Steve Dyer

This bear is smarter than your dog:

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

Frank Rich worries that rapid advances in gay rights are obscuring the discrimination faced by the gay community in the recent past:

For younger Americans, straight and gay, the old amnesia gene, the most durable in our national DNA, has already kicked in. Larry Kramer was driven to hand out flyers at the 2011 revival of The Normal Heart, his 1986 play about the AIDS epidemic, to remind theatergoers that everything onstage actually happened. Similar handbills may soon be required for The Laramie Project, the play about the 1998 murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard. A new Broadway drama, The Nance, excavates an even older chapter in this chronicle: Nathan Lane plays a gay burlesque comic of 1937 who is hounded and imprisoned by Fiorello La Guardia’s vice cops. Douglas Carter Beane, its 53-year-old gay author, is flabbergasted by how many young gay theatergoers have no idea “it was ever that way.”

It’s particularly remarkable given the extreme trauma of mass death that the gay world experienced as recently as a decade and a half ago. But for today’s young gays, that’s not just another country; it’s another continent.

I have to say I feel very mixed feelings about this. Having struggled a quarter of a century ago to stop marriage equality from being treated as a joke by straights and as a neo-fascist plot by gays, it’s staggering now to realize that many young gay kids take their right to marry almost for granted – even though it still isn’t granted fully anywhere in the US yet (because of no federal recognition).

So yes, it’s oddly alienating to feel that one’s entire life has now been rendered moot. But also, exhilarating. One of the key reasons I always believed marriage and marriage alone could turn the gay-straight chasm into a bridge is its generational impact. When I figured out I was only virtually normal, I was around seven. And all I really knew about sex and love was that mummy and daddy were married and I never could be. That’s a huge psychic wound in the souls of gay kids. From that wound, often nursed alone and in private, comes a panoply of pain, pathology, self-destruction, and lack of self-worth. Few can afford the kind of intensive therapy required to get past this – because the wound is so deep and inflicted so young.

But today, that seven-year-old will know, simply if he or she watches the TV, that marriage is an option for him or her. They will know in a way my generation didn’t that they have a future in the society they live in, like their siblings. There are still wounds inflicted by misguided religion or panicked families. But the ur-wound is gone. And the generations of gay kids I meet today are simply way less fucked up at their age than I was, or may ever be. In that sense, I celebrate their amnesia and look up to them. I want the struggle of the past to be flooded by the normality of the present.

But we gays are also crippled in terms of communal memory. Ethnic minorities beget ethnic minorities; and parents are able to tell the stories of their past communal struggles, whether they be Jewish or African-American or even simply immigrant stories that link us to the past. But the parents of gay kids are, by and large, straight. They never went through the gay struggle. They have no gay history to share with their kids, who are born de novo, and required eventually to go outside their own families to find out about the history of their kind.

Most don’t. And I sure wouldn’t want them indoctrinated in any way. But can you imagine Jewish grandchildren of Holocaust survivors never being told about it? Or African-American kids never knowing fully about slavery?

We have no permanent national monument to commemmorate a plague that killed five times as many young men in the same space of time as the Vietnam War. Only now are we seeing the beginnings of memory – the revival of “The Normal Heart”; the documentary “How To Survive A Plague“; or the one-night revival of David Drake’s “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me.” Which is not surprising, if you have studied the end of plagues. The first sentence in my own plague memoir, Love Undetectable, is the following:

First, the resistance to memory.

That is understandable at first, as Camus noted, but it is becoming increasingly unforgivable. We need as a community to honor the veterans of that war, to hold them up and keep them close, and to retrieve the unimaginable agony of those days of psychological terror and excruciating physical pain. And if that makes me sound like a bitter war veteran, please know that bitterness is the very last thing I feel.

We lived for this moment, these years when we would finally see our freedom. Many of us doubted we would ever get to this mountaintop and were fully prepared to die somewhere in the foothills. But if we do not ever look back, and see the trail of corpses along the way, and the ocean of grief and pain we overcame, we will never fully grasp the dimensions of the victory. Or its real and deeper meaning: a spiritual awakening about the dignity of all human beings; about their universal need, above all other things, for love; about how Christianity, at a key moment of testing, sided against love and lost a generation.

Nathan Fielder, star of Comedy Central's Nathan For You, gained a lot of media attention last month when he asked his Twitter followers to "mistakenly" send a text about a drug deal to their parents. He's at it again with a new Twitter "experiment" aimed to ruin people's romantic relationships instead this time around. Yesterday, Fielder tweeted, "Experiment: text the person ur dating "I haven't been fully honest with you" then dont reply to them for 1 hr (& tweet pic of thr response)," and he already has dozens of followers who listened to what he said. This and the other Twitter prank are going to make for one fun episode of Nathan For You next season, if this turns out to be for the show and not just how Nathan Fielder kills time.

Check out a collection of the best responses to this experiment, which skew closer to heartbreaking than funny, below (via Uproxx):

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/nathanfielder/status/339837332213596161"]

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A report came in earlier this month that Sony is interested in having Dan Harmon to return to Community for the show's fifth season, and now, it looks like Harmon has confirmed the news. Hollywookiee reports that, at the most recent live taping of his podcast Harmontown, the Community creator said this:

Dan Harmon just told the audience of his podcast Harmontown that he has been asked to return to Community!
As soon as Dan said it, he asked that it be edited out of the podcast and it was just for us audience members (and I wasn't going to say a word), but soon after that, Dan said "Ahhh, fuck it. I don't care who knows!" He jokingly said that he would only return if they brought Chevy Chase back too but even he couldn't stop laughing at that idea.

While Harmon didn't say if he's interested in returning from the show he was fired from last May or if he would be coming back as a showrunner or just as some kind of producer, there's now hope for Community fans that the upcoming season, which NBC is saving for midseason again, will bring about Harmon's return.

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While negotiations are still ongoing to bring Happy Endings to USA following ABC's decision to cancel the sitcom, it looks like star Damon Wayans Jr. is wanted back at New Girl. For the uninformed, in between Happy Endings' first and second seasons when a renewal for the show seemed uncertain, Wayans took a role on Fox's New Girl. He appeared in the pilot as a roommate named Coach but had to leave the show after Happy Endings got picked up for Season 2 and Lamorne Morris’s Winston took his place. With Happy Endings' future uncertain once again, TV Line's Michael Ausiello reports that if the show doesn't move to USA, "it’s an inevitability that Damon Wayans Jr. will find himself back on New Girl next season in some capacity."

New Girl star Jake Johnson, who's currently filming the buddy comedy Let's Be Cops with Damon Wayans Jr., tells TV Line he'd be excited to "welcome Coach back to the loft." He added, "I would be surprised if he doesn't come back for a while ... There would be such funny episodes with the Coach seeing what's happened in the past two years since he's [been] gone." Even if Happy Endings no longer has a home on the primetime TV lineup, it's nice that Damon Wayans Jr. does.

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sneeze. via

“The animated GIF, meanwhile—whose origins go back to the antediluvian age of dial-up modems and whose natural home is the resolutely non-artistic bottom-feed of Internet image production—rudely interrupts the unbroken sheen of all the slick shit, since to GIF an image is not only to create a loop, but—in very literal terms pertaining to the effects of LZW compression—to apply a verfremdungseffekt, or distancing effect. The shiny mirror finish of HD video is dithered to dust, dots and dashes, and all the smoothing of Photoshop reduced to a crude cartography of color. The v-effekt was one of political playwright Brecht’s theatrical techniques to ensure an audience never get too comfortable: a device to make the abstract immediate and the political relatable. Here, the distancing effect allows the moving image to circulate widely on low-bandwidth connections, bringing it closer to home. To GIF is to reduce a picture to the “poor image” defended by Hito Steyerl; the conditions of its own circulation made visible. ‘The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities… In short: it is about reality.’

The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium not only in the distancing effects of image compression, but also in that the repetition of a single gesture ad infinitum constitutes a sort of gestus—a symbolic moment that is amplified in context to represent a whole paradigm of existence,” – Jesse Darling.

(Hat tip: Cyborgology)

Last year, we released a list of "53 Arrested Development Jokes You Probably Missed," and with the long-awaited new season set to debut on Netflix this Sunday at midnight, what better time to crank out another new list of hidden jokes from the show? Arrested Development is so dense that there are enough subtle gags, callbacks, and references to fill a dozen of these lists. So, if you're cramming the show's first three seasons in before the fourth premieres this weekend, keep an eye out for these sneaky bits of comedy including Oscar Bluth's accidental prison race riot and the Iraqi version of T.G.I. Friday's.

1. Whenever GOB rides up on his Segway, he always changes the subject of conversation for the characters he rides up to, which means his Segway always causes segues.

2. Annyong, a pretty deliberately annoying character's name is just a few letters off from the word "annoying."

3. There's a running joke throughout the show about Lucille's maid Lupe wearing the Bluths' sweaters for old holidays and events, but there's actually another layer to it. When Tobias is working as a maid at Lucille's in "Meat the Veals," he's wearing a "Bush/Cheney 2000" sweatshirt.

4. Top Banana," the episode where Tobias is in the commercial audition, shouting, "We're having a fire… sale!" is the same episode where the Bluth banana stand catches on fire.

5. In "Top Banana," Lindsay is eating lunch with Lucille and one of them orders, bananas foster, a flambé dish, foreshadowing the fire.

6. In "Key Decisions," the Desi Awards in memoriam segment for Ramon Villalobos features a bunch of pictures of adult Mexican actors playing children with dyed hair and freckles. Villalobos is listed as an "artista del maquillaje de la peca," which means "makeup artist for freckles."

7. In "Key Decisions," the hospital's soda fountain flavors are listed as "Spew," "Squirm," "Clear," "Blue," "Stuff," "Cola," "Orange Soda," "Ice tea," and "Rootbeer."

8. In "Visiting Ours," GOB calls Kitty "repulsive." Later, after George Sr. sleeps with Kitty in the conjugal trailer, he says to Michael, "I've done a repulsive thing." Michael responds, realizing what happened off of the word, "Wait, whoa. It's Kitty?"

9. In "Shock and Aww," there's a flashback to Lucille's decision to adopt Annyong. In it, she's upset with Buster and says to him, "Well, maybe I’ll get a son who will finish his cottage cheese." Later on, Lucille is out and about with Annyong and the only thing she leaves Buster to eat is a carton of cottage cheese.

10. In "Justice is Blind," the construction worker removing the Ten Commandments statue from City Hall has crosses all over his forklift.

11. In "Best Man for the GOB," one of the side effects of the drug Teamocil is a "total shutdown of the pituitary gland." The pituitary gland controls growth, so Teamocil causes arrested development.

12. Buster has a line in "Best Man for the GOB" that foreshadows him getting a hook for a hand: " We have unlimited juice? This party is going to be off the hook!"

13. In "Justice is Blind," Maggie Lizer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus's faux-blind attorney character) lives on Scenic View Drive, a hint at her actually being sighted.

14. In "Let 'Em Eat Cake," the hospital sign says "Visiting Hours," but the "H" is missing, a reference to the earlier episode "Visiting Ours."

15. In "Let 'Em Eat Cake," Michael is watching a news program called Hindsight, a reference to the real show 20/20 via the expression "Hindsight is 20/20."

16. In "The One Where Michael Leaves," Lindsay holds a "monkey freedom rally" and holds a sign that reads, "Free this orangutan." Orangutans are apes not monkeys, making Lindsay ever more clueless.

17. A quick joke in "The One Where They Build a House": After GOB and Michael fight with that fake rock and giant pair of scissors, the narrator says, "Unfortunately, the whole incident was covered by the paper."

18. "In The One Where They Build a House," when GOB is buying a boat, there's a sign behind him that reads, "Nothing creates the illusion of Success like a Boat," a reference to his love for illusions.

19. In "Good Grief," the letters/numbers on the wall when George Sr. is in Mexico are "P2252," which ends up being the same letters/numbers that unlocks his ankle bracelet in "Prison Break-In" the following season.

20. When Michael and George Michael are rebuilding the banana stand in "Afternoon Delight," a cruise ship that reads "Hornblower – Events and Cruises" is seen in the background, referencing Lucille's rape horn, which she blows earlier in the episode.

21. When Tobias and Maeby drive onto the movie studio lot in "Switch Hitter," there's a blink-and-you-miss-it banner reading, "America's #3 Comedy, Homeless Dad."

22. The softball game in "Switch Hitter" takes place at Milford Park, presumably also named after educator Earl Milford like Buster's school "Milford Academy."

23. In "Queen for a Day," Lucille 2's vertigo doctor is housed at The Plumb Clinic. A plumb is a tool to make sure things are level.

24. In "Queen for a Day," Tobias sings "New York, New York" and Lucille 2 tells him, "Everybody thinks they're Frank Sinatra. This is a reference to the actress Liza Minnelli singing the theme to the movie New York, New York a few years before Frank Sinatra began performing it.

25. Maeby reads a script for a movie called Armageddon Two: Armageddon in her job as a movie exec in "Queen for a Day."

26. In "Burning Love," Lucille 2 (played by Liza Minnelli) tells GOB he has "no courage," a reference to the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz, which starred Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland.

27. In "Burning Love," after George Sr. gets a hot tub, there's steam coming from the house in the next establishing shot of the model home.

28. After Buster loses his left hand in "Hand to God," George Sr. is at a used car lot and there's an inflatable arm flailing person in the background with its left arm deflated.

29. Rob Corddry's gun advocate action star Moses Taylor is named after two of gun advocate Charlton Heston's most famous roles: Moses from The Ten Commandments and George Taylor from Planet of the Apes.

30. In "Motherboy XXX," Lucille and George Michael's sailor uniforms read "U.S.S. ENTER RISE," a reference to the letter "P" falling off of GOB's Segway to spell "Resident" instead of "President."

31. In "Motherboy XXX," when Buster shows up to the mother-son dance to save George Michael, he doesn't have a costume so they make him Captain Hook. It's a callback to Michael's school play and, of course, a reference to Buster having a hook for a hand.

32. In "Motherboy XXX," George Michael is playing checkers with recent seal attack victim Buster, he refers to him as his "Knuckle Buster" instead of "Uncle Buster," unintentionally referencing his hand loss.

33. In "The Immaculate Election," the school election parallels the 2004 Presidential Election with George Michael as John Kerry, Steve Holt as George W. Bush, and the Indian kid who's actually named "Rav Nadir" as Ralph Nader.

34. In "Sword of Destiny," there's a newspaper article about Tony Wonder where the small print copy reads:

"Tony Wonder wows his audience as he emerges from a giant sandwich... with the flair and fanfare of Liberace.... Despite the oohs and ahs of the mean audience there was one disgruntled ex-magician who was seen doing some sort of chicken-type dance at fevered pitch. He was carted off by the police before this reporter was able to interview him but it is the view of the by-standers that it was some sort of protest regarding the use of chicken used by Tony Wonder’s staff."

35. In "Spring Breakout," Lucille is sent to a rehab place called "Shady Pines." Shady Pines is also the name of the character Sophia Petrillo's former retirement home in Golden Girls, which Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz also wrote on.

36. When George Sr. breaks up the fight between Michael and GOB in front of the courthouse in "Righteous Brothers," The Ten Commandments statue, which was removed from the courthouse in "Justice is Blind," can be seen in the lawn.

37. Oscar's inmate number in "The Cabin Show" is #24601, the same as Jean Valjean's in Les Misérables.

38. In "The Cabin Show," the latest entry in Oscar's blog reads, "It's been a week since my last entry. I can explain. Last Thursday, I was counting ants in the prison yard and it was a scorcher but I remember, I started killing the ants with my feet, yelling "Die, you little black bastards, die!" I got stabbed – a whole lot."

39. In "Mr. F," there's a funny review of the Tantamount Studios movie Love Indubitably that even receives an "F." Here's the text from the review, entitled "Love, In-don’t-itably A Limey Lemon":

"A surfeit of apologies, an onslaught of stammering, Tantamount Studio’sLove, Indubitably is the latest blunder in a long line of forced, derivative flops. And, although it’s consdiered a no-no in the film critic’s world to place films on any sort of quality continuum, this piece of faux-mannered drivel deserves to be singled-out as the worst movie that I have ever seen. In fact, Indubitably’s only success comes from the fact that Tantamount as officially killed the once-charming subgenre of the British romantic comedy. What was once a light-hearted, witty niche—Hey, I’m not ashamed to say I even enjoyed Pardon Me, I’ve Fallen In Love—is now a leaden, painful cliche and only the second coming of John Cleese can prove otherwise. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this reviewers’... desert. When Sir Trevor Sturbridge (Grant Hughes), our hunk p-p-protagononist, falls backwards into a too-small (and why above-ground? Is this Reseda?) Jacuzzi with three perfectly nice lingerie-clad ladies, we are forced to listen to a full five minutes of his I’m- so-terribly-sophisticated- yet-unequipped- for-this- dreadfully-embrassing- moment shtick. It takes Trevor ten minutes to realize he’s ruined his Burberry suit and another eternity to even notice the gender of his chesty tubmates. Of course, we’re supposed to be laughing our charmed heads off the whole time because a British aristocrat is flopping around a hot Tobias: with half-naked women but, sadly this fish-out-of-water scene is lukewarm at best. Which leads us to the crux of why this film is so disappointing. Indubitably asks us to suspend our disbelief in one particular way. It wants us to think that modern British men... urges. Instead of creating stock characters that hide behind their social classes, why can’t Fünke and company show the darker side of British repression? I’d pay good money (12 bucks a pop at my local multi-... of tired romantic comedy set pieces. Each one feels less “witty” and the last, and each time we see actor Hughes go to his yammering well, we feel cheated. Perhaps most fiendish of all is his karaoke scene in... A comedy of manners that actually creates its own new brand of obscenity, Indubitably is a colossal failure. Please stay at home and rent anything with Mey Ryan in it because when it comes to romantic comedies, my recommendation is that you stay on this side of the pond for a while. And for now, we’ll keep spelling Fünkes name with an F. F"

40. In "Prison Break-In," Buster's turtle dies from eating Oscar's weed. Its left hand falls off, the same one that Buster lost.

41. There's a running joke about the Bluths calling jelly beans "candy beans." In "Prison Break-In," GOB refers to gumballs in a gumball machine as "candy balls."

42. In "Making a Stand," the Iraqi toy store "F.A.O. al-Jibaaly Muhammed a-Abat" is a reference to famous New York toy store F.A.O. Schwarz.

43. In "S.O.B.s," one of Andy Richter's quintuplet siblings is named "Chareth the flirt," referring to Michael's fake name "Chareth Cutestory" in "Altar Egos" when he's flirting with Maggie Lizer.

44. Also, Andy Richter being part of a set of quintuplets is a reference to his Fox series Quintuplets, which had been canceled a year earlier.

45. In "S.O.B.s," George Sr. suggests bringing celebrities to the Bluth family fundraiser suggesting "Oscar winners like Nicole Kidman." This is a reference to Arrested Development using Oscar winner Charlize Theron earlier in the season. (Michael's response: "I don’t want to just round up a bunch of famous people that have nothing to do with our family as some sort of cheap stunt. What’s that got to do with us?").

46. "Fakin' It" features a flashback to a previous episode with the caption "Several weeks earlier" in reference to the Fox network putting the show on hiatus so frequently that season.

47. In "Fakin' It," a character references talking magazine ads and we see a cutaway to a hand opening a magazine to a talking ad. A ring on the hand says "RH," indicating it's narrator/producer Ron Howard's hand.

48. In "Exit Strategy," George Michael tries to tell his father about the situation with his cousin Maeby. He says, "It's kind of a problem without an answer" because the answer is "maybe."

49. In "Exit Strategy," when George Michael is inviting people to Maeby' part, the name "R Howard" is listed in Maeby's address book below Steve Holt. When the narrator later says, "And some of us just couldn't be bothered to drive down to Orange County," he actually was invited to the party.

50. In "Exit Strategy," when GOB is being tasered in Iraq, there's a sign for T.A.I. Friday's in the background for "Thank Allah It's Friday's."

51. In "Exit Strategy," one of the Saddam doubles says, "We wanted to keep the house for just one more season," just like the people who make Arrested Development wanted one more season.

52. In "Development Arrested," there's an article from the entertainment magazine Varietyabout Maeby being found out to be a kid. The typo-ridden text of the article, "Tantamount To Child Labor; Teen Exec Cons Studio Job":

"Sources say the hiring of new film kid on the block Maeby Fünke, age 16, is Tantamount to child abuse but studio head Mort Meyer says it was pure genius on his part to draw in the younger demographic they sorely need. / But others disagree. They believe that Ms. Fünkes foray into film, though innocent enough, happened when she inadvertently managed to be indoctrinated into the fold through a mistaken identity phenom that was not of her own making. / Fünke’s calling card apparently fell into her lap as she was helping her father, wannabe actor Tobais Fünke, gain entrance into Tantamount Studios. Who could blame her for hanging on when she suddenly found herself behind a desk and in a position of power than many spend a lifetime trying to attain? ‘At least it’s better than high school, except for the food!’, she was overheard saying. / Well, no doubt, but does any of this excuse Tantamount from its legal responsibility regarding the child labor laws? One would have to argue, NO! / What passes for the upper eschelon of studio masterminds if a teenage girl can pull the dyed in the wool cloth over their eyes? / It seems, however, as though the industry, or at least Tantamount Studios, is more than ready to wrap their arms and minds around Ms. Fünke and are putting their money where their slack jawed mouths are. / Now industry insiders are even whispering about a reality show, MOW or sitcom about the sassy lass’ life. / Ms. Fünkes ex-boyfriend and cousin, Steve Holt, is reportedly anxious to sign on to play her ex-boyfriend and cousin. When asked about it Holt raised his fists in the air and shouted, ‘Steve Holt’. / Ms. Fünke’s other cousin, George Michael Bluth, got a deer in the headlights look on his face and curled up in a ball on the floor. This reporter took that to mean ‘no comment’. / Is this media darlings success wreaking havoc in her home life? / Her family has already been fodder for the rumormill microscope due to the littany of charges against her grandfather, Bluth patriarch George Bluh, head of the development empire the Bluth Company. Charges of possible incest and insanity seemed to continue to flit around this kids inner circle. MOW here we come! / At the end of the day will Ms. Fünke be just a one hit wonder or will she spur a whole new era in the movie biz? Only time will tell but for now, things are undoubtedly getting funky at the Fünke household. It was reported that her father is jealous of her budding fame and has refused to eat until he gets equal press time. Though that has not happened yet, it is said that he has scheduled a photo session for new head shots to cash in on his new svelt figure. / So has all of this suprred studio execs to start combing the hallways and lcokerrooms of their local high schools? No telling for sure but I think I saw a certain SS superfigure huddled at the lunch counter with a gaggle of gals at Beverly Palisades high school last week. Can you say power lunch sloppy joes?"

53. In "Development Arrested," when Michael asks George Michael how long he's had feelings for his cousin, he responds, "53 weeks." The show was on for 53 episodes.

Be sure to check out the original 53 Arrested Development Jokes You Probably Missed for even more hidden jokes and references!

Some of the jokes in this post were spotted by commenters on the original 53 Hidden Jokes piece, so we'd like to thank commenters Leah, Harriet, Cody Michael, Ben_Ben, Heather W, Emily, bigcity5, Anne Marie, J, kalu, Connor Ratliff, Kat, Bottlerocket, Emily, Drew, g (guy), Christopher Miller, t3d, sarah lily timer, annyong?, ST, Nadia, and T (Tobias).

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I met Chris at a mutual friend’s concert in Manhattan’s Upper East Side in early 2011. We bonded over the fact that we had both been in junior high productions of the same, very obscure, musical, Angels Aware. He sang me one of the songs from the production and I was instantly smitten. He was handsome, smart, funny and driven. What I didn’t know that night was that he was also hopeful for the first time in his life. He had just returned to work after a double lung transplant to replace his diseased lungs, which had been ravaged by cystic fibrosis.

Chris passed away on Feb. 20, 2013 at the age of 31. I spent the day after he died lying face down on my carpet waiting for my younger sister to fly in from out of town. The next day, I went on a shopping spree of epic proportions.

That kind of irresponsible spending is against my nature. I work in a notoriously low-paying industry (book publishing), and I have always been good at setting and sticking to budgets. I am not a reckless, impulsive spender. My budget is divided into weekly and monthly spending allocations. I use transit check and a flexible spending account to get as much mileage out of my pretax dollars as possible, and I contribute enough to my 401(k) to receive all of my company’s matching funds. My multiple savings accounts for different savings goals pull money from my checking account as soon as my paycheck lands. I love to save money for well-considered, big-ticket items. I once saved for five years to be able to quit my job and travel around the world with my sister. For me, it’s worth it to not carelessly spend on the small things that add up—I’m always looking at the bigger picture.

But the Friday after Chris died, I didn’t care about any of my budgets. My high school tutor once told me I should always dress up for an exam, because if I looked good I would feel confident as well. I knew I would be visible at the wake and the funeral, and I thought that if I looked my best, I would be able to make it through the day. I bought a $268 dress for the wake, $182 black shoes I could stand in all day, a $160 black sweater, and a $43 purse. I spent $70 on makeup at Sephora. I got a $40 blowout and a $10 manicure. My sister looked at me and said, “You look stressed. A chair massage would make you feel better.” So I opened my wallet and paid $20 for one.

That night I took my sister out to a cocktail bar I’d wanted to try, and to and a nice dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar. We took an unnecessary taxi back to my apartment. Another $236 was deducted from my bank account.

My spending spree continued over the next few months. I needed a reason to get out of bed in the morning, so I registered for races to run ($70). I needed something to look forward to, so I joined a summer share with my friends on Fire Island ($1,200). I signed up for kickball and bowling leagues so that I had somewhere to be during the week ($375). Then, of course, I needed cute clothes for all of these social events ($500).

My therapist suggested that I sign up for a writing class to help me process my grief ($445). Therapy? That’s not cheap ($2,100 since the day Chris and his nurse called to tell me it was time to say goodbye). On what would have been Chris’s 32^nd birthday, I sent his mother flowers ($75).

Since Chris died, I’ve gone out to dinner or drinks almost every night. I am desperate to feel connected and I avoid being alone. I buy rounds at dive bars ($40), and eat long leisurely brunches on the weekends ($55). I take taxis all the time that I never would have taken before ($262). I have thrown my credit card down over and over and spent money without a second thought. My therapist says that this type of spending is a typical reaction for women who lose their partner, especially after a long illness. She says that spending money on things like classes and vacations is a way for me to reenter the world of the living.

Three months later I’m just starting to feel like I can control myself, but I’m still burning through my carefully saved money at a rate I would have panicked about earlier. I don’t care—I just want something concrete to hold onto. When I swipe my card I think: I deserve this. I have been through so much. I think: I will do anything to make myself feel better. Or I think: Who cares about this money anyway? Chris worked hard and saved money his whole life and look where it got him. Chris is dead and nothing else matters.

A native Midwesterner, Sarah has spent time living in Boston, Auckland and Berlin. She is currently grounded in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she balances a career in publishing with freelance writing (when she’s not balancing her checkbook). Photo: senhormario

Retro Report re-reports on old stories, “connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.” Its latest video focuses on the alleged crack baby epidemic in the 1980s:

Clay Dillow summarizes key points:

How did science get it so wrong? The primary study behind the “crack baby” epidemic scare involved just 23 infants–a sample set too small to be meaningful. It also included only infants rather than adults who had been exposed to crack as infants. Later studies conducted on adults who had been prenatally exposed to crack often showed very small changes in their brains rather than the sweeping deficiencies predicted by the science of the time. It’s a lesson in what happens when a misreading of the data leads to a publicly accepted narrative, especially one that feeds on society’s collective fears about the future.

TNC adds:

It is hard to ignore the effects of racism here. There is a time-honored American tradition of turning minorities into the vessel for all the country’s vices — as if adultery, murder, idleness and all other manner of sin would disappear with us. This is especially true in the realm of drugs.

Stefon and Anderson Cooper's wedding on Saturday Night Live this weekend was jam-packed with appearances from characters and creatures Stefon had mentioned in previous Weekend Update reports. We freeze-framed our way through the scene to offer you this guide to all of Stefon's wedding guests. From Gizblow the coked-up Gremlin to DJ Baby Bok Choy, they're all here:

Crowd shot

Black George Washington

Puppets in disguise (just ALF in a trenchcoat)

Human traffic cones ("when two jacked midgets paint themselves orange and you have to parallel park between them") and a human fire hydrant

HoboCops (homeless RoboCops)

Jewpids (Jewish cupids)

Infamous gay running back Blowjay Simpson

A group of guys with afros and graduation caps and jacked homeless guys in old-fashioned bathing suits

Gizblow the coked-up Gremlin

Furkels (fat urkels)

Evil chef Wario Batali ("He's just like his brother, except he doesn’t wear Crocs.")

Germfs (German Smurfs)

Jewish Dracula, Sidney Applebaum

A screaming geisha

Hanukkah cartoon character Menorah the Explorer

DJ Baby Bok Choy ("He’s a giant 300-pound Chinese baby who wears tinted aviator glasses and he spins records with his little ravioli hands")

Stefon's brother Ben Affleck, who appeared with him in the first Stefon sketch in 2008 before he was a Weekend Update character.

Back at the Update desk, we saw everybody doing one of their popular recurring characters. From left to right, The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at a Party (Cecily Strong), Arianna Huffington (Nasim Pedrad), Jean K. Jean (Kenan Thompson), David Patterson (Fred Armisen), Ann Romney (Kate McKinnon), Jacob (Vanessa Bayer), former anchorperson Amy Poehler, Drunk Uncle (Bobby Moynihan), and the Devil (Jason Sudeikis).

And here's the sketch:

For more Stefon, check out our illustrated guide to Stefon's favorite nightclubs.

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See more posts by Bradford Evans

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From a new PPP poll:

Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history, 39 percent are unaware that Benghazi is located in Libya. 10 percent said it’s in Egypt, 9 percent in Iran, 6 percent in Cuba, 5 percent in Syria, 4 percent in Iraq, and 1 percent each in North Korea and Liberia, with 4 percent unwilling to venture a guess.

In what must be the nerdiest nerdgasm posted to the Internet in the last 24 hours, Slate economics blogger Matt Yglesias has watched every episode of every series of Star Trek and shared his thoughts about what makes the series great.

Naturally, he has some insights about the “post-scarcity socialism” of the future economy they portray:

Consider the miraculous technology of the replicator—a machine that can seemingly create anything out of thin air, based on rudimentary raw materials plus energy. When computers and energy can substitute for productive human labor, either the energy supply will be controlled democratically for Federation-style liberal socialism, or else it will fall into the hands of some narrow clique and give us the fascistic authoritarianism of the Klingons, the Romulans, or the Cardassians. Under the circumstances, nothing resembling capitalism as we know it could survive.

Also, everything he has to say about the shows themselves is 100 percent objectively correct.