obviously nothing matters because the big one is coming but here are some links anyway
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A necessary update to “The Hunt for El Chapo”:
When I was reporting my story in 2014, the Mexican officials I spoke with were contemptuous of any suggestion that Guzmán might be allowed to escape again. This was a matter of Mexico’s national credibility, they assured me: with the world watching, they would never permit Guzmán to embarrass the country a second time. When I met with Eduardo Medina Mora, a former attorney general who until this year was Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, he said with an unflappable smile, “Once bitten, twice shy.”
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Ms. Miller said she wanted to preserve what she described as a strong brand. Still, the new version has a noticeably different editorial feel than the old, and it has distanced itself from the original leadership in some pointed ways. A letter from the editors promises “products picked from farmers, not fashion editors” and less of what one reader called “twee hipster stuff.” The inventive “Ask an Ag Minister” column is gone, too.
Features include articles about the dangers of too much phosphorus, how to save tomato seeds and a shout-out to quinoa, which the magazine calls the new “it” grain.
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Press 38 if your 200lb Newfie has ingested 5 Hershey’s kisses and you’re worried he will die.
Press 39 if you’ve already given your kitten Tylenol and want to know if it was the right thing to do.
Press 40 if your dog was neutered 6 weeks ago and you are angry because the testicles were removed.
Press 41 if your dog got into your stash of pot but you don’t want to admit it for fear of what we’ll “think” of you.
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’twas not anal sex that ruined your relationship, ’twas a bad man
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The battle of the menstrually-minded men!
Which offers more useful information to men?
“Be sensitive to that shit!” “If you ain’t gettin’ them shit, get the fuck out they way!” “Do not try to solve it, don’t even bring that shit up!” “It’s the worst thing ever, all the time!” “Get your bitch some chocolate!” T-Ray and Shaboots’s entire presentation is basically wall-to-wall solid advice.
Foley mentions herbal tea and Pamprin. Eh.
WINNER: Key & Peele.
*
The author of that Runaways book responds to the HuffPo piece (I honestly do not know how I feel about what she has to say, and I am definitely not sure this is the time to say it, but I definitely understand what she means about #2 and why her book had to be the way it was):
Journalism lesson #2: Do not out rape victims.
I knew that Jackie might have been the victim; I had been told that on deep background. I also suspected that Kim’s aggressive and vulgar behavior toward women might have crossed the line between offense and assault on other occasions. I repeatedly asked almost everyone I interviewed—including Runaways members Fox, Currie, lyricist Kari Krome, Joan Jett, and Blue—if they knew if Kim had ever crossed that line, with anyone. Almost everyone said no, perhaps because Lesson #1 applies to civilians too, and Kim was usually lawyered up. Currie and Krome both discussed with me what Cherie in her book calls “The Sex Education Class” (because, she writes, that’s what Kim said he was giving the onlookers). But to me, Jackie explicitly dismissed Cherie’s recounting of the incident, and told me that she was not at any event like it. I interviewed her a couple times for several hours, and tried in various gentle ways to get her to speak about this, but apparently she was not ready. That is fine. That is her right as a victim of abuse. Fox needed to tell her story herself, and now she has. However, with her denial—as well as Kim’s denial of the incident, and of having sex with any of the Runaways, ever—I could not report what was at that point hearsay and confidential.
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The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates
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One of the many fine art historians who loves The Toast forwarded me a wonderful call for papers that may be of interest to some of you! Lemme know if you want contact info:
CFP for the session “Ugly baby! Why?” at the 51st International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016.Social media sites abound with memes that exploit for comic effect the unusual, not to say unfortunate, appearance of infants depicted in medieval and Renaissance art. Most often these ugly babies represent the Christ child, although unattractive infants are found in a variety of narrative scenes and iconic images as well. This session welcomes papers that investigate why medieval and Renaissance artists produced so many images of distinctly ugly infants when physically appealing and naturalistic models were available in contemporaneous imagery and the world around these artists. Questions to be considered include but are not limited to the following: Do ugly babies reflect conservatism in the selection of models or is there more to it? Did commissioners play a role in the unattractive appearance of infants in artwork they sponsored? Is the concept of the homunculous connected with these depictions, and if so, how? How can we theorize ugliness when it appears in sacred figures? What do ugly babies tell us about concepts of infancy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? Does reception theory contribute to our understanding of contemporary responses to ugly infants?
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
They should make that Key and Peel sketch a part of the boy’s sex ed classes beginning in elementary school. Pretty sure it’s 95% more informative than whatever they currently teach them about periods.
omg I was crying, laughing, and then sending that to all my girlfriends. Also to my brother. Who is already good talking about periods, because I did my elderly sister duty and trained him.
“You’re not sure what happens when–LET ME TELL YOU.”
Oh my god it is … I am speechless. Also, stealth-laughing at my desk (all thanks and glory be to Mallory, who over the years has perfected my stealth-laughing skills).
This is the best thing ever. “That ain’t space dynamite…”
WTF is even the point of that anal article? You dated douche bags and tried to lure them in with The Rules, had lousy sex not because you wanted to but because you thought it would get you married to a rich douche, then found a non loser and got The Ring. That article sounds like it was written by one of the Hey Ladies.
Just went to check that it wasn’t written by Ali. It’s probably just a penname.
I had to stop trying when she was practising not answering the phone because haaaaaate.
This actually made me want to read it. Am I that desperate for more Hey Ladies?
Not gonna read at work, though.
hahaha same here. After that impending megapocalypse article I need some good cleanse-the-earth-of-humans horror-humor.
I just want to know what that dude thought he was going to find on his dick after a surprise request for immediate anal. Glitter and rose petals?
“I put my dick where poop lives and now there’s poop on it!” I think I found the problem: she was dating a toddler. Of course he’s not gonna propose, where would he get the money for a ring?
Ha! My thoughts exactly! I was thinking that when he said “just cleaning the poop off my dick!” it’d be like “he was lighthearted about it and that’s when our walls came down and our relationship blossomed” but then…. it wasn’t like that at all. What a douche. But also the writer’s sister sounds unbearable as well?
oh my god her SISTER. WHAT THE FUCK.
I just can’t imagine the kind of “person” who assumes that any lady is regularly cleaning out her butt, just in case someone asks her for surprise/immediate anal. I am 100% taking to the sea forever if this happens to me someday (mostly because I will be fleeing the authorities).
Yeah, in the end it turns out she just had to a) stop obsessing about getting a ring and b) stop dating douches. Nothing to do with anal.
I mean, anal, like most sex things, comes down to: do it if you feel like it, don’t do it if you don’t, and don’t stress about it too much. You’d think that was easy enough. Though admittedly, I had the advantage of having “he’ll never buy the cow if you give him the milk for free” related to me by my mom mostly in the context of “this silly thing your grandma used to say to me”. It’s really time we disconnected consensual sex between adults from morality and personal worth.
“I decided I didn’t want to ruin it with Liam. So I called up a professional: my sister Rochelle. We both had big butts.”
wait, what? I have whiplash.
I KNOW, that was so random.
HAD big butts? Do they no longer have them?
I think so? I thought that was the point of following that with the mention of her sister’s diet and exercise routine, like, “Sister started working out, lost big butt, found man.” I don’t know, it’s regressive bullshit all the way down.
That makes it sound like she found the man in her big butt. It got smaller, revealing the man curled up inside.
YES
It’s like the fruit men from the other post! Where are all these tiny men coming from?
Theory: Ant-Man is real.
It’s all shrink-ray mad scientists who never figured out how to reverse the process.
How long have they been trying to get back to their labs? How many accidental butts have they climbed into?
I am mean and bad and I read this article for the same reason that people watch reality tv shows, it makes me feel wonderful about myself. My penance should probably be reading something by someone intelligent and more virtuous than me so that I can get back to an appropriate self-loathing balance.
The whole thing was so full of garbage ideas about sex and dating that it made me feel queasy. The boyfriend who buttshamed her is terrible! The sister who gives terrible advice is terrible! Purity culture is terrible! I feel that there is hope for the author, who seems to be writing about these experiences from a place “look at these terrible things I believed,” but it’s not 100% clear.
Right? Like the author still clearly thinks that breaking up over poop on his dick is reasonable because EW POOP BUTT STUFF OMG. Which, ugh.
I just… How can you be down for anal but not for the chance there might be poop on your dick? If you ever needed a sign you’re not ready for the kinkier stuff…
It would be amazing if someone invented a way to do it without getting any bodily contaminants on there! Some kind of rubber shield you could kinda roll on? Maybe even with some extra lubrication on it?
Sometimes even that miraculous device backfires, and pops. I…probably shouldn’t say anything more, but that was a dark day indeed.
POINT.
Lol, it’s hilarious, because while I have no personal experience with dick-in-ass, I’ve been writing and reading about such sex for years, and I was having a sudden crisis because WHY DID NO ONE WRITE ABOUT THE PART WHERE THEY CLEAN OUT THEIR BUTTS BEFOREHAND? Obviously, it’s not sexy, but NO ONE? And I’ve been perpetuating the problem? So many writers have better respect for verisimilitude and WOULD have included it if it was a part of the process… But then, of course, they had included condoms in the sex.
All the same, I’m side-eyeing those stories with surprise!rimming.
My guess is most/all of his knowledge of anal came from porn, and I’m pretty sure the “poop on a dick” stuff only happens in some pretty niche videos.
Lol, too likely! I wish the author had had enough nerve to say, “Well, what did you expect?”
That article was terrible on all fronts. Argh.
Maybe I was cheating myself by not believing I deserved a man who could give me the support and attention I craved.
MAY BE.
OMG. I read the first, like, two paragraphs and had to close the tab. I couldn’t stand it. It was so, so awful in every way.
Toasties, please continue railing against this article and point out specificities so I don’t have to go back. Or maybe tell me such outrageously terrible things that I HAVE to go back.
Nahhhhh don’t go back. You already have this article written in your head. It is the culmination of every toxic lie women are ever told. sex makes you dirty + be sexually available and pleasing + women’s bodies are gross + your value as a woman is determined by marriage + men have to be trapped into marriage + women are deceitful mantrappers + romance is expensive
and on and on ad nauseum.
Wait a minute… in retrospect, is this article part of a performance art piece?
The second I read “mantrapper”, I pictured, like, TRAPPERS. Ladies bundled up in fur-lined hide coats and big hoods and goggles and snowshoes, and carrying piles of caught men on their sleds.
I want that TV show.
Arguably, something pretty close to that scene occurred in How to Marry a Millionaire.
I might have to draw this now.
PLEASE
Mantrappers sitting around a campfire, passing cups of coffee around, muttering, nodding, staring into the flames, some with memories and *steel* in their eyes.
But then a PRINCE falls into your LAP without you ever having to do anything sad and vulgar like ask a guy out, and he doesn’t withhold the all-important ring, so your suffering is rewarded.
Bleh.
I’m skeeved out by the pic suggesting that they used Dippity-Do as lube. I don’t know anything else that’s that color or close to it with that texture. Hey, maybe it’s a great lube, but I’ve had it in my hair, so, you know.
To be fair, it also makes it look like they only used the lube to get the ring onto her finger.
I thought the blue gel looked like Icy Hot. Your mileage may vary, but that is not going anywhere near my nethers.
Wise. My boyfriend had a sample of KY “warming” lube sitting around, so we tried it, and my cooter was warmed all right, but NOT in a pleasant way. Like, lowkey burning. >:-(
If it keeps hair stiff, imagine what it can do for dicks!
brb, off to the drugstore
It was much more, “How my internalized misogyny, idealized notions of romance, lack of communication skills, and douchebag boyfriend ruined my relationship (and now I still have all of those things except for the douchebag).” BUT HEY, that’s not as catchy a title.
“How Anal Sex Exposed the Fact That I Didn’t Actually Have a Relationship”?
I am super-anxious/angsty/depressed about my lack of relationship experience and foreseeable prospects thereof, and I’m still cringing so hard from the NOPE my shoulders are stuck to my ears.
From one angsty-about-lack-of-relationship-experience person to another, you might find this comforting? I don’t know, it kind of helped me. (It also made me cry, but in a good way.)
Sorry about the total topic change.
BEST CORRECTION EVER
“Correction: July 13, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated Modern Farmer’s new “it” grain. It is sorghum, not quinoa.”
maybe this explains the peas-in-guacamole thing too
“A previous version of this article suggested that peas were an acceptable ingredient in guacamole, when in fact, it should have referred to avocados. We regret the error.”
Modern Farmer is/was a very interesting magazine. I resisted picking it up many times at the university bookstore/cafe and finally broke down for the “Farm Dogs” issue, because it promised pictures of dogs. There were some really good articles– very informative pieces about sustainable oyster farming and water-efficient crops– but I felt very icky reading it because it was all couched in the “twee hipster stuff” the article mentions. $300 wellies and the like. It made the whole thing seem very inauthentic, like it was trotting out a very difficult lifestyle, one that’s in a precarious spot right now, for the “inspiration” of New Yorkers. (For reference, I’m from the Midwest, not from an agricultural background but close to many who are.)
I really liked the pre-editorial shakeup MF precisely because of those “twee” references. I think it was so interesting to depict a farming narrative as aspirational and cutting-edge (they had great technology pieces), and to position it within a global context (RIP Ask an Ag Minister). More and more farmland in both the US and Canada is run by large companies, and fewer and fewer young people look to farming as a potential career – I think the best thing about Modern Farmer was that the magazine tried to make farming into a lifestyle that was interesting, and challenging, and creative, and an expression of self — the way, say, graphic designers or architects or other creative maker fields are depicted — by blending both the hands-on and the high-end.
The praise hands for chocolate at the end of the Key and Peele sketch is the perfect ending.
Currently on my period and ate Nutella out of the jar with a spoon this morning, so yeah. Praise hands.
I’m not telling historians anything new, but as a uni press veteran I can testify that Kalamazoo’s annual medieval congress is like SDCC for medievalists. If you feel like you have it in you to make a presentation about ugly babies, you should definitely go for it.
Then you should use some of the ME Lines of Picke-Vppe (“If ich sayde that thou hadde a bele chose, woldstow holde it ayeinst me?”) and report back to The Toast, that we may review their success or ignominious failure.
I am friends with a medievalist, and he, legit, talks about Kalamazoo *all* *year*. Bless his little heart.
My grandmother is a medievalist. Three years ago, about a hundred people attended her panel at Kalamazoo, where she delivered a paper on nautical images in a manuscript she once translated. She was in her mid-80’s at the time, and I’m pretty sure she just about died and went to heaven on the spot, she was so freakin’ happy.
I’m a classicist, so I get this. Pretty jealous of ugly babies BUT—we have angry dolphins.
My sedate art history professor dad went to Kalamazoo for many years, and — among many other Kalamazoo anecdotes — once told me about how he’d been part of a conga line. MEDIEVALISTS, man.
This is so making me wish I’d followed my whim of being a medievalist. It couldn’t be MORE impractical/irrelevant than how I actually turned out, career/degree wise.
This is making me miss grad school. And I’ve worked so hard not to feel bad about not pursuing my PhD.
Noooooo grad school/getting a PhD was The Worst. I promise that whatever life choice you made instead was a better life choice!
Even if that life choice was just, like, to not get a PhD. Solid A+ decision.
I know, and it’s true, and I’m actually really happy with where my life is right now. But I never went to Kalamazoo, and sometimes I miss Medieval Studies.
Although I have The Toast, which is like all of the awesome parts of grad school with none of the crazy-making shit, so that’s pretty awesome. We’ll always have “I Am Almoost Beschytten.”
I am an early modernist, and every time I hear stories about Kalamazoo, I am reminded that I am **NOT** a medievalist. Is it true that they have a dance?
It is true that there is often a dance, and/or a banquet, and/or attendees in costume. And I am 90% certain that it is also true that early modernists are welcome. At least, my former uni press used to send classical/antiquity studies books and early modern books to the Kalamazoo booth and they found a substantial audience there.
Ah yes, early modernists are welcome–in fact I’ve been invited to be on panels before, but I’m on the quarter system, so I’m still teaching at that point, and can’t take a week off. It’s also true there’s a lot of overlap between our disciplines, but it’s a question of temperament. We tend to be stuffy ex-seminarians with God issues and/or Italophiles with expensive taste. I can’t think of a single early modernist I know who would DREAM of showing up to a conference in costume, and most of us would rather die than dance in front of our colleagues. (By way of explanation: my discipline is so conservative that I have a bit of a reputation as a weirdo and a hellion because I wear heavy bakelite jewelry with my suits, and once aggressively corrected a question-haver who was heinously off the mark)
Just a point of clarification — the academics and the costume-wearers are usually two distinct groups of conference-goers! When I’m there, I’m in a suit. It’s just that there happens to be a very visible subgroup of attendees who aren’t academics; they’re there because they’re just really interested in the Middle Ages (which: fair enough, medieval stuff is awesome!). My understanding is that many of them attend the conference as their annual (costumed) vacation.
There’s no explaining away the dance, though.
You know that we think of you guys as overgrown D&D players, right? This does nothing to combat that stereotype…
(I say this lovingly as a former Catholic schoolgirl with serious identity issues and a thing for Italian designers, so I fit the stereotype, too)
“Do ugly babies reflect conservatism in the selection of models or is there more to it? ”
Hold on, the selection of models? Like, there was a tradition among Renaissance painters to find actual literal ugly babies in order to paint them? Did they scour the streets of Florence looking for the ugliest babies they could find? DID THEY SEND SOME BABIES BACK BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T UGLY ENOUGH
I’m picturing… baby contouring.
Did commissioners play a role in the unattractive appearance of infants in artwork they sponsored?
“Leonardo, I am willing to pay a premium for this painting, but only if you paint me the ugliest goddamn baby in this entire city-state.”
“Good god, man, I paid you a fortune for this thing, and LOOK at it! That baby is positively cherubic! Throw this piece of crap in the garbage and paint me a Madonna with a proper old man baby in it or so help me, you’ll never get a commission in this town again!”
“I thought I made it clear that I’m only interested in babies with severe physical deformities! This baby doesn’t even have so much as a harelip!”
“I’m getting really tired of Donatella’s shit. I know she’s commissioned a portrait of her family and I will give you 3 florins if you paint that baby extra ugly.”
I’m thinking more along the lines of, “I want my darling little Fitzwilliam to be your model for the Christ Child! His wee face is positively angelic!”
//painter accurately depicts patron’s child
//ugly baby painting
And then the moms forever tease their children about how they were (or weren’t–it works either way!) ugly enough to get chosen. Were they like weird pageant moms for ugly babies? “My Dino’s already been picked at the Ugly Bazarr three times! Of course, your Angelo has a good chance too. . .it’s too bad about those little dimples and non-jaundiced skin tone.”
Some deranged Florentine mother plucking her baby’s hair so that he has a notably receding hairline, painting his eyelids with soot so they look hollow and desperate.
Shout out to my home town of lovely Kalamazoo and our world class Medieval Studies conference. Seriously, it’s amazing, everyone should go and then we can have a Toastie meet up.
I know it’s not for almost a year, but I am hereby requesting a report on that Ugly Baby session. Let our understanding of funny-looking medieval Baby Jesii be ever increased!
I was just about to say the same thing about Hey Ladies. Her other Salon article about couple friends is the same or worse.
Definitely worse.
Ooh, thanks for mentioning the other article; I needed a good hate/pity/empathy-read. Here’s the link, for reference: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/29/please_dont_mastu…
It’s so deliciously frustrating because she acknowledges that she’s desperate for companionship, and she even kind of acknowledges that the friendship could have been preserved, but they give up on it because the other husband won’t tell his wife about the time he propositioned the author’s husband. So fine, maybe they considered the possibility of just drawing a line under the incident and agreeing that it wasn’t going to happen again, but felt that things were just too awkward with those people. But she seems to reject the possibility of any platonic friendship at all after this one failure, just because the perfect friends haven’t fallen into their laps in the course of their work and restaurant-going lives. I want to give her a link to one of the Captain Awkward threads about making friends as a post-college adult. Plus, she seems to have some half-examined insecurities about her primary relationship that probably come from internalized patriarchy/gender role messages. I really feel her on the need for platonic friends and the difficulty of finding them, so her apparent self-sabotage is all the more frustrating.
…I think she might have trouble finding friends because she seems kind of awful. Are these supposed to be funny?
“The first few weeks without August and Dana were hard. Jeff and I moped around the house, wondering if we’d ever find new friends. We considered extreme measures like joining AA or having a baby to improve our social opportunities.”
OMG is this real? And could she make themselves sound more insufferable?
Friends allow me to take an occasional mental vacation from the pain of being me.
I mean, I’m sure it’s deeply painful being her, but oh my god.
The exhilarating part of finding your soul mate is wondering whether he’ll want to hang out with you the next time and the next time. Marriage is great, but once you’re legally committed to hang out forever, the simple act of not getting a divorce every day isn’t exciting.
So I’m just a tragic spinster over here, but I’m pretty sure “maybe he’ll break up with me tomorrow” isn’t meant to be the exciting part of courtship, let alone marriage.
I am about halfway through the other article and I am so annoyed I want to set myself on FIRE.
“Dana found adventure by marrying a bisexual man who could end up playing for the other team at any moment.” 😐
that’s not how this works. that’s not how any of this works.
Maybe The Toast could feature papers that answer the medieval babies question! I’m not very curious about what art historians and medievalists have to say on the subject.
…But then who would be writing the papers for the Toast?
re: TNC-
Okay, so I got two paragraphs in and had to close the tab because Work Must Get Done this week, etc etc, BUT
I cannot imagine ONLY wanting Toni Morrison’s endorsement, not knowing her, figuring out how to get her your book, having her read it, and then having her say unambiguously nice things about it. Like, I’m tearing up a little when I think about that too hard. Hell, I’m tearing up when trying to figure out how to express why this thing that does not involve me AT ALL is making me tear up.
It’s an excellent article. I hadn’t heard that Coates was moving to France for a year. I hope he finds the solace there that Baldwin did. I just read “The Beautiful Struggle” this last weekend and I hadn’t thought of the Joyce analogy, but it fits perfectly. I’m also trying to reconcile the parts of the book that I loved with the parts that Shani Hilton highlighted in her review of “Between the World and Me”, because I felt uncomfortable in a similar way – it was kinda unsettling to see him so..dismissive, I guess, of the experience of the women around him at the time he was writing about. I’m really looking forward to “Between the World and Me,” even though I suspect it’s going to be a challenging read.
I thought babies in paintings were ugly because the artists only used adult men as models? Same as the women, right? Some of Michelangelo’s women are a few feet past butch, amiright?
If that’s not the case, then babies in the past were RIPPED.
I’m not so sure about the baby part of things, but in trying to find a long lost article I once read about how Michelangelo was actually representing women with breast cancer or some such nonsense, I found another that has a fantastic turn of phrase.
In discussing Night from the Medici tomb, Seymour Howard states: “Even more revealing and enigmatic is a group of mature works related to the celibate and insomniac Michelangelo’s erogenously loaded and profoundly disquieting and characteristically tortured, “serpentine” figure of Night, with its hideous engorged, tumorous (?), and widely-spaced breasts. These semi-amorphous accretions are part of a figure based upon idealized anatomical studies of a wiry male body and a small triangular head type, apparently derived from the comely profile of a young woman with an elaborate coiffure once ferociously metamorphosed into a similarly profiled diabolic Crone or Satyr head. Her architectonic starred diadem becomes a quasi helmet; her massive Medusa-like braid changes into a fetishistic turd-like phallus…”
He goes on from there in similarly stellar and hyphenated fashion, eventually comparing her breasts to Dali’s surrealism. “Fetishistic turd-like phallus” is certainly a group of words I never expected to read in quite that order, but he’s not wrong about the braid.
Could there be an auxillary question about why the fuck some of these ugly babies, particularly ugly Christ babies, had fucking six packs? I mean, no baby is born with a six pack. Is it meant to demonstrate Christ’s Divine dominance over ab rollers and planks?
We have to know for the sake of understanding the cultural underpinnings of Western art.
Until someone corrects me I’m going to continue to say its because the artists used adult men as models for all subjects in painting, men, women, and babies apparently. Probably animals too, if you look closely.
They could’ve used a chubbier, or at least less ripped, dude!
[In all honesty that is probably 50% of it and 50% of it “baby Jesus has to look like he still knows shit, not like normal human babies” but I’m deeply enjoying this question and will probably continue to ask everyone all morning.]
That’s something that has always bothered me about the Orthodox icons of my childhood, especially because in a lot of them, the six-pack actually looks like a giant Divine Wang:
Add to that the Orthodox tradition of ritually kissing icons and you’ve got a lot of awkwardness going on.
My theory is that, at least in the icons, the lines that we interpret as muscles are actually supposed to be his ribcage and his hollow stomach, to show how emaciated he was after his mistreatment at the hands of the Romans (like in this one where he’s a lot skinnier but still has those abs)… but the execution (hehehe) is poorly done.
You do need to have really low body fat to have a visible sixpack (his ribs are clearly visible next to and above the penis-abs), and I guess that in Jesus’ time this probably happened because of manual labour and hunger rather than heavy exercise and a cutting diet… Same thing, but the old way would signal poverty while our way signals loads of personal time, discipline and knowledge.
The dick shape though? I have no explanation, where are the art historians when you need them
Babies are pretty ripped, TBH. Maybe in the absence of excess arrowroot biscuits the six pack is more apparent?
I just want you to know that the urge to write an anal sex poem was very strong…
They say the big one’s coming
and they don’t mean Joe Manganiello
when the ocean floor is thrumming
and the land shaking like Jello
All the coffee in Seattle
won’t save you when it’s time
when the glassware starts to rattle
and the sea begins to climb
those tectonic plates are shaking
and the sea is on the rise
the mountains are a-quaking
you’re all in for a surprise
so you better sleep in kayaks
or in very buoyant jammies
when the Earth begins to crack
and delivering the whammy
All the tourists are devoured
by the whales that come ashore
and the hipsters overpowered
and dragged away offshore
Microsoft will float away
to hire Moray eels
and Amazon will offer 2-day
shipping to the seals
So Seattle stop your vaping
and put away your hookahs
you should be escaping
to Cleveland or Paducah
All those places that you fly over?
well they have coffee too!
and from Salt Lake to Andover
You can get tattoos.
How do you think of these so quickly!? So talented!
Although I misunderstood the first line of your comment and thought it was an anal sex poem on first read; I sure was puzzled when I got to the tourists being devoured.
Honestly? I don’t know where all this nonsense comes from. Satan, probably.
this is delightful, and I have a great mental image of an old-timey banjo picker singing it, Great Atomic Power-style.
Qualifies into the Abyss: This is obvious and I am no art historian but…
I always thought that infant Jesus was so ugly and man-babyish because they just weren’t comfortable with Jesus wearing that vapid and adorable expression babies have (I’m not baby shaming them they are just on a baby journey to consciousness ya know). Jesus always lookin’ like he KNOWS whats up and could give a long an detailed lecture on the trinity right now complete with references to Aristotle’s De Anima. Anyway I thought man-babyness is a theological representation of people being uncomfortable with the human aspect of Jesus. It’s a mystery and they want to err on the side of Jesus being an omniscient two-week old. Sort of the opposite of the little baby Jesus prayer in Talladega Nights (HE WAS A MAN HE HAD A BEARD!).
Oooh this makes sense to a certain extent but he could’ve still 1) looked like an attractive man baby and 2) does being ripped = greater philosophical understanding to a medieval audience?
1. dunno
2. Still speculates wildly: the being ripped could be looked kind of under the same heading but with strength instead of knowledge. They don’t want a weak Jesus, infants are weak and helpless and they flop all over the place and for a while their heads don’t even stay up. They want an all powerful warrior Jesus under whose name they fight and kill people (texas football), but the Christmas story is a great one so they don’t want to leave it out they just tweak Jesus a little bit. Now he’s like a baby but a buff one.
I don’t know about greater philosophical understanding so much as like a cultural (and even subconscious) projection of what they want God and especially Jesus to be.
IF I was going to pick a baby Jesus I might pick Nicole’s he seems to like embody joy and adorableness- which is what I want my Jesus to be like. “And the multitudes praised the pictures of the baby Jesus that were posted on twitter”
(I’m not baby shaming them they are just on a baby journey to consciousness ya know).
DYING.
“Press 34 if you want to know what type of home medical care you need to give your dead rabbit when you pick it up. ”
it’s pining for the fjords
Well…
I fully expect Ali’s new bestie Marilyn to make an appearance in the next Hey Ladies.
My favorite artistic baby Jesus:
That arm though D: Did she literally hit him so hard she broke it?
ETA: Maybe Max Ernst just ran out of room on the canvas and had to be like “welp, making it fit”
There is a plethora of Northern Medieval and Renaissance spider-like or Danny DeVito-looking babies in Art. And they are hard to look away from and super-creepy. Here’s my theory: they were painted this way purely to induce nightmares and/or be made into GIFs.
Now I want a “Babies in Western Art History who look like modern celebrities” article
So many questions about that Salon article! Also this reminded me that I stopped reading Salon because it is XOJane for grownups.
1. Jewelry on a second date? Also gray pearls are not everyone’s cup of tea and one date seems like a very short time to know her jewelry tastes.. Is he a serial killer who gets off on making his current girlfriends wear tokens from his victims?
2. A 300 dollar wardrobe from Anthropologie to lure in a man? That is 1.5 dresses, and are men actually into Anthropologie? I mean, “boho wood nymph” is not the *height* of sex appeal.
3. Waiting by her cordless phone? *scrolls up to check date because maybe this feels so retro because it was actually written in 1985* Why would a single woman have a landline in her apartment?
There was an article a week or so ago about women’s beauty spending for first dates. It was sort of good in that it tried to highlight the gender disparity in beauty expectations, but it also interviewed some kind of silly examples, like a woman who said she bought a new $16 lipstick even though she had lots, just because she “knew” she could get a better one?
It positioned itself as something about gender politics, but to me, read as more about consumerism and how we give ourselves confidence through buying. (Which, to be fair, is also often a gendered topic.)
tl;dr — yes, $300
Every time I have to give someone my phone number and they ask if it’s a landline or a cellphone, I am genuinely taken aback because why on earth would it be a landline.
Wait, people still ask you this??
Often it’s phrased as the more ambiguous “Is that your home phone number?” Which it is, in the sense that it’s not my work number, but it’s not a phone that I keep at home either.
“I am home where my phone is. My phone is my home.”
Heh, the one exception I know of is for my parents, who genuinely wanted to just have cell phones, but they live in so rural an area that they can’t depend on their signal all the time. So in that case I’m glad, because safety.
“Is that a cell or a landline?”
“I’m sorry, what, do you think I live in a cave? What is happening here?”
We still have both, and I vastly prefer the landline for conversations of substance and length– it has much less sound distortion, which results in much less energy expended on trying to figure out what the heck someone just said. Yes, I could buy a better cell, but I’m trying to contribute as little as possible to the growing supply of electronic waste.
Jewelry on the second date seems to signify that at least one of them has the intention of moving this along quickly.
And lol, yes, 1.5 dresses indeed! I was a bit perplexed when the sister’s advice ended so soon. I was waiting for plastic surgery and liposuction directions.
I just can’t imagine having the mindset that ANAL SEX is really the key to securing a husband. Like that is the one thing you need to do for him to propose to you, rather than any kind of heart-to-heart conversation about common goals and life aspirations and, I don’t know, children. The fact that you actually knew so little about him that you thought anal sex was the dealbreaker, and you wanted him anyway — brb, I’m running screaming away. I’d rather be single forever than play with those headgames. But clearly the writer and her sister have very different expectations and purposes for marriage, I guess.
Yeah, when she refers to her married sister as a “playboy tamer” my first thought was, “definitely cheats on her, right, moving on.”
A real interesting thing that I’ve always thought about Romantic Comedies is how they give us the impression that “together” — like, getting married or getting a boyfriend or something like that — is a threshold that you cross. The entirety of the game is about dragging one person over the finish line and then once you’ve done it, cut, roll credits.
I always wonder how much damage the elision of relationships-as-ongoing-challenges in popular media does to people who are trying to live in them.
Have you seen Don Jon? Cause you should see Don Jon. Its all about how the media we consume affects our expectations and behaviour in relationships.
At least in a romantic comedy the series of challenges is like a wacky obstacle course, not like a slog through a miserable swamp that the characters pretend is worth it. This “welp, we got the first kiss/engaged/married, story over” trope bugs me so much more when it’s not played for laughs.
well, that’s true, but I think it also brings with it a set of related problems like, “the way to woo a person is to do a bunch of stupid stuff and not take no for an answer”, so
I don’t know, everything is terrible I guess, I’m glad this lady found someone that doesn’t want anal if she doesn’t like doing anal.
yeah, there is probably a whole lot to unpack in why people don’t think “ha, what a ridiculous premise, that would never work in real life!” re: rom-coms the way they do about other genres of screwball comedy.
“This actually seems like a…crime? Is that the word I want?”
Maybe $300 got you more from Anthropologie back in 1998, which is the latest possible time a story could be set in while still constantly referencing swing dancing.
Yeah, I was wondering how she found so many places to had swing dancing while driving across the country.
Podcast-related comedy nerdery.
Tig & Stephanie were on Comedy Bang Bang yesterday. (http://www.earwolf.com/episode/romantig/)
The opening half of the episode where the two of them and Scott are just shooting the shit is the best.
I LOVED IT
Tig also showed up on the second to last Pistol Shrimps Radio, before the game started, because Stephanie’s on the team. I’m excited to watch her documentary this weekend!
You will love it. Caught an early screening of it when it played at the Seattle film festival a few months ago.
Tig & Stephanie are just the absolute best couple ever, they just make me happy plus they are both hilarious. Go Shrimps!
Who watched ANW last night? I am squeeing forever because JESSIE GRAFF.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=X-RDbbMoUjI
(And next week I hope to squee even more and harder because MEAGAN MARTIN.)
ALERT ALERT the wee tuxedo friend of Auckland, lately dubbed #cemeterycat, HAS BEEN COTCHED. REPEAT, SHE IS COTCHED.
Yay! Hoping for an awesome post-cotch life for her.
Hello Toast Friends,
I have a very strange favour to ask the Toastatariat at large. Does anyone remember one or other of the Nicoles (I am very sorry, Nicoles, I know you are not the same person) talking about their daughter being cute about Last Midnight from ItW? I know I must seem like the depths of crazy for needing to know/needing a link to some tiny offhand comment probably made months ago, but I have the kind of unfun mind which cannot unfix from things until I have found them.
Sorry to bother you all with high-octane crazy so late in the day.
Hookahs / Paducah !!!!
How does your brain work like this?
This is the best thing ever. "That ain't space dynamite…"
Toasties! I am looking to purchase as many Toast-recommended books as possible on Amazon tomorrow, and would appreciate your advice! Bring me your H is for Hawks, your classic Wildes and Brontes, and ideally amazing books you’re astounded not more people have heard of. Sci fi, feminist lit, graphic novels, biographical gems: lay ’em on me.
I just made the most terrible noise when I read this comment.
Wait, so you don't have to be the proper field to attend this?
Nope! Almost everyone there is an academic in some branch of medieval studies, but as long as you register (and pay the registration fees), anyone can attend. There are non-academics there every year.