Friend of the Toast Sara Cantor (she's single, ladies) just guest starred in her first-ever music video, describing it to me thusly: a "disco witch sex coven commits femme-on-femme glitter bondage." Reader, I watched it.
“Write me an erotic story about Batman and the Queen of England. Bonus points if you get the Queen’s corgis in there somehow.” “Write me a story about a backpacker whose dying wish is a tiramisu cupcake.” “Write me a meet-cute about Cthulhu and a woman at a bar in the style of Charles Bukowski.” I say yes. Of course I say yes -- I’m the man sitting under the tree with a typewriter. In…
Previously by Jacqueline Steiger: 16 Gemstones Renamed Correctly I have always considered myself a reader: always stuck in a book, always escaping into another world. As a child, I would read during dinner, at night under the covers, in the car. We had a rule that if I picked out a book at the bookstore, I could not start reading it until we exited, because my mother said she was tired of me "finishing…
Previously in this series: "Snow White the False" Good morning class! Over the course of this semester, we have had the opportunity to examine, and sometimes reappraise, how different monarchical institutions have adapted to crises. These monarchies are, by their nature, conservative and generally do not change course in the absence of fairly drastic events, usually driven by external forces. A single person – even if that person wears the Crown – rarely has the…
Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.
It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later
Mr. Freeze and the Velociraptor Rumble in Van Nuys, age 9 Some experiments with camera angles and lighting may have preceded it, but I believe this was my first production to have any sort of narrative. The narrative was this: Mr. Freeze fights a velociraptor, and the velociraptor wins. The action takes place in Van Nuys, CA, specifically in my parents’ house, more specifically on their living-room floor. Mr. Freeze and the velociraptor play themselves,…
My father has an unusual affliction. He doesn’t see it as a problem—he might not even realize he has it. For as long as I can remember, my father has been beset by Spoonerism. My dictionary defines Spoonerism as “a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect.” It was named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who was notoriously…
A little while ago, I moved from New York to San Francisco in a fashion that was radically out of character, which is to say quickly, and for a job in software. This was painful and exciting and lonely as hell, but I came to enjoy everything a lot more when I stopped trying to understand San Francisco within the framework of New York, and when I suspended as much cynicism as possible and began…
What happens when you revisit the woefully misremembered science fiction of your youth? Joe Howley (Latin teacher) and Johannah King-Slutzky (internet wraith) asked adults to re-read their genre favorites from childhood. For the second in our Time Quartet series, we talked to bona fide adult Julia Wetherell, a radio producer for Playing on Air and one of the developers of the upcoming Autostraddle podcast. We spoke with Julia via Gchat about how…
The first thing to understand is that we are very beautiful. Deploy your imagery of choice. Reach for gemstones, for edibles: crystal skin, laughing emerald eyes, hair like gently burnished gold. Peaches and cream. The blush of sunrise staining fresh water. You may mix metaphors. You will be forgiven. The second thing to understand is that it means nothing. It means nothing because we have been beautiful for years. And years. Think of the highest…
I looked up from busking to see a school bus full of kindergartners, their noses and chubby fingers pressed hard on the glass. I knew what they were looking at. I stopped playing, raised my bow and pointed it at them. I did not smile. They screamed, piercing little screams that I could hear from the street, and the light turned green, and the bus pulled away.
Negotiating skills are so important, particularly for women, and Latoya Peterson offers some advice on salary negotiation and also gives us some insight into her work life. There is going to be a new Ghostbusters movie. All the leads are going to be women. That cast has been announced.
Moseying around the "Lilith" entry on Wikipedia eventually brought me to the life of Paschal Beverly Randolph (via the nineteenth-century theory of pre-Adamism, if you must know), an "American medical doctor, occultist, Spiritualist, trance medium...a free man of mixed-race ancestry, descendant of William Randolph...[and] the first person to introduce the principles of sex magic to North America." Clicking on "sex magic," by the way, leads to the greatest header in the entirety of Wikipedia:…
1. PENIS COSIES. Ravelry, the largest social network for people who do yarn-related crafts, records four patterns for knit penis cosies, one crochet pattern for the same, and seven lip balm cosies that look like penises. Although the term “penis cosy” suggests that only the penis is involved, all of the penis cosy patterns include a little sweater for the testicles as well. This last detail suggests a misandrist plot, as overheated testicles…
