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Well, order has been restored to the universe. Schenectady High School senior Draven Rodriguez, who started a petition to get his unusual photo featured in the yearbook as his senior portrait, has his cake and is now eating it too. Recently, the school’s principal posed for a photo with Rodriquez in the ultimate display of solidarity. Perhaps our education system is in better shape than we thought.

Well, order has been restored to the universe. Schenectady High School senior Draven Rodriguez, who started a petition to get his unusual photo featured in the yearbook as his senior portrait, has his cake and is now eating it too. Recently, the school’s principal posed for a photo with Rodriquez in the ultimate display of solidarity. Perhaps our education system is in better shape than we thought.

You guys, we’re all for experimentation and boundary-pushing by stars on the red carpet. We applaud such efforts, even if the results are usually questionable in some way. But this is so freaking odd that we don’t think we can bring ourselves to clap this time. This is so clearly wrong that we’re struggling to …

credit: Kristin

Hark! We have heard tales sung of the great storm,
And the raindrops that fell like cold, wet spears,
how they smothered the unshining sun!

There was Sally, sitter of stools,
Batter of baseballs, brave in the outfield.
The Warrior of Little League had fallen far!
Slumped stool-sitter, and hater of sitting in stools,
Wisher at the window, watching the whale-road deepen with water.

A boy-child and her brother, I had before been bird-chaser,
Bare-footed grass-galloper, gazer at clouds,
Celebrant of summer sunshine and silver dusk:
That was good weather!

Now I was mourner of mud, of mirth-turned sorrow:
Sorrow of sogginess, of sun-starved boredom.
There was nothing to do!

Bump!

Read more The Cat in the Hwæt: An Old English Seuss Translation at The Toast.

Mallory Ortberg IRL:

When you’re writing for the Toast, do you picture an ideal reader?

A librarian. Like, a fun librarian.

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Carrie "The Best Editor Nicole Has Ever Worked With" Frye has written the most incredibly brilliant thing for the Gawker Review of Books about Rebecca and Daphne du Maurier, and you are to sit down right away and bask in it, please and thank you:

Daphne had a few romantic relationships with women as well, although she rejected the term "lesbian." "… by God and by Christ if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with "L", I'd tear their guts out," she warned in one stormy love letter, whose recipient, being a woman, might have felt she had a right to call the love exactly that. This avoidance gets complicated, and her biographer Margaret Forster writes perceptively about it.

Part of it was surely internalized homophobia, a reluctance to acknowledge herself as that way; something, too, to do with her time period's narrow conventions of what being a lesbian meant. But also mixed up in there is du Maurier's recognition of herself as a boy—an identification she only allowed herself to make in her 40s—and a boy isn't a lesbian. This boy was who Daphne had been as a child; she'd put him away as a teenager ("locked him in a box," she described it), but he emerged in her writing, she felt, giving it its vim and daring. The male narrator of My Cousin Rachel, for example, was a psychological self-portrait of Daphne in love (and behaving badly). He's there in The Scapegoat, too, a great novel about a man and his more freewheeling, rakish double. (It's the other of her books I wish Hitchcock had made a movie of.)

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Read more Link Roundup! at The Toast.

Whisper "I am a leaf on the wind; watch how I soar" to them.

Pretend not to understand any of their Spaced references.

Tell someone who likes to think of himself as a Moss from the IT Crowd that he in fact reminds you of "that one guy from The Big Bang Theory."

"I think John Hurt was the best Doctor, personally."

"Oh, I'm sorry -- I figured you knew when I asked you to come over to watch Death At A Funeral that you knew I meant the American remake."

Compare Batman: The Animated Series negatively to the comics.

Read more How To Emotionally Devastate A Very Specific Type Of Person at The Toast.

“Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Course List for Rupert Giles, Master of Library Sciences Candidate, Michaelmas Term 1982

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: How to Preserve And Handle Books Bound in Human Skin

Taking Your Glasses Off And Slowly Rubbing Your Temples: An Introduction

Guarding A Vampire Slaying-Teen: Is It For You? Non-Traditional Employment In A Saturated Library Sciences Market

Beginning Wizard’s Latin

How To Recognize Drawings of Demons

Data Analytics and Amateur Gravedigging

Cursed Metadata In Theory and In Practice

Late Fees And Love Spells: Intro to Communications Systems

Mystical Convergences And The Lunar Cycle: What Every Curator Should Know

Survey and Analysis of Current Literature for Children Grade 5-8

Making The Most Of Your Resources: How To Acquire Medieval Assault Weapons And Strange Tinctures On A Limited Library Budget

Filling Out Timesheets

Maintaining An Appropriate Student-Teacher Relationship

Digital Curation

Witch Mentorship Work-Study Program

Distinguishing Between Third-Degree Burns And Spontaneous Combustion

Integrated Library Systems And Standard Runes

Supernatural Harassment In The Workplace: What Every Librarian Should Know

Archiving Despite Demonic Interference

There’s An Ancient Prophecy For That: Matching Your Present-Day Disturbances With Twelfth-Century Romanian Curses

Remember, You Are Not A Hero: Doing What Needs To Be Done (What Your Slayer Doesn’t Need To Know)

Basic Self-Defense and Smothering

Comparative Cosmologies and World Religions: Angelology to Zoroastrianism

Read more Rupert Giles, MLS at The Toast.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

by Dish Staff

Jesse Bering reviews research suggesting that not only can people accurately match dogs’ faces to their owners, but also that “our faces also bear an uncanny resemblance to the frontend views of our automobiles.” Participants in a study were given a picture of a car and asked to rank its possible owners on a scale of 1 to 6:

[T]he authors suspected that the judges in their study would be able to match cars with their correct owners above chance levels. And that’s what they found. “The real owner was in fact assigned rank 1 most frequently,” they write, “and rank 6 least frequently.” This proved true regardless of the subjects’ sex and age. There were an equal number of male and female judges, and they ranged widely in age—from 16 to 78 years. In case the sheer bizarreness of these data hasn’t quite registered, let me put it to you more bluntly: The average person can detect a physical similarity in the “faces” of cars and their owners. …

Implied in these results is the startling fact that most car owners are unwittingly purchasing cars that look like them. If that’s the case, figured [researchers Stefan] Stiegar and [Martin] Voracek, then is it possible that judges can even take it one step further, matching dogs to their masters’ cars? After all, we know now that it’s not a myth: dogs really do look like their owners. And since we choose both cars and dogs that physically resemble us, shouldn’t our dogs and our cars look alike too? Here, frankly, the data just get weird. Nevertheless, they’re genuine. In their third and final study, the authors added 36 portraits of dogs into the mix. Half of these were of purebreds, and the others were mutts. In a twist to the previous studies, a new group of judges saw an image of a car (again, either the front, side, or rear view) and beneath that, six individual dogs. Subjects ranked each dog on the likelihood of its master being the owner of the car shown. Amazingly, the participants were able to pull this feat off as well.

Meanwhile, Laura Bliss considers the oddly human attachments people form to their vehicles:

To many of us, [cars] are beloved, person-like companions. More than 70 percent of respondents to a recent AutoTrader survey were at least “somewhat” if not “very attached” to their cars, with 36 percent describing their vehicle as “an old friend.” In another study, nearly half of all drivers assigned a gender to their cars, and about one-third actually name them.

For many car-owners, emotional attachment can also come hand-in-hand with socio-economic mobility. For example, there’s research that suggests for certain low-income families, owning a car is linked to the ability to live in neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and lower health risks, as well as higher neighborhood satisfaction and stronger chances of employment.

Car-owners often assign human-like attributes to our cars, too. A 2006 study found significant differences between how participants understood their own personality and how they described their cars’. And in that same AutoTrader report, more than a quarter said they felt “sad” when they thought about parting ways with their internally combusting pal.

This is the one where Troi gets pregnant. How? Well, when a tiny beam of sperm-shaped light and a woman love each other very, very much:

"Dat ass" - this lightsperm

…the lightsperm travels into any nearby spaceship and impregnates a half-human, half-Betazoid woman…somehow. It’s never made THAT clear how this works. And you know why?

"Special" my ass

Because this is the new ship’s doctor!!! Uggggghhhhh.

I’m Feather Mullet and I’m here to say / I’m super stupid in a stupid way

I just love Bev so much that I cannot abide any interloper, ESPECIALLY one who looks like AC Slater is in disguise as my Aunt Mary.

Anyway, there’s not a whole lot going on fashion-wise here, so thank goodness for Guinan.

Thank Goodness for Guinan, Mondays at 9/8c, this fall on ABC

Without that platter hat and this electric purple drapery, we wouldn’t have anything. Thank you, Guinan. Thuinan.

Troi is like “I feel weird” and Pulaski is like “uhhhhh, you’re pregs??”

"I need to see the fetus as LARGE AS POSSIBLE"

If I was planning to have children, this is how I would announce their birth on Facebook, except with my own face Photoshopped over Pulaski’s.

Deanna reacts as any woman would - with this “WHAAAAAA” face and with a LOT of blush:

Captain, I can’t add any more blush. I CAN’T.

Her makeup is too 80s for the 80s. She’s ringing in the 90s with a BOLD lip and a STRONG brow.

Her pregnancy progresses HELLA quickly, so we get to see her on the bridge in this kicky maternity outfit:

A pea in the pod on the bridge

Deanna’s beloved Bold Box color palette is in full effect here, with a dusty teal that fell straight out of County Seat and into our hearts:

You can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can’t take the girl out of jersey (knit fabrics)

My main question is: why isn’t Deanna wearing this ALWAYS? THIS SHIT LOOKS SO COMFY. You know I love a jumpsuit but if I had to choose, it would be this bathrobe and gown combo every day.

Data, get the FUCK away from me

However, it appears that she’s wearing a top made of one of those blankets they hang up in rehearsal studios to prevent the sound from leaking out. SHOUT OUT TO PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND THAT REFERENCE.

Okay, so now it’s time for the baby to be born. It gets graphic, y’all.

#BABBYBUTTS

This baby looks really clean. Also, wise:

The secrets of the universe are contained within my fontanelle

We go VERY quickly from that baby up there to this little scamp down here:

That’s a wig

Good to know that on the Enterprise, young men are started down the ugly sweater path early and often. 

Ian (Troi named the boy after her pops) goes to Enterprise School, which appears to consist of:

PUPPPPPIIIIIIEEEEEEESSSSSS

I have a lot of questions about these puppies.

1. Were they born on the Enterprise?

2. Does that mean there is a mama dog on the Enterprise?

3. If they were NOT born on the Enterprise, where did they come from?

4. Did they come from the replicator?

5. CAN I HAVE A PUPPY REPLICATOR?

6. Are there ethical considerations about a puppy replicator?

7. Fuck ethics, I want a puppy replicator.

In conclusion,

WAS I REPLICATED??? TELL ME, SARAH MCLACHLAN

Ian, who is now several years older than the last time we saw him, is wearing a beige nightmare.

I literally had a nightmare about that garment

Everyone is like “wow so weird that he’s growing so fast” but no one is THAT concerned except Worf, but of course everyone dismisses his VERY REAL SECURITY CONCERNS in favor of Troi’s cute kid.

Also, what is this kid learning/wearing:

Geometry lessons get WAY better when you’re on acid

I can’t see the print on his arms that well, but I feel confident in saying that I like it.

His pained expression is due to his beige catastrophe

BTW, this whole time, a PLAGUE specimen has been traveling on the ship as well. These are the safety precautions taken to protect the crew from the plague:

It’s called a Ziploc hat and it’s VERY in right now

You know that guy from a Wes Anderson movie. Look, here he is again:

MY MUSTACHE SENSES TROUBLE

I am seriously digging his California Casual hair.

Meanwhile, in Ten Forward, this person is wearing the letter Y:

As in, Y would U wear that

I do like that green.

Wesley is consulting with Guinan about his future while she wears a relatively subdued look:

Guinan, space nun

You know it’s serious because she has two collars.

So the end of this is that little Ian gets sick and DIES except not REALLY because he was never really the half human/half Betazoid creature we thought he was, he was just an alien who wanted to LEARN in disguise. It’s still pretty sad but also kind of funny:

I don’t feel well

I think I have disco fever

Please don’t go, my lightbaby

Bless you, lightsperm. Blightsperm.

In conclusion,

PUPPY REPLICATORS FOR EVERYONE.

Previously in this series: A day in the life of Seth MacFarlane, normal human male.

He bent down with a match crooked in his right hand. She pulled back, waving him off.

“It’s an electronic cigarette,” she said by way of explanation. “It stays lit all day.”

“Just like me,” he said, downing a gin.

She smiled, but she didn’t laugh. It wasn’t the sort of joke you laughed at, exactly. Funny, but a little too on-the-nose.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Just have to powder my little girl’s room while I freshen up.”

“Sure thing, baby.” He took his hat off.

“Incidentally,” she purred, sticking her head back around the corner, “what’s the wi-fi password here, darling? I need to check something.”

Cats purred. Cats scratched, too.

“That network is locked,” he said.

“That’s not the only thing that’s locked around here,” she said, and disappeared.

The doorbell rang. Christ. Had she been sleeping?

“Who is it?” she said in her regular voice, then cursed herself inwardly. “Who’s there?” she called out in her softest, most dangerous voice, the one that mixed poison and honey in her throat.

“It’s me, baby. Open up.”

“Just a minute,” she said. Had she shaved her legs? You couldn’t ask a man to commit a murder for you with stubble on your legs. Men only killed for smooth women; they’d drilled that into her on Day One at Dame Academy. One thing was for sure: this wasn’t going to be repeat of Shanghai, when that quick-talking gunsel had slipped through her fingers just because no one had been willing to tell her she had lipstick on her teeth when she tried to flash a heavy-lidded, catlike smile at the mark.

Dame Academy hadn’t even wanted to take her at first. “Her legs are too short,” the Headmistress had said dismissively, before lighting a series of cigarettes with the heel of her shoe and tossing her Veronica Lake curls into a silver basin. “Try the secretarial pool.”

“But they go all the way to the top,” she’d said, crossing her legs so her hemline slid just above the knee, revealing four flasks, a pearl-handled revolver, and a couple of knives with different names carved into the handle.

Headmistress had smiled at that. “So, there’s some cat underneath that mouse after all.”

“Come in,” she said. “I’m very helpless.” She crossed her legs. Fuck. She still hadn’t shaved. Headmistress would have pulled off her manicure if she could see her now. Sleep with your makeup on, girls. You never know who’ll come breaking and entering. She dove out the window. Nothing to do for it but leave town and start a new life, with new legs, somewhere else.

“I follow my own code,” he said.

She sipped her drink. “I follow a lot of things.”

He looked puzzled. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. That sounded more suggestive in my head. I just…we’ve been bantering for hours. I’m sorry. I’m so tired. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

He still looked puzzled.

“I’m trying to suggest that I’m sexually available,” she said. “But in a vague, plausibly deniable sort of way.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

She put down her drink. Enough was enough. She’d just murder her sister herself.

Read more A Day In The Life Of A Femme Fatale at The Toast.

I can’t believe they missed Chicogo…

Photo courtesy of Cathy.
Found on an exchange student in the U.S. from Taiwan.  

G-G the book - G-G on Facebook - G-G on Twitter

First of all, no one gets the personal space they deserve on a plane. Accept that right off the bat; do not sink into pity for your seatmate if he is 6’7 and convince yourself that he merits the armrest between the two of you. You are on a plane; you are bound now only by Skylaw. The rules of God and man no longer apply. Wring mercy clean from your heart. I promise that he has none in his heart for you.

Do not hope that he will notice your uncomfortable position and cede you your fair share of the armrest. In the history of time, no man has ever silently anticipated the needs of a woman. (BROAD GENERALIZATION) As surely as your father will never notice of his own volition if the dishwasher is full and start unloading the clean silverware without prompting, no male flier will ever say, “Oh, were you using that?” and gently withdraw his meaty pincer. You are your own champion today, sister. It is a feminist victory whenever a woman makes it through a flight without losing the majority of the shared armrest to the man sitting next to her.

It is possible, perhaps, that once or twice in human history two women who are strangers to one another are seated together. Stranger things have happened. But in all my life, whenever I have traveled solo, I have always been seated next to a man, each one dudelier and more prone to sprawling than the last. I offer my poor wisdom that I might save you from the pain I have endured.

Men are forbidden from using this knowledge. Please do not read the following. I will hold you to an honor system.

1. Make up your mind as soon as you board the aircraft that you will not give up. None of this effort will be worth it if you cede an inch. He will claim immediate victory and you will have uncomfortably rubbed triceps with a man whose name you do not know for a quarter of an hour, and for nothing. This is as much a mental contest as it is physical.

2. Board the plane before him. Do not wait idly by as the rest of seating group 2 clusters around the pre-boarding area. Get in there. Jostle some motherfuckers.

3. Fly clean. One bag that fits in the overhead compartment without having to force it in, and one handbag. No long straps, no smaller plastic bags full of purchases and tchotchkes stuffed illegally within. Travel light; you will require swiftness.

4. You must be seated, with both arms prominently and dominantly splayed across the armrests, when your traveling companion stops in front of you and says “Oh, I think I’m in __D.”

5. The next step is crucial: do not get up to let him in. Tilt your knees to the side and hug them to your chest. Make no apologies for this clear flouting of the social contract. If your size or his will not permit such a maneuver, exit your row as quickly as possible and re-seat yourself while he is still getting situated, then re-claim the armrest.

6. Mark the territory with your menstrual blood.

7. At this point, unless your forearm is large enough to cover the entire armrest, he will attempt to place his own arm against yours. You may choose to allow this, but make sure your elbow is always further back than his, in the dominant position.

8. Cede nothing. Reach for your bag with your outside arm. Move your armrest hand at your own peril. If he shifts, shift with him. If he reclines his seat back, slide your elbow further into the crevice between your seats. To abandon your position for even an instant would mean instant loss of hard-fought territory. Play the long game, and play to win. I promise you that he will not let the social discomfort of touching a stranger’s bare arm keep him from trying to wrestle the armrest from you. Abandon your sense of personal space.

9. If you are in an aisle seat, intercept his meal as the flight attendant hands it to you. Eat it in front of him, screaming continuously.

10. Remember the lessons of the Somme: Grind them down wherever you can, sisters. On planes and on subways and wherever humans jostle with one another for territory. That small metal platform is your birthright. Treat it like the Weimar Republic treated Alsace-Lorraine.

Read more How To Maintain Control Of The Shared Armrest: A Guide For Women Flying Alone at The Toast.

And on the fourth attempt at fitting “camembert” on the tiny chalkboard, Gary calmly set down the board and chalk, threw the easel across the room, and went for a long drive.

Maisie Williams attends Entertainment Weekly’s 2014 Comic-Con Celebration in San Diego, California wearing Ryan Jude Novelline “ZAM!” dress made entirely out of recycled graphic novels.           Photo Credit: INFphoto.com, Getty Images

Go ahead. Get married, suckers.

(submitted by Lynsay)

Go ahead. Get married, suckers.

(submitted by Lynsay)

by Jia Tolentino

Via Modern Farmer, please meet Frosty: a perfect little creature who was born with a condition that filled his back legs with terrible baby goat poison ("pus and toxins," according to the video), immobilizing him until the good hearts at Edgar's Mission equipped him with the most ballin' tiny wheelchair in the world. From the Australian animal sanctuary's about page:

Edgar’s Mission was founded by Pam Ahern and named after her first rescued pig, Edgar. Edgar Alan Pig, aka “the pig who started it all” sadly passed away shortly after his 7th birthday party in April 2010.

EDGAR ALAN PIG. They've got pictures and biographies for many of their rescued animals, including another wheelchair boss, a piglet named Leon Trotsky. And on a related note, Aeon's got a piece up right now about why we like looking at animals so much.

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We recently had the pleasure of photographing Samantha and Andrew’s beautiful wedding at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club (Sunset Ballroom).  Everything about their wedding day screamed elegance and every detail made their day perfectly amazing and memorable.  You really got a sense of how special the relationship that they shared is.  Sam and Andrew,  thank you so much for allowing me to capture your big day!

Our first wedding at Chesapeake Bay Beach Club and we are so impressed by this beautiful venue.  The Sunset Ballroom is a spacious venue on the water with private beach and features all the charm and elegance of a classic New England style ballroom.  The westward facing wall of windows captures bay scenery, dramatic sunsets and an abundance of natural light.   It also features a stunning Garden Room with a large canopied Rooftop Deck, which is perfect for wedding ceremony.  The staff are so friendly and professional (special thanks to Erin).  Sam and Andrew’s choice of Chesapeake Bay Beach Club has really made their wedding so memorable.

“She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.”
—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd