Steve Dyer

fuckyeah1990s:

RIP animals from movies/tv made in the 90s

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Christopher Robbins investigates:

More often than not, it means in a mass grave with 850,000 others in the world's largest publicly funded cemetery, Hart Island. ... Prisoners on Rikers Island perform the burials for 50 cents an hour, and the deceased are stacked atop one another, 150 to a pit, in a practice carried over from the 19th century. "Sometimes they dig up portions of earth that already have bodies in them," notes Frank Clark, a former Rikers inmate who now works with PTH. That procedure has been disputed by the DOC, but Clark says he has firsthand knowledge of the practice. "I know they do that, because I worked the detail. It's true."

Apparently one needs to get quite ripped to play a Navy Seal.

Watch Pratt talk to Conan about his role, AFTER THE JUMP...

Something akin to a high-stakes poker game, rabid ferrets, a surprise Plan B. These fiscal-cliff negotiations have it all!

Iowa residents Brian and Mary Lohse are using $3 million of their recent $202 million Powerball win to build a new football stadium for their son's high school team, The Blue Jays, which is a nice and generous.

They had a not-so-nice stipulation, though: the opponents' locker room must be pink, to, as Mary Lohse said, "put them in a certain soft frame of mind."

From the Des Moines Register:

As for the pink locker room, that was Mary Lohse’s sense of humor kicking in with an undying love of the Hawkeyes.

"I was sort of half joking and half not I suppose, but they said they’d do it," Mary Lohse said of her scheme, inspired by the University of Iowa visitor’s locker room of the same color (pictured).

"It’s supposed to put them in a certain soft frame of mind … it will certainly give all the players something to talk about," she said.

This development comes after Ohio University football coach Urban Meyer apologized in March for punishing team members by making them wear lavender jerseys to shame them.

As the reader who sent this along pointed out, if the Lohse family wants to engage in these kind of mind games, why not just go the extra step and right gay slurs on the locker room's walls?

The Texts

2:30 a.m.
Him: I find myself still attracted to you but I’m glad I was able to come talk to you tonight.
R: Well I’ll always have a little crush on you too, but I’m glad we could talk and that you’re happy.
Him: If I’m honest I don’t know if I would have had the resolve to say no if the attempt had been made to take things further.

9:20 a.m.
Him: But you can do way better.

The Analysis

K: Hahahahaha wow I am going to slay the whole solar system.
R: We seriously never have a punching bag around here, anywhere.
K: I can’t take it. I can’t take it. Feel my pulse.
R: It feels normal basically.
K: Like, why does the couple that jet-skied themselves to death on their honeymoon from that TLC show have to die but this ENGAGED asshole piece of shit gets to live?
R: Arghh nooo, don’t bring them up, it’s too much.
K: It’s like, A, not only is he suggesting cheating was on the table and B, insinuating that YOU would be the one to INITIATE the cheating, he is ALSO, C, passive-aggressively asking you to compliment him.
R: I know. He thinks I won’t say “You’re right.”
K: Sometimes I don’t think they know that we KNOW. Anything!
R: Everyone is the dumbest person I’ve ever met.
K: Exactly. But … also. You know you should NOT have said you’d always have a crush on him. Right?
R: I mean, NOW, yes. I don’t know how I’m supposed to know what’s wrong to say until I’ve already tested it out loud. 
Read the rest at The Hairpin.

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On Monday, Duncan Hosie, a gay freshman at Princeton, confronted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia about Scalia's anti-gay dissents on landmark gay rights cases. This interview with Duncan is worth watching: 

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I'm struck first of all by the freshman's calm civility and sharp logic. It contrasts so vividly with Scalia's emotionalism and bravado. When a few of us kick-started this issue way back when, this young man wasn't even born. Now he articulates the same case with polish, confidence and intellectual clarity. I cannot express how moving that is for me and those who lived through the beginnings of this struggle.

But the exchange also brought back something in my own past. Well over a decade ago (I can't remember when), one of the professors I taught students for at Harvard, Michael Sandel, invited me to debate my former dissertation adviser, Harvey C Mansfield, on marriage equality. It was for Sandel's legendarily popular course, "Justice". The fact that Harvey and I both agreed to do it and debated with civility and mutual respect (I revere Harvey as a scholar and as a human being) was, for me, somewhat moving, if also a little personally awkward.

But at one point, Harvey simply said (I'm paraphrasing), "If we cannot disapprove of homosexuality, then what can we disapprove of?" The huge student crowd - over a thousand in Sanders Theater - audibly gasped. The assumption that homosexuality was obviously a profoundly immoral and disgusting thing was what separated the generations. I asked Harvey to make an argument that wasn't based on a mere assumption, that could show why non-procreative sex for a gay couple was somehow obviously abhorrent, while non-procreative sex for a straight couple was completely accepted (i.e. through contraception). He couldn't. And since that moment, I think it's fair to say, his position has softened a little (although I don't want to put words into his mouth).

The equation of homosexuals and murderers is also, it seems to me, not so much offensive as bizarre. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that same-sex non-procreative sex acts are as bad as murders. I know that's completely insane, but bear with me. Murderers still have the core constitutional right to marry the person they love. Even people on death row who cannot even consummate a marriage because they are incarcerated retain the core right to marry, according to Supreme Court precedent. Dead-beat fathers who have abandoned children from previous marriages and failed to provide child support equally retain a constitutional right to re-marry as often as they wish (also ruled on by SCOTUS). All these rights have been upheld strongly by the Supreme Court over the decades (for the precise precedents, check out my anthology, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con).

So lets challenge Scalia on "legislating morals". The public has every right to legislate morals but not to do so arbitrarily to punish and stigmatize a minority for doing the exact same things that the majority does all the time, i.e., sodomy. If the court has already determined that mass murderers have an inviolable right to marry, how is allowing gay people to marry somehow a sign of moral decline? If the court has already made non-procreative sex constitutionally protected for straight people, how is it that the very same thing, condemned for the very same reasons by Scalia's and my own hierarchy, is obviously immoral when it comes to homosexuals?

It's that discrepancy that suggests that this argument is not about legislating morals, as Scalia insists. It is about legislating them unequally, and treating a tiny minority differently for no rational reason. This issue has been settled, as Scalia himself declared in his dissent in Lawrence vs Texas. He rightly said there that that decision essentially made gay marriage a constitutional inevitability. He was right. And he should uphold that precedent in these cases, if it comes to that. Or is he going to contradict himself?

Amy Davidson puts Scalia's backwardness in perspective:

It was during the AIDS crisis that many people learned what it meant to be married, in terms of having the right to be in a hospital room or plan a funeral, and also how many people they knew who were touched by it. Those lessons, about the legal power of marriage and the enduring force of family ties, have been carried past those years of crisis. They have been joined by, and informed, a drive for marriage as a way to protect the rights of the children of gay parents.

Scalia has no awareness of this, as he is sealed off from it entirely. Paul Campos uses the incident to argue for SCOTUS term limits:

Scalia’s tactless fulminations are, at bottom, a reminder of why life tenure for Supremes is a bad idea, the badness of which increases in direct proportion to our average life expectancy. Put another way, someone who was in law school at a time when 96 percent of the public disapproved of interracial marriage should be considered too old to sit on the Supreme Court.

(Photo: US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks during the American Bar Association 59th annual 'Antitrust Law Spring' meeting in Washington, DC, on March 31, 2011. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.)

Forget what Bill Cunningham says. The 'meggings' (male leggings) trend just isn't going to fly for Anderson Cooper.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

A reader writes:

I’m a bit shocked by something that has been missed entirely in this thread. One reader wrote, "We want the government to have a roll in education through pell grants and student loans," and there have been a few curt mentions of student debt, but … HELLO? We want the government to have a roll in education through ... saddling the next generation with debt? How far have we come!

I’m 28, an attorney who graduated with over $100k in debt after attending a top-tier public law school. (It’s a funny joke in our culture that we call these schools "public.") I pay a mortgage that is about 50% less per month than I pay in student loan payments.

Now that’s fine; those are my choices. But when we’re speaking about generational redistribution of wealth, how can you not mention that we Millennials are starting the game with one leg cut out from under us? Previous generations enjoyed the benefits of "public" college (if you could get in) - college funded by the old guys paying taxes. We’re the generation that will finish paying for our own college in our fifties. So on top of paying for excesses in pensions and entitlements, we’re going to be footing the bill for our own schooling.

Another writes:

I was born in 1985. I'm the oldest of three and the only one to complete college (Class of 2008). Deciding to go to college has become one of the defining events of my life. Not because of the excellent education I received despite my learning disability (I have dyslexia), but because of the MASSIVE debt I now carry. I owe about $103,000 in student loans. I have 22 years to pay it off. Currently, my monthly payments on all of my loans is about $930/month. Do I think my college degree was worth $100,000? HELL NO.

But it has helped me in job interviews because it's a school that is well known. I was lucky enough to get a decent job right out of college (if you consider right out of college six months after graduation). In the five years since starting as a young professional, I have changed jobs three times. Even in my current position, as a project manager for a National Institute of Health contract at a major university, 50% of my paycheck goes to my student loans. That's on top of living expenses like rent, food, utilities, transportation costs, etc. My "extra" spending money comes to about $150 per month.

Because of my debt and monthly expenses, I probably won't be able to buy a house in the near future. Even with my husband's income, we can still only put away a few hundred dollars a month. I've read stories where the author stated that it's MY generation's fault that the housing market hasn't picked up. Maybe that is true, but how the hell am I suppose to save 20% for a down payment with my income? I also have family members who are Republicans and avid in their hatred for Obama. But even they admit that it'd probably be a good idea for a portion of my generations loans be forgiven so that the economy can pick up.

To read all the millennial letters, go here.

majss:

hey will you remember me in a day

yeah

will you remember me in a week

yeah

will you remember me in a month

yeah

knock knock

who’s there

i thought you said you’d remember me

I didn't really comment on Bob Costas's statement on handguns, mostly because I thought it was a little too broad for my tastes. I wasn't clear on what, precisely, what he was proposing. There's also something a little too easy about putting Kasandra Perkins' death on the presence of handguns. Men have been murdering their significant others since time immemorial. I understand that handguns make it easier -- much as cars make alcohol-related deaths more frequent. But it doesn't really strike me as a strong argument to speak with certainty about the counter-factual. Kasandra Perkins also liked shooting guns. Perhaps that drew them closer. I don't know and I don't see how anyone can.
But the other day I was biking home at a relatively late hour. I was coming up Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge. I was a couple of blocks from my crib, when a car full of young black boys pulled up slowly next to me. They were laughing among themselves, and one of them mumbled loud enough for me to hear, "Wait, I thought that was my bike. I got my bike stolen last week," and then they drove off.
When you grow up as I did, you take these sorts of encounters as a threat. When I was a kid and we were looking to jump someone, it was pretty standard for them to "invent" a reason. I'm not saying that other people don't do the same (I suspect they do). But I am speaking from what I know. The (aborted) threat didn't scare me as much as my immediate response. I was very angry, and what I wanted, more than anything, in that moment, was for the car to stop, and for one of them to approach me. Then I would bash that kids head in with my bike lock. 
That was a really stupid idea.
The man in me knows how macho imaginings usually outstrip reality. He also knows that this may not have even been a threat. He further knows that kids, in general, do dumb shit. But that wasn't the man in me talking. It wasn't the father who knows he needs to be around for his child. It wasn't the husband, who knows his wife is back in New York depending on him. It wasn't the writer who hopes that his best words are still in front of him. It was some little boy who got jumped repeatedly more than two decades ago, back in West Baltimore, and has spent the rest of his days just "wishing a nigger would," as my people say.
That boy is a damn fool. And part of any adult's maturation must be keeping the idiot in them under wraps. But I can't kill the boy. Nor should I. It's that same boy who tells me not to punk out when I'm doing my miles, not to be a chump and take a day off from writing. The boy reinforces the man. But he needs guardrails.
I suspect that a good way to remove the guardrails is to put a gun in my hand. I didn't say anything when those kids rolled up on me. I knew I was outnumbered. But give me a gat, give me that same anger, and that thirst for revenge, and it takes nothing for me to see myself yelling at those kids, "Nigger, what?" and hoping, praying, they stopped the car and got out.
You might say they initiated the aggression. I say I don't want to kill anybody. I say that there are things worth more than my life -- like how I want to live it. And I know that after the boy has his moment, the man must take the weight. There must be consequences, moral or otherwise, for even those killing which the law would relieve you of. It must alter you, just a little -- unless you've already gone there.
I haven't.
But I think a small part of me is always spoiling for a final fight. And I think it must be a seriously well-adjusted human who has none of that in them. Perhaps Michael Dunn would have told those kids to turn down their music, no matter what. But perhaps knowing that he had the ultimate power in his hands to annihilate all of them, gave him a little edge. Very few people, no matter how "responsible," would be immune to such a feeling. 
Fantasies of standing your ground come easy to us because, at some point in our lives, we've all fled the field. Having fled repeatedly, I will tell you that it's a horrible feeling. Some of us live to never feel that way again. And others of us kill. 

aktigerlily:

newyorkcitydreaming:

gypsytraveler:

gabzgirl:

mickey-ears:

cultureandjunk:

the-once-was-the-has-been:

inert-rememberer:

puckersons:

#kids movies more like spawn of satan

WHO DID THIS

WHO PUT THEM ALL IN ONE PLACE

DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT KIND OF POWER THEY HAVE TOGETHER

I think I’m dying.

This is like the meanest post ever and I love it.

If this had a Fox and the Hound gif, I would probably just drown in a sea of tears.

NO 

WHY WOULD YOU ADD THAT GIF

gifmovie:

I adore this woman.

howdah: a seat or platform for one or more persons placed on the back of an elephant.