Lbabwah

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jim benton

darkesthorizons:

neptuneisforlovers:

ITS NOT SEWING SUPPLIES!

My question is how does every single person identify with this, is it like a secret rule to use those for sewing supplies?

There's good reason to debate the girl-power cred of the mononymous chanteuse: these single-named chart-topping women have massive fanbases and worldwide recognition, and assigning any particular ideological label can have far-reaching trickle-down cultural effects. But I'm going to come out and say it:

Yes. Enya is feminist.

To wit:

1. Enya is a woman

2. Enya has sold 75 million records worldwide and is the best-selling Irish solo musician of ever

3. Having performed in 10 languages, Enya celebrates and respects women of many cultures, including cultures that are made-up and only exist in Middle Earth

4. Flouting the rules of conventional femininity, Enya has short hair

5. Flouting the rules of "not looking like you do all your clothes shopping in the Signals catalog," Enya looks great in capes

6. Enya has won four Grammys and been nominated for one Oscar, which she only didn't win because some sexist chuckleheads at the Academy fell prey to what I think is called "the old payola" and gave the prize to a song from MONSTERS, INC, a movie for children that scores an approximate F- on the Bechdel test

7. Enya has a song on Pure Moods, favorite CD compilation of feminists everywhere

8. Enya also has a song with the consent-respecting title "Only If You Want To"

9. Using money she earned entirely by herself, Enya outbid Michael "Lord of the Dance" Flatley and bought her own castle

10. And she named it "Manderly" 

11. And also she fortified the hell out of it against violent stalkers

12. If Boadicea, mythical warrior-queen of the British Iceni tribe, isn't a feminist subject for a song then I DEMAND to know what is

13. Enya classifies her music's genre as simply "Enya" because she has a strong sense of brand and refuses to submit to the conventional categories of society

14. The gender-bending implications of using Enya's "Only Time" as the only soundtrack badass enough to score Jean-Claude Van Damme doing splits between giant trucks could fill a dissertation and I really hope someone actually writes it

15. Finally, Enya has an asteroid named after her. If you need something to look up to, you can literally look up to Enya.

Previously: Further Ways In Which Beyoncé Is Problematic

beyoncebeytwice:

beyoncebeytwice:

i spent an hour planning this wedding and i actually shed a tear when it was over bc i remember raising both of them like they were literally just born yesterday and now they’re getting married and then my mom made me get off the game because she’s concerned for my well-being

THE GUY DIED OF OLD AGE TODAY I ACTUALLY CRIED AND MY MOM CONFISCATED THE GAME SO NO MORE SIMS FOR LIKE A WEEK

In news that is proving to be even more controversial than the Affleck-is-the-next-Batman cycle, somehow: Jason Segel will play the late David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour, a movie based on Jason Lipsky's book about his road trip with the author. I am good with this! He's got the hair, and he'll have the bandana. Anyone read the book? [The Wrap]

wiki commons

It had been a long campaign but finally the companions arrived back at the town of their birth, Sandpoint. The relief on the townspeople’s faces was overwhelming and the clear pride they felt was something beautiful to behold. Surely, these strapping men couldn’t be the same unsure boys that left the land of the birth a mere three months ago? Surely no transformation could be this fast or total.

“Guys, hold on a second, I have to do something real fast.”

That was me. I’d been playing D&D via Skype using Maptools for the last few months with a couple of childhood friends. We all live in different cities and this was the best way to get together and we did it every Sunday from 5 in the evening until roughly 11 at night. It was a great way to keep in touch and it was a great way to keep imaginative childhood habits alive. Every Sunday I was excited to “play.”

“Ok,” George said. “Let’s just take five then.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Behold! Two bottles of white wine donated from my neighbor who’s a liquor distributor. He’s liquor flush at all times. I am the grateful receiver of that overflow. I chose a bottle, Chardonnay maybe? I don’t recall. I open it. I pour a glass. The five minute break comes to an end and we reconvene. The adventure begins in earnest.

Two hours later, I’m having an amazing time. Everything is funny. The roleplaying banter is at an all time high. Characterization of my fighter is really coming along. We’ve built up some back story out of nowhere. Everyone is happy. I go to pour myself another glass of RPG fuel and lo the well is dry.

“Guys, hold on a second, I have to do something real fast.”

“Ok,” George says. “Let’s take another five minute break.”

I open the fridge and see that it’s going to be Reisling this time. Usually not good to end the night with a sweet wine because it gives me indigestion but what the hell, I’m a 10th level fighter and I just picked up the Great Cleave feat. I cannot be stopped.

About another hour into playing and I start to get tired and George and Brad start to notice my speech isn’t what it was just a few hours ago.

“Eric, are you drinking?” This is George asking me this. For some reason I lie even though he’s known me since I was 12 and will absolutely know that I’m lying.

“Nah dude. I’m just getting tired.”

It was after the second half of the second bottle that things started to get pretty choppy. I hadn’t really eaten much for dinner because I hadn’t been hungry before we started playing. I’d pretty much just been noshing on cheddar for the last few hours to fight the pangs. It was also at this point that the culmination of our entire evening occurred. Some background.

In this campaign we were fighting Frost Giants and in this particular campaign world (Pathfinder) these Frost Giants were the descendants of slaves who had been also been experimented on with cruel magics to both make them more maleable and more powerful. As a result, what had been a wise, gentle, and creative race only 1,000 years ago was now one of the more brutish and cruel races in the world. We’d been fighting them the last two playing sessions and I’d already killed probably 20 of them on my own but when a group of them approached the gates of our home town of Sandpoint and began attacking the main gate I just didn’t have the heart to really go out and fight them.

George was noticeably annoyed.

“It’s not their fault,” I insisted. “They’re not really like this. They’re just trying to do right by their people and we went and invaded their land and took some of their stuff and they want it back.”

Imagine that slurred horribly as the evening’s game time is coming to a close and George’s wife is expecting him to sign off and come to bed. George was patient though, he was.

“Well Eric, there’s nothing you can do about that right now. They’re at the gate and the magic used to change them 1,000 years ago is way more powerful than anything the group is capable of. You’re going to have to kill them or they’ll kill you.”

I insisted we try to speak with them, reason with them, remind them who they are in their core. In reply, I get a boulder thrown at me while I stand atop the town battlements.

“This is so unfair to them. It’s not right!”

George gets over his patience. He has them break the gate down. They kill two lesser town guards, 1 hit die peeps with no importance whatsoever.

“Well, now they’re killing your townspeople so what are you going to do.”

I just know he’s going to force the issue by bringing my fighter’s love interest onto the scene any minute or something equally implausible. She’s only third level. She’d be dead in seconds. I go down off the battlements. I tell the Frost Giants that I’m sorry. I kill one while Brad’s wizard kills the other two with a fireball. There they lay, two are burned to a crisp, the third is disemboweled.

George and Brad say good night and log off. I get up, realize how drunk I am and go throw up in the toilet. I have to call in the next day. George fills me in on what happened because I can’t remember a good chunk of it.

“You were really relating to those Frost Giants last night, man.” He laughs. “To tell you the truth though, I knew where you were coming from.”

“Yeah, I really felt like we should have freed them somehow.”

Two months on into the campaign we do free them, all of them. It’s glorious. Unfortunately we killed like 500 of them in order to free them. I didn’t drink anymore when we played. I just get too worked up.

Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said “Denver Lacrosse” on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty crazy,’ ” Steinberg says. Then he looked at the back of the shirt — and saw the number 5. His number. Steinberg tried to talk to the guy about the shirt, but he didn’t speak much English and they couldn’t really communicate.

Planet Money is done making their T-shirt (mine is in the mail somewhere!), and is continuing its reporting about the lifecycle of the clothes we wear, including what happens to them when they get donated. Charities like Goodwill receive a lot of clothes, and some of it gets sold and shipped off to used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the XL shirts are cutup and sewn into smaller items and then resold:

One recent day he bought an extra-large Motorhead shirt and, in a few minutes, turned it into a slim, custom shirt with a blue collar and canary-yellow sleeves. The Motorhead shirt was imported to Kenya for 15 cents. It was resold and sold again for 45 cents. Then someone got 12 cents to cut it up, 18 cents to tailor it and 14 cents to wash and iron the shirt. Then a vendor bought it for $1.20, with plans to sell it for $2 to $3.

Fascinating.

Also amazing: Planet Money saw this shirt with a specific Bat Mitzvah date on it in Africa and asked their readers to track down the former owner, which they were able to do!

Photo: youngthousands

Once—during one of those conversations in which you and a spouse/friend/coworker are formulating an alternate reality—my husband suggested that we move to Japan and become reality television stars. We're an interracial gay couple with the two cutest kids in the universe. In this country, we get occasional stares. In Japan, I'm confident we could be stars.

Gossip personality Perez Hilton is going to co-produce and star in a reality television show about gay dads, right here in America. It has a very descriptive name: "Gay Dads Of New York." We are not going to be on it. We weren't asked to be, nothing like that, and we're not the kind of people who would do well on reality television, anyway; neither of us has ever said "I'm not here to make friends." (We're not, though.)

It goes without saying that reality television has very little to do with reality. What such programming represents isn't a realistic depiction of a thing; it's the elevation of that thing to cultural prominence. It's the Tyler Perry conundrum. The popular culture will reckon with someone who is, on paper, representative of me. Does it have to be that guy? 

In 2010, at the ages of 63 and 48, Elton John and his partner David Furnish became fathers. They had a second son earlier this year. With respect to parenting, biological age is not for men the concern it is for women. I do not know Sir Elton, and would not guess at his motives for fathering a child, and I'd hasten to point out that I don’t think anyone's motives for bringing a child into this world are unimpeachable. Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men. When I became a father for the first time, someone I don't know very well made a joke about a Gucci diaper bag, as though fatherhood were merely an excuse to accessorize. By extension, I guess, the baby would be the ultimate accessory. You could say that Elton John had his fill of Alain Mikli, and wanted something more special—just as you could say that Madonna, in choosing to adopt a child at the age of forty-eight, was simply parroting Angelina Jolie, who adopted three of her six children, but if you're saying that, you're arguing that children are simply objects to be collected. Stars are just like us, remember? They're celebrities, not sociopaths. I have to believe they love their children.

The only people I know with a Gucci diaper bag are a straight couple.

I don't want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions. Reality television, despite its fakery, traffics in the opposite of stardom, even as it elevates its participants towards fame. For god's sake, there are about a hundred reality shows about cake.

Bunim/Murray and Perez Hilton are poised to influence the popular perception of gay male parenthood, a perception heretofore largely shaped by the sitcom "Modern Family," a show I have not ever seen but which approximately ten thousand strangers have mentioned to me upon learning that I am a gay father.

Unfortunately, I assume that, in the service of making a compelling program, not documentary television, Bunim/Murray will build the action of their show around couples bickering, montages of shopping and brunching, telephone calls conducted via speakerphone—all decorated with the occasional camera pan to baby's beautiful face. Babies just drool and poop and cry, hardly the stuff of great television. And older children… well, my elder son is a capable conversationalist, but most of our chats revolve around types of trucks. It's boring even to me.

But that boringness could be quite compelling in a reality show, as it would inevitably remind viewers of the parenting they practice, or the parenting they received. Our common humanity, and all that jazz. But reality television isn't in the business of celebrating our common humanity, unfortunately.

Most of us, myself included, have heterosexual parents. Being curious about parents who are not doesn't seem especially malicious to me. I'm aware that gay men and women have been raising families for years before my own family came along, but so too am I aware that my kids and their contemporaries will be a generation for whom having gay parents is a kind of normal. We have, to some degree, television to thank for this.

I'm sure there are teen moms who rage at "Teen Mom"; I'm sure some people who bake cakes watch one of those shows about cake and shake their heads and cry. I know the purpose of reality television is not to represent reality, but selfishly, if the class of which I find myself a part is to be represented on television, I want it to be well-represented. I realize it probably won't be.

My husband and I often say that we're the most traditional family we know. We were introduced by a mutual friend, we dated, we got married, a year later we had a baby, a couple years later, we had another. I cook dinner, he washes dishes; we both change diapers, wipe tears, give baths, build elaborate highway scenarios on the floor of the dining room, read the same books over and over again, then when everyone's asleep, we eat dinner in front of the television, and are in bed by nine-thirty. Gay parenthood is just like regular old straight parenthood; tedium leavened, on occasion, by magic. Like when I said goodbye to my 15-month-old son last Wednesday and he said, clear as day, "I love you," and rested his cheek against my lapel, drool trickling onto my blazer.

We live in New York City, where the bar for freakdom is extraordinarily high. We get stares, but they're often sort of… kind-hearted. I've seen frowning women soften as they realize what's going on, or people taking in me, our boys, my husband, and trying to do some complicated math. I've had people tell me, apropos of nothing, just how much both of my sons look like me. I'm not sure why they do it—it's like they want me to know they're trying to figure us out, and anyway, it's patently untrue. As my sons are both gorgeous, I take it as a very high compliment.

I'm sure there have been "faggots" muttered under breath, I'm sure there have been people who want to pray for us, or feel sorry for my kids, or judgmental about the people who entrusted us with the privilege of being parents. But for the most part, when people stare, I think it's with no particular ill intention. When my older son was an infant, a woman on the subway asked us if he was ours. I anticipated a fight, a public prayer, some kind of horrible set-to. My husband offered a defensive "Yes," and she laughed. "Get ready!" she said, before telling us how she'd raised six daughters, an undertaking that left her completely bald. She removed her hat to show us. She asked God to bless us.

Rumaan Alam lives in New York and for now can be found here: @Rumaan.

Here’s a dish that’s cheap, easy and tastes like restaurant food, which is the one thing that I miss when I’m cooking at home a lot. This recipe makes enough for one person for an entire week’s worth of meals, or one person + anyone you live with that might drunk-eat your food while you’re asleep. It keeps well, tastes even better the next day, and is a welcome addition to dinner parties, buffets, and any other occasion you might have that requires food for an army on the cheap.

Saag paneer is a delicious Indian dish that is basically creamed spinach in a curry sauce with delicious bits of fried cheese. If you’re not wild about the idea of consuming giant quantities of dairy in one sitting, sub out the cheese for cubed extra-firm tofu. I relish the joy and occasional discomfort that comes with all the dairy, so I keep the cheese in, but have made this dish with tofu, and it’s just as good.

Here’s what you’ll need. The prices are what I paid at my local, non-fancy Foodtown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

To Buy
• 1 large onion, $1.79
one 2-to-3 inch knob of ginger, $1.47
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, $1.56/head of garlic
• 2 packages of chopped or whole leaf frozen spinach(I used whole leaf, but either works just fine), $2.98
• 1 pint of heavy cream, $2.79
• 1 block of a white, firm, mild cheese that can be briefly fried. A note on the cheese: paneer is awesome if you can actually find it. I did once at a fancier grocery store and it was great, but it was also expensive. I usually make this with queso blanco, which is readily available at my grocery store, $5.49

On Hand
• Rice or some sort of grain to go under this delicious meal.
• Curry powder, salt, pepper.

The prep is a little intensive, but once you have everything chopped and good to go, all you’re really doing is throwing things in a pot, pushing them around with a wooden spoon, and watching an episode of a half-hour long television show of your choice. I recommend Netflix’ed episodes of Say Yes To the Dress: Atlanta or Jeopardy, but you choose your own adventure.

Put on some tunes, so you feel less like a harried MasterChef Junior contestant and more like a mature, responsible adult cooking dinner. Also, have a beer, or a glass of wine. Cooking’s more fun with a drink in hand. Let’s get started.

First, tend to the two things that will take the longest: the rice, and the spinach. If you were smart and set the spinach out on the counter to defrost in the otherworldly heat of your apartment in winter overnight, you get a cookie. If you didn’t, just put the spinach in a bowl full of hot water and let them hang out for a while, until they feel less frozen and a little squishy.

For the rice: If you have a rice cooker, fantastic. They make everything easier. If you don’t have a rice cooker, follow these instructions at the kitchn, because I am utterly hopeless at making rice on the stove. I was taught to measure rice and water by my Asian mother who refuses all conventional measuring techniques as a matter of course. She recommends measuring the water level in your rice cooker using your finger as a guide—if the water comes up to the second knuckle on your index finger, you’re good to go. If you enjoy measurements, the ratio is generally 1:2—one cup of rice to 2 cps of water. Prep the rice using your preferred method, then set it and forget it.

For your aromatics: Chop the ginger, garlic and onion into a fine, uniform dice. This will take some time, but you’re aiming for pieces that are all the same size, so they cook at the same pace. Ginger is a pain in the ass to break down, but it’s worth it. Peel it with a vegetable peeler, then slice into matchsticks and dice.

Cooking time: Coat the bottom of a large, wide skillet in oil—vegetable, olive, or whatever you have—and get it shimmery, over a medium heat. Throw in the aromatics with a bunch of curry powder, maybe a tablespoon to start, plus salt and pepper to taste. Push everything around a bit with your wooden spoon to make sure all is coated evenly.

Cheese time! Dice the cheese into uniform chunks of heaven. In a smaller skillet, get some oil nice and hot, throw the cheese in that pan and sauté for a bit until it gets a little squishy, with a nice, golden outside. Take it off the heat, and set aside.

Do things smell delicious yet? Has your roommate come home and told you that it smells like the best kind of restaurant in the hallway? Good. That means 10-15 minutes have elapsed, and you’re ready for the spinach. If it hasn’t thawed yet, take it out of the package and throw it in the microwave until it doesn’t feel frozen anymore, for about a minute. Expel most of the water out of the spinach by plopping it in a colander lined with a paper towel and pressing down with your hands, until things feel markedly less soggy.

Throw the spinach in the pan with the aromatics and stir to incorporate. Add more curry powder, salt and pepper if necessary. Once everything is well-coated, pour about half the container of heavy cream into the pan and stir. The spinach will start to soak up the cream, and things should be turning a lovely golden yellow, but if it looks less soupy than you like, pour the rest of the cream in as you see fit. Let that cook down for about 5 minutes, then add the cheese cubes, stirring heartily to get everything nicely situated. Adjust spices and cream to taste.

Turn the heat to low, finish your drink. Take to the sofa, where you will watch your 30 minute television program of choice, checking on things halfway through. At the end of the show, the food should be done. Serve over your fluffily cooked rice, and enjoy!

Megan Reynolds lives in New York. Photo: Rebecca Siegel

onlylolgifs:

Baby LED light suit halloween costume preview

earrie:

Sure Lock Homes would be a great name for a home security company

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity set a box office record ($55.6 million) this weekend. Did you see it? Has your nervous system recovered? At any point during the heart-stopping visuals of our planet as seen from cold black space, did you consider what it would be like to be right next to George Clooney all day, but with your bodies confined to the prison of an astronaut suit rather than naked in each other's arms as God intended? Did you hate the music at the end or were you into it? Maybe, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're not buying the hype? Talk to me; all I care about today is space. I, like Buzz Aldrin, loved the movie, although Buzz found certain things unrealistic:

We were probably not as lighthearted as Clooney and Sandra Bullock. We didn't tell too many jokes when people were in some position of jeopardy outside the spacecraft.

If you're interested in the making of the movie, this NYMag piece is a must. Cuarón and his team have been trying to execute this movie for years, and they eventually had to invent much of their own technology:

Webber and his team had designed what would become “Sandy’s Box”—a nine-foot cube in which Bullock would spend the majority of the shoot, on a soundstage in London, strapped to a rig. On its inside walls were 1.8 million individually controllable LED bulbs that essentially formed Jumbotron screens. Getting her in and out of the rig proved so time-consuming that Bullock chose to remain attached, alone, sometimes in full astronaut suit, between takes, where she listened to atmospheric, atonal music Cuarón had selected for her. She has referred to the experience as “lonely” and “isolating.”

Also, there is an animated version of Gravity floating around somewhere, and I would really like to see it:

From the storyboards they created a digitally animated version of the film, complete with digital versions of the characters. “It looks like a crude Pixar film,” Lubezki says, “and it was so beautiful that when I showed it to my daughter probably after a year of work, she thought that was the movie."

Lastly, Mother Jones talked to Catherine Coleman, the astronaut who advised Sandra Bullock for her role in the movie and is the only person to have ever brought a flute to space:

The dread and intensity of Gravity are (as you could guess) about the furthest thing from Coleman's experience. "I loved it up there," she says. "If it weren't for my family, I wouldn't have wanted to come home…There's so much to do, so much research to do."