There is a disappointing number (ONLY SEVEN) of sub-categories in the “Magic Spells” Wikipedia page, please fix
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“Maud Gonne played a public role in the struggle for Irish independence, but her life also included private tragedy. Her grief over a child who died at the age of two inspired an unpublished poem by W B Yeats – and she was so desperate to reincarnate the boy that she had sex in his tomb.”
Okay, I need to read a book about her right now. It does not have to include the tomb sex portion as it seems like the rest of her life was still fascinating, but I wouldn’t not read a whole chapter about the tomb sex, because oh my god, the human heart.
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I am 100% convinced that the blonde dude in the cravat is either Loki himself or at the very least a thousand-year-old vampire doing his absolute best to disguise himself as a regular human while he checks in on the ceremony. No way has that dude not tasted human blood, is what I’m saying.
LOOK AT HIM YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME THIS IS A MODERN MORTAL WEARING ITS OWN SKIN
I feel just enormous warmth for this dude and Emily the Strange next to him. I know exactly what kind of friends we would have been in high school, and how harmless most of their eccentricities would have been. We would have talked about swords a lot.
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One of the most common cure-alls was snake oil, and its less than sterling efficacy soon lent its name as a generic to all such fraudulent hoaxes. The epithet endures: A quick search for “snake oil” on the Internet reveals that it still refers almost exclusively to something worthless and fake. But some of those original itinerant salesmen may have peddled actual Chinese snake oil, and those who did may not have been fraudulent after all.
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Contradictory Ideas I Am Capable Of Entertaining In The Same Head At The Same Time
1. Everyone is too hard on everyone else about the size and shape and function of their bodies, and it would do us all a world of good to simply lay off.
2. I really, really hope Rihanna is actually refusing to date Leonardo DiCaprio until he goes on a diet for her.
He spends 900% of his time dating models in bulk and looking sleepy, I love the idea of a woman actually making a request of him so much. “Leonardo, I’m sorry, but I have extremely rigorous physical standards. I can’t date a man who can’t fireman-carry me to safety off of a yacht in case of emergency.”
This is only okay to do hypothetically to Leonardo DiCaprio, though. Nobody else gets to do this, just so we’re clear.
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There’s an interesting idea here – “detox-style eating” as conspicuous consumption – but I feel like it ends just where it should have been getting into some serious reporting. Someone write a longer version of this, please!
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Put in an offer on a house today, why haven’t they sold me the house yet, what’s taking so long, I should be there right now, give me your real estate advice you guys
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Gonna need some of these:
Execration texts, also referred to as Proscription Lists, are ancient Egyptian hieratic texts, listing enemies of the Pharaoh, most often enemies of the Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. The texts were most often written upon statuettes of bound foreigners, bowls, or blocks of clay or stone, which were subsequently destroyed. The ceremonial process of breaking the names and burying them was intended to be a sort of sympathetic magic that would affect the persons or entities named in the texts. The fragments were usually placed near tombs or ritual sites.
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“Grandma Wiwi shows up at Elliott’s house the next day with 42 of her closest black friends and family to go swimming in Elliott’s pool. You know black people, always randomly appearing in dozens to swim in your pool uninvited. I feel like this is the scene where the writers really wanted to break stereotypes.”
lolllllll for, if not ever, certainly a prolonged period of time
Tags: link roundup, the internet
OMG I always wondered who Maud Gonne was. Thanks, The Cranberries and Mallory, because now I will have the line of a song from 1992 in my head alllll day long.
Mallory! Congratulations on the world of real estate! But try not to stress because usually offers can take a day or so to respond to because real estate is like an elaborate game of telephone where the stakes are ALL YOUR MONEY.
I feel like the concept of cleanses and all that shit as a facet of privilege is fairly well trodden ground, but that may be just in my own head and comments on the Toast. It ties into the idea that eating all organic and gluten free and whatever is good for you, when those things come with ahefty price tag and aren’t available everywhere. Cleanses and their associated fad diets (like any MLM scheme that involves buying shakes or whatever) mean that you can afford it, which makes it a status symbol. So being thin is not enough of a status symbol on its own–now you have to demonstrate this whole commitment to healthy living through expensive and not-medically-proven crap.
I remember the feeling of “a HAH” when I read something on orthorexia. I have always struggled with disordered eating, and on some level, I knew that my punishing insistence on all-organic, farmer’s market-fresh, free range blahblahblah was just another way to restrict my eating, but it was really powerful to hear it had a name and other people were struggling.
YES TRUE I guess what I want is a really SOLIDLY RESEARCHED SCIENCEY (“sciency”) piece about it rather than just “here are my general thoughts about the subject.”
I read that piece too, and thought exactly the same thing. It seems high time for some proper questions to be asked of these choices, and that piece promised much but delivered less.
I’m so glad the blond pagan I brought up yesterday on the Proto-Norse Amulet post has reached such prominence in the Link Roundup! I don’t care if he has tasted human blood, I would climb him like the Tree of Life any day.
I was already trying to persuade a friend to come to iceland with me this year and that post gave me plenty more ammunition!
My real estate advice is when you are in the house, occasionally walk around in it in the moonlight in your bare feet, with all the lights out and say to yourself: “Holy shit. This is my house. All by myself. Mine.”
Also, get a house inspection.
Second on the home inspection. Home inspectors are, IMO, saints sent from above to save you from agony and lots and lots of cash expenditures. When MrChouffe and I were house shopping, we came across what appeared to be a perfect home–location, price, style, double oven, trout stream in the backyard, you name it–but the home inspector came back with the information that the trout stream in the backyard had caused, and was continuing to cause, the foundation to crumble and the whole house to sink.
We did not buy that house. Due to it really wanting to fall down.
Wait, are home inspections not required everywhere? Our sale wouldn’t go through firmly until the home inspection was done and the inspector said there were no major issues. Can you buy a house somewhere without inspection?
I think with some financing, you can buy a home that’s a fixer-upper or has some major issues so long as you’re willing to take them on, and the sale would probably require a release of liability so you couldn’t go after the seller.
I think here it’s optional. Some mortgage providers probably require it (I can’t see why they all wouldn’t, but I remember it being put to us as an option).
I think it’s an offer condition. Like, in a bidding war, potential buyers will waive the requirement for a home inspection in order to seem more attractive to the seller.
In Toronto, people will get ‘secret’ home inspections (“Oh, this is my uncle, he’s just coming and seeing this awesome house that we really want to buy”) done prior to putting in an offer so they don’t have to include the condition in their offer.
A relative of mine almost bought a lovely house until the home inspection revealed it had been a METH KITCHEN. (Or whatever the term is.) The previous owner had been a landlord who didn’t keep a close eye on his tenants, and the tenants had done a good job of cleaning up when they left so it didn’t look meth-y. The whole house was saturated in various chemicals that would be dangerous to breathe on a daily basis. And, of course, it would’ve been impossible to resell.
OMG, seriously?? That is absolutely terrifying.
Well… that depends who you’re reselling it to…
Also though do not assume your inspector will find everything. They can only find what they can see. They cannot see roof leaks (necessarily; depends on the damage), window leaks, wall leaks, termites hiding behind the plaster eating the rot from all these leaks, criminally bad wiring hidden behind cabinets, asbestos tile hidden under the carpet you were planning to rip up in order to refinish the hardwood, that one wood screw that’s holding that window into the house that’s about to give way, or ghosts.
or ghosts
They can’t see leaks but ours at least had a heat sensing gun (?) that he ran along the outside edges of the inside of the house (sorry this is confusing) to detect ‘cold’ spots aka where water was coming in.
but totally agreed to all of those other things. You *can* have a roofing company, termite company, a plumbing company to snake a camera through the pipes in the yard to check for roots, etc etc. come by during the inspection period. Probably also paranormal specialists, but ymmv.
Where the water was coming in, or…ghosts?
Either way, probably a good bet to avoid.
it was probably ghosts
bought the house anyway
And do you have ghosts?! If so, I hope they are the friendly kind.
I live in Santa Fe so I’d be shocked if we didn’t have ghosts
so far they seem to just want all of our houseplants dead
(yes yes, it’s the ghosts and not my forgetfulness that’s killing the plants)
True! It might be wise to also have a couple of specialized contractors come out and look at the house — we had an electrician and a plumber come out, and they did find a couple of (small, in our case) issues that the inspector hadn’t.
But, by the same token, and assuming that you have a good and conscientious home inspector who will try to find everything: remember that their job is to point out all potential problems, not necessarily to distinguish between stuff that urgently needs to be fixed and stuff that is probably fine. My inspector brought up a couple of issues like “There’s insufficient firewalling in the chimney, your fireplace isn’t safe” — good to know, definitely, but pretty easy to solve by having the fireplace disconnected from the gas line and not using it.
And there are some things that they HAVE to tell you (“you have a wood-burning fireplace, do not use until it’s professionally cleaned”) even if they are nearly certain everything is OK.
Also, if it is a used house that has maybe not been kept up very well (for years) it might be worthwhile for you to get a home warranty. We bought a foreclosure last year and just had the water heater replaced for $0.
Definitely make the seller get you a home warranty! (unless it’s a foreclosure then I guess get your own IDK.) We got a $200 garage door spring for $60 in this fashion. (Home warranties differ a lot – our made us pay $60 any time a service person was called out, but then paid for the rest of the repair on covered systems (generally just appliances and equipment, not things like roof leaks and ghosts.)
Home inspection story!
I watch a lot of HGTV, so I thought all home inspections involved burly Canadian men going over the entire house and making gently sarcastic comments about the quality of the work.
We hired a guy who had hugely positive reviews on Yelp and testimonials up the wazoo on various other sites.
He was at the house for less than an hour, but it’s a small house, so we didn’t say anything. Part of the inspection is that he has turned on every faucet and water-using appliance in the house. We are all standing in the kitchen as he is finishing up the paperwork and telling us that everything looks great, works great. No major concerns.
Literally, as he is saying this, a puddle is forming around his feet. I point to the puddle. He says it is nothing to worry about.
Would not hire again.
Well, to be fair, I live in Canada and you’ve pretty much described my IRL experience of house inspectors.
My favorite part of my current house’s inspector was when he took photos of the wiring to ‘show at the local electrician’s Christmas party”. Because my wiring was special. (in a good way, thank God)
Our plumber did that! He called his apprentice upstairs to look, we heard them both laughing, and then we heard them taking cell phone pictures. We’re pretty sure they went straight up on lookatthisDIYidiot.tumblr.com or something.
(Oh, no, wait, I missed the “in a good way” part of your story. Our plumbing was not special in a good way. I mean, it wasn’t special in a disastrous way, either, but it was definitely a “WELL I see that SOMEONE fancied themselves a D.I.Y. genius” type of situation — a previous owner had, instead of installing the correct kind of trap under the sink, bought an assortment of random pipe parts and done his damnedest to assemble them into something that was sort of the right general shape. I don’t know, I’m not a plumber, but apparently if you are a plumber it was HILARIOUS.)
Did we own the same house? I had a plumber investigate the source of the water pouring through my kitchen ceiling say bemusedly “It…. looks like someone replumbed the bathroom with, uh… leftover bits of pipe?” His recommendation was either tear out my bedroom wall and replumb or “Glue it and hope for the best.”
I went with the glue.
A friend hired a home inspector, not realizing that he moonlighted as a contractor and had done renovations on the house she was buying. He told her it was all wonderful, neglecting to mention that the walls weren’t square, it had asbestos, and newspaper had been used liberally as a construction material. We are also in Canada.
Oh, that’s unconscionable!
ALSO make the seller pay for a home warranty! I know for a lot of folks it seems like a scam, but let me tell you — the $425 we made the sellers pay was more than paid back within a month: the very day I moved in, the wiring in two rooms shorted out. Three weeks later, the furnace stopped working. A few weeks after that, the knob fell off the washing machine. That would have been $300, $800, and $350 (respectively) worth of repairs for which I paid less than $250 total, thanks to the warranty. In fact I renewed it at my own expense when it originally expired, and I will get my money’s worth again this year too just bringing some minor details up to code.
Mallory, did you make up the story about Rihanna and Leo because it is unreal and also because the hyperlink takes me to the article about snakes-oil salesmen.
Wait.
Is it the snakes-oil diet that he is on?
I read this article yesterday and found it rather infuriating:
How I thrived on less than $11000 a year while building an enterprise. A lot of unexamined privilege and that “it worked for me and my specific set of circumstances, so it must work for everybody, and if it doesn’t for you then that means you’re not trying hard enough!” nonsense.
You might be saying to yourself, “I could never do this,” but then ask, “Is my life revolving around the people I love, or the bills I pay for the stuff I don’t really need?”… It comes down to the responsibilities you have to yourself and others, and your personal priorities, about how you ultimately want to live your life.
Yeah, well, my personal priorities include not having 13 roommates and not eating food out of the garbage, but thanks for the advice.
Jesus. No not everyone can do that, you enormous twit. “Roll your own cigarettes and brew your own beer! Dumpster dive!” You fucking idiot. Good dental hygiene won’t save you if you crack a tooth. What if you need medication? For fucks sake, you spend $550 a month for housing PLUS UTILITIES. Holy god the unexamined privilege is choKing.
$127.50 in bus tickets? I take the bus to work in the morning and walk home unless it’s raining or really really cold. Tickets are $2.77 each, so assuming 5 tickets a week for 49 weeks (since I get 3 weeks’ vacation) that’s almost $700 a year for me. If I got a monthly pass it would set me back over $1200 a year.
It says he spent under $1100 traveling over 15000 km across the US and Canada and that “the greatest expense was fuel” – what kind of gas mileage does he get on that car of his?
Haven’t read the article, but a monthly pass in Montreal costs $82 something (just bought one a few days ago), so how this dude is spending 50% more on bus tickets is beyond me. (Unless he’s taking the AMT too? But he sounds like a pretentious hipster who’d live nowhere but the Plateau/Mile End, so that’s unlikely.)
EDIT: Oh, I’m daft, that’s annually not monthly.
And I forgot to mention that my $2.77 per ticket is for Ottawa, not Montreal!
It says he traveled with a friend, so I assume they split the fuel cost. Also, my guess would be that it was the friend’s car, since he doesn’t mention car maintenance or insurance anywhere.
Like people who live in tiny houses using someone else’s shower
Yeah, the dental hygiene part made me extra rage-y. I have EXCELLENT dental hygiene and I have already spent over $1000 on dental procedures this year. Some of us just have shitty teeth genes!
Yes yes yes! I am right in the middle of dental treatment that will cost me around $2k out of pocket when all is said and done and it has literally nothing to do with my dental hygiene. And I have insurance.
“I don’t buy shampoo” well, dude, I bet you don’t have hip-length hair.
I’m not against no-poo, but the overarching smugness here is bringing out my contrary side. Not to mention the 13 roommates and garbage food. Literal garbage food, ew. Yes, a lot of food is wasted, but have you ever smelled a dumpster?
Well said! How smug can he be.
I pay nearly $11,000 per year in student loan payments alone. So, you know, screw you dude.
I’ve lived in places where you could do that– I was paying about $300/mo including utilities, with only one roommate, in a small town where I could walk everywhere. But in those kinds of places it’s a lot harder to “build an enterprise” (I can’t really tell what his business is supposed to do, but it doesn’t look like something that would take off in the sort of low-income place where you can get rent that cheap).
And even still that was only possible for me because I had insurance through my parents at the time, and did not have any dependents, and minimal debt. Most of my coworkers in the entry-level jobs I had at that time had shitty lives and not because they were less clever than this guy.
And he starts it off talking about the poverty line! With no other discussion of poverty at all.
Especially infuriating: his $550/month commune with 13 roommates and dumpster food plan $172.30 would be too expensive for someone living off of (Ontario’s) social assistance rates. Not including any of his other “perks”.
yeah, that’s the thing that bugged me – is this an argument for a universal basic income (as it states at the top), or does he just want to share his (not at all universal) co-op, frugal living story? Either one by itself, cool. All tangled together like this, they’re icky for all the reasons y’all are posting.
I KNOW THIS GUY.
I KNOW HIM AND HE IS JUST AS AWFUL AND POMPOUS IN PERSON AS HE APPEARS. ALSO WILDLY ODIFEROUS.
(in my defence, he is more of an acquaintance, really. montreal can be a surprisingly small place?)
anyways. he has a kickstarter-y ‘endeavor’ wherein he encourages people to pay him for his time. he will then share this time with you by drawing on his undergrad degree in philosophy to discuss the finer points of plato’s allegory of the cave.
he is also apparently a poker coach.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2015/02/03/link-roundup-263/…
CURSE YOU, INTENSEDEBATE.
YOU ARE THE BLURST.
Blurst? ……..Marc?
OF COURSE HE’S A GOT A PHILOSOPHY DEGREE.
Anglo Montreal can be very, very small sometimes.
I bet he calls himself a “philosopher”
Whether or not a philosophy major is a tolerable person is instantly identifiable about whether or not they call themselves “philosophers” (and they spring into likeable/new best friend territory by their abilities to make fun of those that do)
I was a philosophy major, and I heartily endorse this tactic. Also, there is an amazing little (less than 75 pages I think) book written by a former philosophy prof at the University of Texas called “Bluff Your Way In Philosophy” that is full of hilarious trivia and advice about how to derail philosophy conversations or take them onto fun tangents.
Much like Last Week Tonight or The Nightly Show, it will also teach you a whole lot about philosophy under the guise of humor. That said, it is dated, so it may not have translated well to modern times. I try to conduct my philosophy conversations in the manner suggested.
Me: “Oh, you want to mansplain the Allegory of the Cave? Did you know Pythagoras died because he was fleeing disgruntled students and wouldn’t trample on a field of beans?”
Them: “Yes, but ACTUALLY…”
Me: “Also, Nietzsche broke down in madness when he witness a man beating a horse.”
It saves time and usually gets me away from those conversations.
ETA: I know the cave allegory is Plato. But changing philosophers mid-discussion makes Philosophy Dudes so. mad.
I want to read that book. And, also, baiting Philosophy Dudes is such a fun recreational activity.
You get like 50000 points for “wildly odiferous.” I wonder if his Kickstarter is the “odd jobs” mentioned in the article.
Do you also know the guy in the comments who recommends asking coffee shops for their used grounds to save $$ on “vices”? “Cheesecloth is a peasant’s best friend”, indeed.
No.
Well, that scared me enough to click to check that he’s not my ex-boyfriend, who is also a fairly odiferous philosophy major with a passion for “living frugally” who moved to Montreal. Thank god it’s not him.
Yes but how many of these guys are there then????
Hold on, 13 roommates and he pays $550 + utilities in the Plateau (ie, utilities are probably $$$ because they’re mostly old, drafty buildings there)?! Ludicrous. Dude gives communal living a bad name.
As I read it, his contribution to the “collective pot” comes out of that $550, so his “rent” includes “electricity, Internet, telephone, renovations, events, group projects and food staples.”
“Life is a game and you decide how to play it.”
“If you want to learn to live better for less, the first step is wanting to. ”
What a butthead.
In general I enjoy (sensible) articles about reducing spending, but so many authors seem to equate their fun ‘experiment’ or monthly ‘no buy’ to the experience of people who actually have lived that experiment all their lives.
Life is a game and you decide if you’re going to be born in a poor family or a rich one!
I think you have to spin 7 or higher to be rich in the Game of Life, don’t you? I forget.
Ugh, seriously. Sometimes your life revolving around the people you love means that you prioritize your life so that you get to spend some time on your own and some time with them, rather than never ever getting to be alone and spending a bunch of time with your head in a dumpster.
Not to mention, sometimes making your life revolve around the people you love COSTS MONEY. Ever heard of children? Or aging parents? NOPE GUESS NOT.
Children are a sound investment because their little hands can fit into the tight spots in dumpsters.
And if they master the hungry-child-sad-eyes, sometimes people just give them food!
Ugh, Yeats was such a creep. Not long after proposing to Maud for the last time, he proposed to Iseult, Maud’s DAUGHTER (who was presumably conceived during the tomb sex). Then a couple weeks later, he proposed to Georgie Hyde-Lee, who was not even half his age.
Weirdly enough, Georgie was the step-niece of Yeats’ first wife, Olivia Shakespeare. Olivia was married to Ezra Pound, who acted as the witness for Yeats and Georgie’s marriage.
Those poets, they’re all connected in messed-up, convoluted love geometries.
Soooo it’s accurate to say that Ezra Pound married Shakespeare? Huh.
“And was it quite fair to fling Elfine, all unprepared, to those Bloomsbury-cum-Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broad-minded fashion? They always made Flora think of the description of the wild boars painted on the vases in Dickens’s story – ‘each wild boar having his leg elevated in the air at a painful angle to show his perfect freedom and gaiety.’ And it must be so discouraging to them to find each new love exactly resembling the old one: just like trying balloon after balloon at a bad party and finding they all had holes in and would not blow up properly.”
I just burst out laughing. Thank you for this. It’s nice to know others share my obsession with this book.
I’m going to be a pendant and just say that Yeats and Shakespear were never married!
Anyway, I love Yeats and even have a tattoo of the gyres, but you’re right that he was a creep and pretty terrible when it came to his love life. He used to force Georgie to do automatic writing for hours.
Wait, but the seven categories of Spells are AMAZING and include Curse tablets, For A Swarm of Bees, Nine Herbs Charm, and Lorsch Bee Blessing.
So few categories, and so specific- SOMEONE is using the Wikipedia Spells category as her own personal Book of Shadows.
My only real estate advice: oh my stars, it’s terrible and stressful, and I really hope they accept your offer promptly, and the inspection turns up nothing remarkable (AND that this actually reflects the physical reality-based state of the house), and that everything with the lawyers/banks/etc. goes smoothly, and that it’s as non-nightmarish as possible for you, and here, I made some custard-and-raspberry tarts, come help me conspicuously consume them while you wait.
The best thing of course is that the Norse temple will include worship of Frigg. Making it…
A FRIGGAN TEMPLE.
With, presumably, a Friggan priestess/priest?
It could only be better if it were built on a dam.
“No, the Friggan dam temple!”
..I am six.
I wonder if all priests from Effin are by default Friggan priests.
My real estate advice it do not buy a house unless you are fabulously wealthy, or really enjoy fixing things. Or preferably both.
Alernately, you can learn to enjoy living in a place where half the stuff doesn’t work.
“living with lots of broken stuff” is a valid lifestyle choice, but it’s not for everyone…
My wife and I have had this very conversation!
“Should we fix this broken window? The back room is freezing.”
“It’s cheaper to just not go in that room.”
“I have things to do in there.”
“Why don’t we hang a blanket up in front of it?”
Look, I’m going to find time to buy screws and empty out that drawer and fix the drawer front any day now.
In the meantime, you just hook a coat hanger around the end and you can pull the drawer out, it’s fine.
I have come to the conclusion that it will be a long, long time before I can afford to live in a place with a functioning shower drain. Until then I’m investing in bulk amounts of Drano.
In many ways, owning a house is a kind of exercise in appreciating a thing for its potential.
I’m much happier since I starting frame this as a hobby. “My hobby is owning a 90 year old house with original plumbing”
Spend $8 for a drain augur and in 25 minutes or so you too can have a working drain. I mean, there’s the horror of extracting something that is roughly the size and texture of a dead nutria, but it’s a considerably lesser horror than standing in a pool of stagnant shower water and watching the pubes float by.
We found a toothbrush AND a makeup brush jammed in our drain. The very sight of the black, slimy, dripping mass that Mr Robinn pulled from the pipe triggered a healthy gag reflex in me, so I didn’t see the actual reveal, but I saw the final product.
It’s become our pastime to blame everything that’s wrong with our (delightful!) house on the previous owners, who painted everything grey but didn’t bother covering up the beautiful wooden floors with dust sheets before they did so.
Omg, turns out Maud Gonne is the inspiration for Cersei (because guess what, that scene was 100% CONSENSUAL. Don’t listen to those filthy lies the show writers will tell you, the book is canon).
I am DELIGHTED by the revitalization of Norse paganism and that Rihanna has put DiCaprio on a diet.
It didn’t feel 100% consensual when I read it but it was definitely not…the thing the show did, why did they do that
I mean, Cersei did say no! several times! Jaime just heard “convince me” instead. I think the big difference is agency–in the book, she has it, she is eventually an active participant; in the show, she doesn’t. at all.
seems to me that the intent of the book scene was to demonstrate that it’s a fucked up relationship founded on intense codependence and a lack of respect for personal boundaries, which neither party has ever learned how to properly establish anyway + the way that relationship and their parental grief interact
I suspect the show writers are working not so much from a point of “familiarity with the texts” as “once saw the books. on a shelf. in a library. through a window. from the street, driving by. whilst very drunk.”
*facepalm* You’re right, I forgot about the first half of that scene — I was just thinking about the second half, when she’s urging him on. BUT YEAH, you get what I’m saying, and you’re completely right too in your analysis of the rest — especially with the writers/showrunners’ familiarity with the canon, lol.
Fictionalized portrayal of Maud Gonne: “In Dreams Begin” by Skyler White http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7850577-in-dre…
Includes tomb sex, magic spells. It’s historical fantasy, so highly fictionalized, but fun.
Dammit, you beat me to it! It is a delightfully strange book.
OOOH, Maud Gonne, call on me, call on me!
Ok, Maud Gonne is one of my favorites, and anyone who wants to hate on Yeats should go ahead but MacBride was so much worse and that’s worth remembering too. (She married MacBride instead of Yeats and he conveniently died in the 1916 Rising which means he’s a nationalist hero now but what a dick. Or, “drunken, vain-glorious lout,” as Yeats put in “Easter 1916.”)
Further reading.
Margaret Ward is a prominent historian of Irish women & wrote a biography of Gonne in 1990
Gonne also published her own autobiography, “A Servant of the Queen”, and there are other published collections of her writings & letters
There’s plenty of Gonne in RF Foster’s gorgeous two-part biography of Yeats
And she features prominently in two recent excellent works: Senia Paseta’s Irish Nationalist Women 1900-1918, and Kate O’Malley’s Ireland, India, and Empire.
A+ username for talking about Irish revolutionary figures. I gotta get my hands on the Foster books.
Thanks! 🙂
Also, didn’t MacBride molest Iseult when she was very young? I mean, Yeats proposed to her, but at least she was in her 20s then.
Also, I believe that the son she had who survived, Sean MacBride, founded Amnesty International?
I have just been reading all about him on Wikipedia! He sounds fascinating.
This guy ignores the difference between living on $11,000 for a year, temporarily, with a safety net, and living on $11,000 every year, with no safety net. These are two Very Different Things, which is why “grad school broke” and “poor” are not the same financial situation even when they result in the same net income.
To pick one example out of the MANY he has provided, “Good dental hygiene will keep your dental bills low.” OH REALLY. Maybe if you’ve had comprehensive access to dental care for your entire life, unlike a lot of Americans whose parents couldn’t afford or access dental care, but even then some unlucky year you’re going to need a cavity filled or a crown or a root canal.
But the safety net is the most glaring here. You can get a $11,000 bill just from one night’s hospital stay, and not everyone has family or friends waiting in the wings to help you out with that.
to be fair, I don’t think we know whether he has any friend/family safety net. To be fair right back the other way, “my plan for an emergency” is a big gaping hole in any “how I thrived on $11K” story.
He’s in Montreal, so he wouldn’t be racking up any bills for his hospital stay (unless it ended with him being prescribed medications, which he’d have to pay for out of pocket if he doesn’t have insurance). But… yeah. If I didn’t have dental insurance through my husband I would have shelled out a hell of a lot more than $315 for the dental cleaning and the filling I had done last month. Hell, just my birth control pills would cost over $200 a year without insurance.
ugh I started thinking “even without the horrible prospect of medical bills that hovers over every non-zillionaire American, there’s plenty of potential financial emergencies! Like a fire…or having your bike stolen, which if you’re low-income is a big deal…or…”
now I need my brain to stop listing these. THANKS, FRUGAL DUDE
Yeah. I started doing that. Like, if he got hit by a car on his bike, what would be the associated costs? Hours lost a work? Medications? Ambulance rides? Cost to repair/replace bike? Costs of physio to repair damage?
“Frugal” dude has a savings account to pad himself against all kind of financial emergencies, so he’s probably not lying awake, worrying about all the other financial emergencies.
Oh, cost of birth control — I love our fully funded access to abortion, but I really wish that birth control was more accessible. I’ve had employer health plans where birth control was not covered by the drug plan, or where pills were and IUDs weren’t.
I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places where the sexual health clinics offer heavily discounted forms of bc, like the nuvaring for $5/month and Plan B for $5 a pop. (Those clinics still really frustrate me about how they handle Plan B dispensing — they make you come in and set up an appointment to see a doctor, and make you take it under the doctor’s supervision. I mean, you can get it over the counter at the drug store, but that costs $40 as opposed to the $5 version, but $40 can be a lot for such a time-sensitive pill)
And I just went off on a tangent …
I would be willing to bet $11,000 that this guy comes from a privileged background, and can probably go stay with his family anytime he gets tired of his 13 roommates and dumpster food. We don’t know for sure, but I have never heard this kind of oblivious rhetoric come from anyone in a different situation.
I would also bet that his reaction to a polite “perhaps you have certain privileges that shaped your worldview and they’re not universally applicable” is at least twice as many words as the original article.
I agree so much about this — it is so easy to say “good dental hygiene” will keep your dental bills low, but accidents and life happen, and you might not have had access to dental care your whole life. It’s also completely ignoring the fact that living on $11,000/year allows for absolutely no buffer for life happening: losing income, family and friends who need support, losing affordable housing, price of food going up, needing to buy new clothes for a job, etc.
(Although, I will give him a pass for not worrying about unexpected medical costs, as he is in Canada. He won’t ever have to pay for a hospital stay — although, if he did get hit by a car on his bike (for example), he would be on the hook for medication costs, ambulance costs, and some rehabilitation costs.)
yep. I skipped going to the dentist for years and was not always diligent in my oral hygiene, but because I had access to dental care as a kid, when I DID finally go back I just needed a deep cleaning and a replacement on a previous filling. It could have been MUCH worse. As it was, even with insurance I spent a LOT of money at the dentist the first year I went back. If you’re genetically predisposed to dental problems and/or didn’t have good dental care as a kid, you can end up with huge dental bills even if you brush and floss regularly.
From the original post on Medium: “Other ways I enjoy having fun are through playing harmonica (a $30 instrument) and most recently with devil sticks ($30)”
OF COURSE YOU DO
If he were TRULY frugal he would just learn to have fun through whistling. BAM! Saved $60 on musical instruments.
And he’d forage his devil sticks from the local park.
I definitely dig that two of the seven sub-categories of Magic Spells are bee-related.
(Coincidentally, I was reading about the charm to prevent Swarms of Bees on Wikipedia just the other day, I assume Mallory is spying on me.)
I’ve spent a long time wishing there was more written about Yeats & Co.’s spiritualist tendencies. I spent a weekend once trying to make it through A Vision (the supposedly automatic writing of Mrs Yeats) and gave up. Attempted resurrective sex in a crypt is infinitely more interesting. Maud wins again!
I mean, the idea of what Georgie Hyde-Lees claimed to be doing (and the potential whys of why she may have claimed to do it) are still fascinating, but the stuff itself…not so much so.
A Vision is almost incomprehensible. I had to reference parts of it for my college thesis and it was…not fun, to say the least. I would much rather just parse his poetry.
Yikes, you poor thing. That cannot have been fun. I can’t remember what made me want to try to read it, but whatever curiosity I had was soon sated. Sodding gyres.
I actually have a tattoo of the gyres! You should see people’s eyes glaze over when they ask me what it is.
Yeah, I went through a “I have to read ALL the Yeats!” phase that quickly ended with A Vision. Fortunately I only had to reference part of it (the 13th and 14th phases of the moon) because I was talking about the connection between beauty and destruction in his poetry.
I pretty much start sobbing softly whenever I have to read “The Phases of the Moon.”
He’d crack his wits
Day after day, yet never find the meaning.
No SHIT, Aherne.
My favorite Yeats & Co piece of spiritualist trivia: Aleister Crowley – aka 666, aka The Beast, aka the ancestor of every goth kid’s fondest dreams – once actually took out a hit on Yeats. Yeats, you see, had dissed Crowley’s poetry.
(Warning: do not, under any circumstances, attempt to read Crowley’s poetry. It’s Vogon levels of bad.)
Hahahaaaa…I just snorted my coffee. I didn’t know that bit of trivia, but your description of Crowley’s “poetry” is perfection.
I may now spend all day on the internet trying to find out what happened to the hitman. Thank you for that!
Also, the best part about the whole thing was that he specifically asked the spirits if he should dissect their messages, and they said, “No, we have come to give you symbols for poetry” and then he DID IT ANYWAY.
Seconding the hell out of that detox-style eating as conspicuous consumption article. I would read pages and pages and PAGES of this.
I know that there’s a lot out there on the topic– some of which I’ve seen posted in this very space– but I’m drawing a blank right now. Anyone have links?
This is going to turn into a self-linking extravaganza, but writing about food and consumerism happens to be my jam.
Raw, Cooked, Rotten: Using the culinary triangle to talk about how certain foods or practices, like juicing, acquire health halo and how food marketers play on those associations.
In Good Taste: Explaining how kale went from food of the poor to superfood, via Bourdieu’s map of taste (financial capital on one axis, cultural capital/education on the other).
The Metaphors of Mass Consumerism: Complaining about how consumer choices–especially women’s consumer choices–are often mischaracterized as literally swallowing what you’re served, when for most people engaging with consumer trends is pretty complicated.
One Way of Looking at Foodies: Kind of a different angle than detox, but there is <a jref=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2706501-foodies”>a great book out there that analyzes foodie discourse in ways I found very constructive.
Heyyy this one is not by me: Wheat and Death, in which The Fat Nutritionist discusses some of the reasons an anxious eater might try to go gluten-free, and how to tell whether that’s for you or not. If you’re into critiquing food or diet trends, you may love to read The Fat Nutritionist’s whole archive.
Really sorry about the linkdump! I kind of want to write that longer article as commanded by Mallory, but unless I snag a little more free time, it will just devolve into a linkdump not unlike to the one I just laid down. The upshot for me is that the Guardian article actually doesn’t address conspicuous consumption at all. The article is personal narrative about the author feeling a little at sea in a world of too many choices, and being susceptible to marketing and culturally approval for certain choices even when she knows they are not necessarily nutritionally sound. And yep, those narratives anout health and goodness are classed (and gendered and raced), and yep, that could (and is!) be a whole book (several books!). But headlines are easier to share, so if sharing the Guardian headline gets people talking, that’s cool too.
Yesss. It’s about showing off that you can afford $8 juices all the time and that you’re part of the elite Healthy People at the same time. There is so much to say about this because there’s so much capitalist bullshit mixed in with, yknow, people actually wanting to be healthy and having no way of actually figuring out how to do that.
Ditto. Also, I’ve been saying for a while now that for a certain group of people, food is the new religion. Some people are more easy-going Episcopalians about their diets, and some are crazy fundamentalists who will shun you if you dare to admit that you or your kid actually ate potato chips last week. There must be some intersection between the religion/conspicuous consumption angle…
See here: http://skepchick.org/2014/07/food-is-for-white-li…
And here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/…
For the record I think the “food is religion” analogy is stretching it a bit but they are definitely both ways that people signal their group affiliations and moral rectitude.
I have a christian fundamentalist relative. She seems to meet the definition of orthorexic. It is definitely linked to her religion, the need to find the most correct answer to every question. She must render her body holy by feeding it correctly, else she would disappoint god or lead her children astray with grains or something. I realize this may not be the direction you were going. But it’s where my brain went with your comment.
This is a very strong example of the religion/food intersection. I find it just as interesting when I meet people who are not particularly religious, but who speak in very Puritan terms about their diets, keeping their bodies and their families’ bodies “pure”/free of “toxins” and talking about eating “forbidden” foods as others would about sin.
I put a 24- or 48-hour time limit on the offer I made for my house, it helped with the anxiety of waiting for the sellers to respond. The process was not painful – it helped that I was flexible on the closing date and that we were not far apart on price.
Maud is the muse for Yeats’ poem, “When You are Old”.
My college boyfriend who was an English grad student TA (the boyfriend before my husband) told me I looked like Maud Gonne, but I suspected he may have said this to other girlfriends, and that, (among other reasons) is why we broke up.
House! Make sure you get all the inspections you want done, my first Realtor pretended he didn’t understand when I said I wanted an asbestos test done before the sale finalized and then tried to explain that asbestos “Wasn’t really a problem” when I realized he wasn’t going to help me and got the damn test done by taking hunk of ceiling to the lab myself. Turned out I didn’t want asbestos villa after all. He then tried to scare me by saying I’d likely lose the hefty deposit, which I pointed out was still cheaper then medical bills. I got the money back, found a new Realtor, and moved into an asbestos free beautiful little house a few months later.
Agreed! Also, it’s probably too late for Mallory but my best advice is getting a realtor who you like and who ‘gets’ who you are and what you want.
If your bid isn’t accepted, tell yourself that there was probably some unknown person buried underneath the house who would have haunted you and not in a fun way.
Or, as per the comment above, asbestos.
Or a person buried in asbestos?
I wish I’d heard this advice before putting in several offers on houses. Eventually, though, I got a really great house at a great price.
I KNOW THIS GUY.
I KNOW HIM AND HE IS JUST AS AWFUL AND POMPOUS IN PERSON AS HE APPEARS. ALSO WILDLY ODIFEROUS.
(in my defence, he is more of an acquaintance, really. montreal can be a surprisingly small place?)
anyways. he has a kickstarter-y ‘endeavor’ wherein he encourages people to pay him for his time. he will then share this time with you by drawing on his undergrad degree in philosophy to discuss the finer points of plato’s allegory of the cave.
he is also apparently a poker coach.
My Irish Literature professor claimed to have met Maud Gonne when he was a child. His only impression of her: “She was very tall and frightening; I started crying and ran away.”
I feel like this is a life goal, but then again, I didn’t like that professor very much.
Best peom about Gonne, and my favourite of Yeats: No Second Troy. I learned this in school and the words pop into my head sometimes. He is lamenting her part in the Irish republican movement and his mostly unrequited love for her:
No Second Troy
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
I love/hate this poem, as I love/hate Yeats generally, because of the way he just can’t help being politically ugly in such gorgeous language. Yeah, Willie, socialism is just envy, that’s all, and what a good thing for your rich friends that Gonne didn’t destroy their beautiful houses, huh?
One of my favorite poems. Life goal: inspire a man to write a poem about how I should never be held responsible for causing property damage.
MY HEAD IS CURRENTLY EXPLODING
HARPER LEE
NEW BOOK
GROWNUP SCOUT
whaaat
[double checks dateline for April 1]
[continues exploding]
Not to be a total downer, but I’m really concerned about this news. Alice Lee, the sister who managed Harper’s affairs, died 3 months ago at 103 http://www.npr.org/2014/11/19/365120931/alice-lee… .
Now, Harper is 88 and in frail health and will allegedly “sign anything put before her by any one in whom she has confidence.” That from this piece by Michelle Dean, http://gawker.com/how-unauthorized-is-the-new-boo…
I’m really hoping Harper Lee actually wants this published.
That’s what I though of immediately. (After recently reading In Cold Blood for a book club I went down the wikipedia hole looking at information on the book and then Harper who I have found to be endlessly fascinating.) Based on what I’ve read I have a feeling if she were in better health there is no way in hell this would be published which makes me very sad in many ways.
For real. :////
I’m also concerned about the whole trunk-novel thing — not enough folks I see on Facebook seem to acknowledge that this book was a) a first draft, and b) written in the 1950s, about c) an adult Scout. Many people love TKAM without realizing/noting that it’s a book about a white child discovering what black people live with every day. It’s not going to be as “cute” coming from an adult character, and (I’m hoping) it’s not going to be as easy to overlook the problematic writing that is just flat-out going to be there in a novel written in the 50s but published in 2015.
Basically I am hoping that backlash isn’t going to be the thing that finishes Harper Lee off. :////
It is pretty funny to learn that snake oil might actually be helpful on the same day that this is making the rounds: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/new-york…
It’ll be a fun little tidbit to inject into all the “ALL SUPPLEMENTS ARE SNAKE OIL! PHARMACEUTICALS ARE PERFECT! NO ALL PHARMACEUTICALS ARE EVIL AND I CURED MY CANCER WITH ORANGE JUICE! THERE IS DEFINITELY NO IN-BETWEEN REASONABLE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION!’ CONVERSATIONS.
While FDA regulation may not be perfect, it is better than no regulation, which is where most supplements (even the ones with nutrition info labels) are. Unregulated food, and claims that don’t have science behind them, are troubling. So I’m all for calling people on bogus claims and requiring better regulation.
Pharmaceutical companies are, of course, problematic as well. There’s a long and unhappy history there of biased studies, suppressed research about harmful side effects, and all that stuff 🙁
Totally. It’s seriously alarming that supplements aren’t even being held to the same standards as food. But it bothers me when people write off all interest in herbal or ‘natural’ remedies as anti-science garbage. Especially since for a lot of things there just hasn’t been enough research to prove that they’re helpful (this is what you find when you look up basically any herbal remedy on WebMD), but there is never going to BE adequate research into it, which leaves us a choice between pharmaceuticals that we know have harmful side effects, and other options that haven’t been studied enough but may not have the same problems. What it really comes down to is there are too few sources we can truly trust when navigating our health, and finding them inside and outside of the medical science world is near impossible.
Hey guys does anyone want a copy of “Treasure Island!!” by Sara Levine?
Roxanne mentioned it in her essay about unlikable women in literature, it sounded fun, so I bought it. It’s in good shape, it was pretty funny, I’ll send it to you for free.
I’ve always wondered how you even get the snake oil, do you just squeeze the snakes really hard or what
no, man, you need a derrick.
Thanks, that makes more sense but then where does baby oil come from OH GOD HOW DO WE GET BABY OIL
This really puts another angle on “if baby oil dissolves condoms, what must it do to babies????”
maybe more than one additional angle, I dunno
what happens if you, for instance, let two babies touch?
i read this real estate horror story yesterday. so…don’t buy a semi-detached?
Jesus, that was brutal.
seriously, i can’t stop thinking about it. it’s like a living nightmare.
wow. That’s awful.
My Dad told me about this story this weekend, and I was too scared to read it (it’s my city and these semi-detached houses are everywhere). I just did … flipping terrifying and horrific.
Trigger warning for suicide in above link.
Another good clue for Is This Person A Vampire Or What is to look at how many rows of fancy buttons there are on the person’s waistcoat.
A person does not need to be a vampire to want a lot of fancy buttons on his waistcoat.
Some of us just like buttons, okay?
That’s just what a vampire would say!
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/…
Kind of late today, but people might enjoy this piece on gender and race in Masterchef Junior. I don’t watch the show, but the article is heartbreaking.
I actually do watch, and enjoy, Master Chef Junior, and this has bothered me from the get-go. The little Black girls get cut every single time, the Asian kids go home, the final is two white boys of varying heights.
GOOOOOOOOOONE!!!! WHEEEEEERE IS THE MANY-COLORED DOME OF THE SAMPOOOOO?????
Those B of A sponsored posts: “work a second job!”, “forego small comforts!”, “save money on hygiene products!” are seriously bumming me out. Like, thanks, B of A, let’s just tell people that they aren’t thrifty enough rather than that the median wage has been flat as the cost of living has steadily risen over the last few decades.
And he'd forage his devil sticks from the local park.
Buying my very own place was nerve wracking as hell, but totally worth it. I did worry when I bought a power drill that this would happen, though:
http://xkcd.com/905/
It didn't feel 100% consensual when I read it but it was definitely not…the thing the show did, why did they do that
I mean, Cersei did say no! several times! Jaime just heard "convince me" instead. I think the big difference is agency–in the book, she has it, she is eventually an active participant; in the show, she doesn't. at all.
seems to me that the intent of the book scene was to demonstrate that it's a fucked up relationship founded on intense codependence and a lack of respect for personal boundaries, which neither party has ever learned how to properly establish anyway + the way that relationship and their parental grief interact
I suspect the show writers are working not so much from a point of "familiarity with the texts" as "once saw the books. on a shelf. in a library. through a window. from the street, driving by. whilst very drunk."
This really puts another angle on "if baby oil dissolves condoms, what must it do to babies????"
maybe more than one additional angle, I dunno
what happens if you, for instance, let two babies touch?
I'm this guy (no kidding). can confirm. Have tasted human blood and I'm secretly loki. I got busted.
As the daughter of a real estate attorney, I am standing up and applauding.
That magic spells thing is disappointing, especially since Wikipedia has a perfectly fine entry on the Greek Magical Papyri. It doesn’t actually give any of the spells, but that’s maybe for the best, given what’s in there.
On the other hand, at least one of the six subpages is on For a Swarm of Bees, which is my jam lately. “Sitte ge, Sigewif,” I say to bees as they buzz past me. They don’t seem to notice.
Toronto’s Beach neighborhood is a place where many creative and innovative people congregate. Many of the entrepreneurs in the Beach are not only consummate business people, but they also have a social and environmental conscience.
Toronto's Beach neighborhood is a place where many creative and innovative people congregate. Many of the entrepreneurs in the Beach are not only consummate business people, but they also have a social and environmental conscience.