IKEA Monkey

President Donald Trump challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to "compare IQ tests," delivering a sharp-edged ribbing that threw a bright spotlight on his seemingly shaky relationship with his top diplomat. The White House insisted the president was only joking.

Trump issued the challenge...

Most men think gender bias in the workplace is less prevalent than a new study shows it is, and they’re also less likely than women to prioritize an even playing field.

But both sexes tend to discount the level of discrimination that exists in corporations, especially for women of color, according...

A Utah detective who was filmed handcuffing and dragging a nurse in July has been fired.

During Ronan Farrow’s investigation, thirteen women told him that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them.

(SPOILERS – Stop reading if you don’t want to know what happens in season three of Rick and Morty) I have been watching Rick and Morty for a few years now and I took it as a fun, light-hearted, sci-fi…

Donald Trump, angry with officials he appointed and frustrated with his failure to progress his legislative agenda, is said to have turned into a “pressure cooker” who frequently explodes at those around him. Reports suggest that in recent days, Mr Trump, fed up with criticism of his handling of the crisis in Puerto Rico and furious over comments from a senior Republican who claimed he was setting the US on “the path to World War III”, the President has been lashing out at those around him and burning political bridges. Meanwhile, his relationship with Chief of Staff John Kelly, the former general appointed to try and bring order to the chaos of the White House, may have become “irreparable”, according to one report.

As my one true girl, you know that I crave your love. I need it like a woodworker needs the perfect slab of mahogany. Like a sculptor needs obsidian. Like the stars need the night. If I had to travel 3,000 miles with various layovers at small regional airports that have little to no amenities just to be with you, I would do this.

However, there is no need to take a plane, because tonight, Smoove and his one true girl stay in.

To be clear, I’m saying that we will not go to the city’s finest clubs. We will not go to the city’s finest restaurants where they serve the finest bread imported from the surprisingly good bread regions of South Korea. We will not go to that spot that only Smoove knows about, watch the sunset with your head on my shoulder, and drive home on a winding mountain road, never saying a word to each other but sharing a deep, emotional bond that comes from watching the finest sunset from the city’s finest vantage point. I will not then pull over to the shoulder and hit you doggy-style on the side of that road.

Here’s how tonight will go down:

First, I will ask you to join me at my penthouse apartment. I will do so by sending a text. The text will read: “Come to my place at 8. Wear that dress.” You will know which dress I speak of. I will include two dozen red rose emojis at the end of the text so you will know I am yearning for your love.

At eight o’clock you will arrive because you are punctual. I find that very sexy. I will also find the dress you are wearing extremely sensual, and I will compliment it. You will blush and accept the compliment, because you are a lady and a lady accepts such compliments. I will then compliment your necklace, but as you will be admiring the romantic view from my living room window at this time, you may be too distracted to hear it. Believe me though, it will be a flattering remark.

I will lead you to the balcony where we will enjoy the cool night air and sip champagne. I have recently had all my champagne glasses re-fluted by the only man certified to do this kind of work in the country. He is an excellent craftsman, and while you may not consciously notice the difference, it will add to the deep satisfaction of the evening. This satisfaction will slowly well up inside you like a mountain spring over the course of the night. This satisfaction comes from knowing you have a man who treats you right.

Even my main man Darnell doesn’t know about champagne re-fluting.

At 8:30 p.m. exactly, I will lead your fineness from the balcony to the kitchen because at that moment, our meal, simmering on the stove, will have reached ultimate perfection. Taking the wooden tasting spoon from its velvet-lined box, I will present you with a sample of the perfect sauce. Before I let you taste it, however, I will blow on it three times so that it does not burn your tongue.

You see, your tongue is very precious to me.

I will fill our dinner plates with the sumptuous banquet I have prepared for you. I have used only the finest French cookbooks from the finest French publishing houses. Once I have seated you in the dining room, I will make a toast to your beauty, charm, and ample booty. During the meal, we will smile and laugh about how nice it is to stay in and just enjoy each other’s company. I will say complimentary things about your hands and praise the quality of your manicure. We will smile and laugh again, because we have chemistry, and that is what stimulating creatures with smoldering sexual dynamics do.

After a dessert of fresh, seasonal berries, things will get serious.

That is when I will turn to you and say, “I crave your body.” You will get weak in the knees knowing this information. Maintaining eye contact at all times, I will stand up, take your hand, and lead you to the bedroom where you will be surprised to find that scented candles have been burning and the music of Keith Sweat has been playing all evening long. I will stand behind you and slowly remove that dress while kissing your neck.

Damn.

This is when I will lead you to the bed, which will be covered with towels that are both soft and absorbent. This will not concern you in the slightest. I will wordlessly instruct you to lie face-down. That is when Smoove’s Massage™ will begin.

This will be all about you. Tonight, I will be like a sensual baker, and you will be my delicious creation. My hands will be strong but delicate. Your body will be the perfectly formed dough. Every stroke will knead your magnificent form and smooth you out until you are as supple as a homemade pie crust. Every caress will unleash your body’s luscious goodness. My only intention during this massage will be to make you as buttery and delectable as possible. With a skill that sensual baking experts would marvel at, I will gently heat up your body to prepare it for what’s to come.

Only when your body is at its utmost readiness will I put my filling in you.

Since we will not have gone out, we will have more time than usual to freak nasty. Now, you may think I will not have the stamina to go all night long. Put that thought out of your mind—now and forever.

My back is strong.

Despite having taken your body and mind to the limits of pleasure, you will awake the next morning extremely fresh. You will once again join me on the balcony, where I will serve French toast. However, I will add my personal twist to this dish, perhaps stuffing it full of Nutella or some manner of spiced whipped cream.

There will also be bacon.

That is how it will go down. Please bring your love to me as fast as you can.

But do not arrive before eight o’clock.

Smoove out.

A suburban Chicago mother of seven is accused of urging Facebook followers to kill a gang member-turned-FBI mole for his role in a sting that put an associate of hers behind bars on charges he tried to sell semi-automatic rifles stolen from a freight train, court documents show.

Iesha Stanciel,...

Three women accused Harvey Weinstein of raping them in a story published by The New Yorker Tuesday, significantly intensifying the scandal surrounding the disgraced movie mogul. A representative for the mogul vehemently denied the allegations in a statement to the magazine.

The expose, published...

Fashion mogul Donna Karan is apologizing after praising Harvey Weinstein following his firing from his film company amid allegations of sexual harassment lasting decades.

Firefighters were counting on cooler weather and weakening winds Tuesday to help in their fight against at least 17 large blazes.

The New York Times was reporting well-known rumors and accusations when it broke the story Thursday that big-shot movie mogul and Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein allegedly had a long history of sexually harassing, abusing and victimizing countless women. But Weinstein might have gotten away with...

Problem solved? [ more › ]

We have to give it up to the McDonald’s marketing team: When Rick And Morty creator Justin Roiland’s food-based obsessions gave them an opening into the fervent fanbase of one of TV’s hottest shows, they grabbed that greasy, breaded football and ran with it, as far and as fast as it could take them. Those efforts…

Read more...

Judging by the reactions online over the weekend, people seem torn on whether Blade Runner 2049 is good or great, long or too long, a box office failure or only kind of a box office failure. Pretty much everyone who loved the first film, though, at least very much enjoyed the long-awaited sequel, in part because of…

Read more...

More than half of Americans don't think Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, yet he has a clear path to winning re-election. If Trump isn't removed from office and doesn't lead the country into some form of global catastrophe, he could secure a second term simply by maintaining his current...

I cannot believe how soothing I’m finding this video of a German man in full Medieval costume explaining how people used to walk in the Middle Ages, before the advent of fixed-sole shoes.

Read more...

Here’s a bird landing on a bear.

Read more...

Republican Senator Bob Corker had some choice words for Donald Trump today following one of the president’s typical weekend tirades, accusing him of turning the White House into an “adult day care center” and later expressing concern that Trump will “set the nation on the path to World War III.” I guess that last one…

Read more...

The citizens of the internet woke up to some shocking news this morning: AIM, a pioneer in the world of online messaging, is shutting down after 20 years. The service will officially shutter on December 15, with no plans for an official replacement from Oath, the Verizon-owned company that includes both America Online…

Read more...

The 36-year-old apparently smashed glass, flipped over tables and poured red wine on the furnishings at the upscale spot. [ more › ]

It’s rare that the Hollywood industrial complex so flagrantly wags its hatred for the thick, heaving masses, but with Young Sheldon it has quite literally lifted lines from its most popular character—The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon—and regurgitated them from the maw of some sneering moppet. It’d be hard for anybody to…

Read more...

President Donald Trump called a White House dinner with top military commanders, "the calm before the storm." When a reporter asked what storm, he replied, "you'll see."

Birth control should be free, but instead the Trump administration is reportedly about to make it even harder for some women to obtain.

Read more...

Rep. Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania Republican with a staunchly anti-abortion voting record, urged a woman he was having an affair with to get an abortion, according to messages obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Wu-Tang Clan is perhaps one of the most influential hip-hop groups in history, selling more than 6 million albums as a group and inspiring an entire generation of rap syndicates in the process. As individual artists, their reach is even wider. They’ve produced some of hip-hop’s most heralded solo LPs, like…

Read more...

GOOD MORNING.

DID YOU THINK SLAVERY WAS OVER? LIKE THE FORCED AGRICULTURAL LABOR KIND?

Well. Let me tell you about late-stage capitalism then because we are bringing back slaves, and not just to work in governors’ mansions for the benevolent wealthy, oh no! We are maiming people and stealing their money! See, the Constitution outlawed slavery but they left a couple explicit loopholes, specifically the Thirteenth Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

I fucking hate chickens. I will never become a vegetarian specifically because the chickens and I have been in a war since my neighbor’s hen got into my bedroom and shat over everything I loved. Have you ever seen a chicken run or a coop that’s not been cleaned in a couple days? It is hell. Hell, mayhem and smelly destruction. If you don’t clean a chicken coop for a week you have to burn the square acre containing it and build a new one. They are squawky stinky messy birds and I hate them all which is why I try to eat as many of them as I can, to help control the population. YOU’RE WELCOME, AMERICA.

That said, have you ever *butchered* a chicken? It is even worse than dealing with the live version! I will assume that nobody who is reading this has worked in an abattoir, and I will tell you that out of all the nightmarish things in a slaughterhouse the very very worst is the smell. I made it two weeks at a pig farm, and two months in the chicken barns, and that was over a decade ago and I just got nauseous even remembering it. During that few months I injured my shoulder from heavy repetitive motion, sustained chemical burns, got a huge gory slash in my thigh and contracted some kind of airborne bacteria that meatpackers are at higher risk for. (And I know the owner of the farms; they ran a remarkably cruelty-free outfit but there’s only so many ways to kill and process a chicken. They can’t make it easy or pleasant for the workers even if the chickens never felt any pain.)

Point is, that was by far the best paycheck in the county and I’m a tough girl and I lasted a couple months. I have a whole career based on telling entitled people they should try getting real jobs and see how THEY like it and I’ve never once wished a slaughterhouse on anyone, not even that time when I was lecturing at Yale and a student asked me if I thought that maybe poor people were being a bit unfair to their bosses because they just didn’t understand how stressful it was to be in the white-collar class. EVEN THAT GUY I DID NOT WISH THE BARNS ON.

So. What do you, the chicken company, do when the only jobs you have to offer are completely shitty both literally and figuratively? GET YOU SOME SLAVES, OF COURSE! And it’s completely legal in America to enslave convicts! Problem, meet solution. You think I’m kidding, but:

It was started in 2007 by chicken company executives struggling to find workers. By forming a Christian rehab, they could supply plants with a cheap and captive labor force while helping men overcome their addictions.

Now. I have flirted with substance addiction myself, and I can tell you one thing: There is nothing in this whole wide world that would make me want to chuck sobriety right out the fucking window than finding myself back in the barns. I write about Donald Trump every day and I’ve not killed myself yet but if I got busted for a dime bag or something and found myself back on the processing line I might invent entirely new drugs to start doing!

But wait, would this not be possibly morally okay if we were making like rapists and serial killers process carcasses for the homeless? Possibly! Only this isn’t that. This is a “drug treatment program.” It’s called Christian Alcoholics and Addicts In Recovery, which is about as honest a name as the PATRIOT Act, or Clear Skies, or Healthy Forests. It is pure fucking evil and possibly blasphemy to boot because when the assholes who run it get to see Jesus they’re gonna find that he wasn’t too thrilled.

See, because addicts need to learn the value of an honest day’s work, never mind that plenty of people pick up their addictions when they’re injured and physically can’t do that manual labor thing. And because we know that there’s no such fucking thing as an employed addict, right, which explains half of Wall Street and every PhD program I’ve ever visited?

So you know how to really teach someone the value of a dollar? Make them work seven days a week and then keep all their dollars! That’s right! People in this drug program never got paychecks! The “rehab,” CAIRR, sent all its court-mandated “clients” to Simmon Foods (Simmons Foods, Inc, valued at $1.4 billion-with-a-b), which realllly needed the workers, and then just kept whatever wages they would have earned. Which, pretty evil, right? AHAHAHAHA I AM JUST STARTING HERE!

Remember how I told you I got sick and scarred from mere weeks? Well! So do the slaves at the chicken barns! And even though they don’t get paid, they are technically workers and eligible for worker’s compensation if they get injured! Obviously, there is a potential to help someone here, and those people are Janet and Don Wilkerson, who run this hellhole of a “recovery program” and apply for workers’ comp for injured slaves all the time! And then keep any money the slaves are entitled to for their medical bills, because it’s actually a program rule that slaves aren’t allowed to have money! AND LOL THEY MAKE THE SLAVES SIGN FORMS THAT SAY THEY’RE CLIENTS AND NOT EMPLOYEES SO THEY CAN’T GET WORKERS COMP, BUT THEN THE LAW SAYS THEY CAN SO THEN THE COMPANY JUST KEEPS THE MONEY AND THE SLAVES ARE MAIMED FOR LIFE GOD AIN’T THE CAPITALISM JUST GONNA SAVE US ALL! (It’s okay, if your hand gets crushed someone will find you a doctor to just splint that up for you but remember, you’re in rehab so no painkillers for you even if you’ve crushed three bones!)

So are you a little uncomfortable about this whole slavery thing yet because we’re not even done! See, the Wilkersons think that things like “helping the Wilkersons move” or “renovating the Wilkersons’ house” are what we call community service. So they have slaves for that too. And we, the taxpayers, are helping pay their $168k yearly combined salary! (For y’all city dwellers that doesn’t sound like a lot but in a region where the median income might be $30K they’re basically Cruella de Vil and Scrooge McDuck in an unholy alliance.)

ANYWAY. So since this is a recovery program you might think they’d have things like drug counselors and shrinks and whatnot, but you would be wrong! This program isn’t certified! It’s not even legal to send people to this program! And whole states do it anyway! OH AND THEY PROHIBIT PSYCHIATRY. Not even shitting you. They have aspirational YAY WORK posters on the walls and mandatory church.

Now, I was raised a fundamentalist and I am pretty damn familiar with the Bible. If you want to know why I don’t go to church anymore it’s because people do things like run fucking slave camps and force their slaves to read the Bible, which is pretty famously a book with a story about an angry deity who sent like whole plagues of frogs and blood and whatnot SPECIFICALLY TO FUCK UP THE SLAVEOWNERS. And that was back in the early chapters, before that Jesus guy showed up to specifically outlaw slavery! You know, the one they called the Christ and based a whole religion off of? The religion that people are now using to justify the enslavement of people WHO HAVE NOT EVEN BEEN CONVICTED OF A CRIME AND ARE THEREFORE NOT EVEN LEGALLY ALLOWED TO BE MADE SLAVES.

Yeah, this fuckery just keeps descending into madness. It doesn’t get better than this, nor more sensical. The initial article everyone’s reading now is full of quotes from people saying flat-out that this ain’t right, that it’s definitely not legal. But then there’s the quotes like this, which really make you wonder whether we shouldn’t just let North Korea nuke us anyway, because how you’re gonna be a court official and say this:

“The referral is to assist the participants in developing good job skills, life skills, work ethics and personal care skills,” said Vicki Cox, court administrator. “Participants are not sent to CAAIR for drug or alcohol treatment.”

PERSONAL. CARE. SKILLS.

I have just been talking to Jesus (I was from one of those sects that believed you could just mentally ring the guy up for a chat when you needed to) and he told me to tell you that he is Not. Happy. In fact, his direct quote was “if these motherfuckers don’t stop taking my name in vain I’m going to come down there and just wreck ALL OF YOU. Dad’s been trying to talk me into floods and fires for millennia now and I have to say I’m starting to see his point.”

In closing: Fuck chickens, and fuck processing chickens, and the only people who should ever be made to work in an abattoir are people who think that enslaving and brutalizing the poor will instill a “good work ethic.”

Because, according to Mrs. Wilkerson, that fine Christian woman, “money is an obstacle for so many of these men.”

Eat the rich and feed their bones to the chickens.

[Reveal]

Help Editrix keep actually paying her workers and give money here:

I've loved horror movies for as long as I can remember. But around the time I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in my late 20s, my relationship with them started to change. You might think being nervous all the time and running on adrenaline overload in my daily life would make me steer clear of anything that would deliberately jack up my already-hyperactive fear response—but the more anxious I am, the more I crave horror movies. It's more than just a desire to sprawl on the couch with the TV on and tune out the world: I deliberately seek out the most nightmare-inducing stuff I can find, and if I go too long without a good scare, I can feel my always-tenuous grasp on emotional stability getting shakier.

It's not counterintuitive when you realize that the standard horror movie plot is basically an anxiety sufferer's dream come true. In the beginning is the fear: The protagonist, usually a woman, often disempowered in some significant way, sees something scary. Or hears something scary. Or perhaps she just senses that something is wrong in a way that no one else can. Often she has some form of trauma in her past that makes her hypersensitive to red flags but, at the same time, allows those around her to dismiss her intuition as hysteria.

The details may vary, but in the first act of a horror movie (especially a supernatural one), a woman is afraid and no one believes her.

Not only is she not believed, she's often talked out of trusting herself. People half-convince her that she's overreacting. This is what it's like to live with anxiety: around every corner waits some sound or shadow that hints at a monster no one else can see. You are always glimpsing it out of the corner of your eyes, and you see just enough to know it's there, but not enough to prove it. Everyone keeps telling you it's not real, that you just need to relax, maybe do some yoga. And when you close your eyes at night, you hear it breathing.

In real life, there is no closure or catharsis. Sometimes the monster is farther away, sometimes it's closer. Sometimes you think you've outpaced it, but that motherfucker will be back again for the sequel. There are no great victories, just the long exhausting struggle against the fear that wears you down. No one understands why you're so tired because they can't see what you're running away from.

But for the horror movie protagonist, there's always a moment when the monster emerges from the shadows. Once it's standing before her, the question is no longer whether she's imagining things. It's how quickly she can reach for a weapon. The struggle is gory and usually people die, but at least both antagonists can acknowledge the life-or-death struggle in which they are participating. The fear is vindicated, the monster is real, and it can be fought.

And at the end—even now, 25 years after Carol Clover published Men, Women, and Chain Saws—almost always, the Final Girl emerges bloody and scarred and very much alive. We might not like to think of horror movies as wish-fulfillment fantasies, but for an anxiety haver, there's something irresistibly appealing about the idea that the thing you most fear could become solid: that it could have a body, a name, and best of all a weakness. That it could bleed.

Some small thing inside me heals when I watch a scary movie and see the protagonist achieve a triumph that will never be available to me. That's one part of the anxiety and horror movies equation: the diegetic catharsis. But there's another facet too, which I might describe as the equalization effect.

Part of the reason mental illness is so horribly isolating is that what's happening inside you doesn't line up with your external reality. You can be miserable without being able to point to one thing in your life that's wrong, or pulse-pounding terrified when you're safe in your own warm bed. It's hard and tiring and so, so lonely, knowing with your brain that what you feel in your body is wrong. But when you watch a scary movie, you're supposed to be scared. If I put something frightening on the television when I feel panicky, then the panic isn't an aberration anymore.

It's a relief to see a monster on the screen instead of feeling it in my chest. Watching a scary movie, fear isn't some faceless broken thing inside of me—it's Leatherface, it's Freddy, it's ghosts and demons and evil porcelain dolls.

Horror movies make our worst fears real, then show them defeated. It's satisfying on an emotional level that has nothing to do with how well-crafted the story is. I enjoy careful attention to craft in a horror movie, but I don't need them, because ultimately what I crave from horror isn't a surprising narrative or a deep exploration of a theme. It's a really fucking scary monster—or at least a monster that I can hitch my "really fucking scared" to.

I know it's not a replacement for treatment. I know I can't live in the world of "monsters are real, let's punch them" all the time. But it's an incredibly necessary form of escapism. Sometimes nightmares are the only thing that can help me get a good night's sleep.

Follow Lindsay King-Miller on Twitter.

In case you weren’t aware, the British Library has a fantastic Flickr account. Weirdly, though, all the images are of me.

Read more...

He's sneaky