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Hi, Everybody!

A great man once said, “What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back here anyway.” If you, like me, subscribe to the newsletter of Homer Jay Simpson then I have excellent news. That insurmountable collection (read: stack) of Simpsons season-by-season DVDs that you occasionally pick through (sans a few missing seasons due to forgetful friends and ex-roommates) is about to become a little more obsolete. Don’t worry, the Rastafarian Bort Simpsen t-shirt you bought on Spring Break will always be cool.

In the wake of FXX’s insanely successful Simpsons marathon, the company has wisely decided to give the people what they want. More Simpsons (still waiting on the dogs with bees in their mouths that when they bark, they shoot bees at you). The delivery method? The new “Simpsons World” that debuts on the FXNOW app tomorrow.

Named after (and heavily influenced by) Matt Groening’s 20th Anniversary book, “Simpson’s World,” FXX has been working very closely with Gracie Films and The Simpsons producers to create an app that truly embraces the source. So without further ado, here are 5 things you should know about “Simpsons World,” presented in handy-dandy list form:

1. Yes. It has every episode.

This is what we all really care about, right? Every episode, available anytime, at the push of a button. All 530 Episodes, spanning 25 seasons, with new episodes from the upcoming 26th season being added next day. Having gotten to play with a sneak preview of “Simpsons World,” I can confirm that the layout is easy to navigate and simple enough to find episodes. Whether it’s tracking down that exact episode in your favorite season, browsing seasons by popularity, or rolling the dice and watching episodes at random. For the truly ADD super fans out there you can even browse episodes without even leaving the episode you are currently watching.

2. Playlists

This one seems like a no-brainer, but it is commendably well executed in “Simpsons World.” There are several playlists already present (e.g. every full Sideshow Bob episode, or clips of Ralph Wiggum’s greatest lines), plus the feature will be constantly evolving the more users build their own playlists and share via Twitter, Facebook, etc. So, if you built a playlist of, say, your favorite Homer moments involving bacon, shared that online and if a bunch of people watch and like your bacon playlist, it could get featured amongst FXNOW’s featured playlists for any bacon-loving stranger to watch. Then you’d be popular, and being popular is the most important thing in the whole world.

3. Searchability

In its current iteration, the search function is a little ruff (that is to say it tastes like “bark” and the functionality is very “grrrr”). You can put in character names, episode titles, guest star names, and basic stuff like that. The next version (rolling out in January 2015) will have every line of dialogue from every single episode integrated into the metadata and promises to be expansive and amazing. What that means for the metadata laymen is this: in the current “Version 1.0” if you know Johnny Cash plays Homer’s Spirit Guide you can search “Johnny Cash” and quickly find “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer” (S08E09). But in the upcoming “Version 2.0” one can easily enter “space coyote” or “pope of chili town” or “I hope I didn’t brain my damage” to find that very same episode.

4. Sorry cord cutters…

And here’s the rub… FXNOW — much like HBOGO was — is only available through your cable provider. So if you don’t pay for cable and you want to add FXNOW to your mobile device or Apple TV, it’s time to call your big sister and get that passcode! Or just continue using your DVDs and the YouTubes. Oh, unless that paid subscription is through DIRECTV, Dish, or Verizon. Those three aren’t playing along with the FXNOW app (Ha ha!). But FX is hopeful that they’ll be able to add those providers soon through the power of negotiation. That being said…

5. Yes. It’s on EVERYTHING.

iPhone, iPad, Android, that non-Apple tablet thingy, Xbox, Apple TV. The layout and functionality are all pretty similar across platforms, except for Apple TV’s which has no search function and the layout is similar to most other Apple TV apps. But, honestly, we shouldn’t blame FXNOW for that… using Apple TV’s search function is worse than a ski trip with stupid, sexy Flanders.

So there you go. Starting RIGHT NOW version 1.0 of “Simpsons World” is available through your FXNOW app, and watching any and every episode of The Simpsons will be easier than finding the “any” key. Here’s a glimpse in case you’re not already downloading…

cedricdigory:

Taylor Swift, another victim of TFIOS (x) (cc. taylorswift fishingboatproceeds)

After years of turning a deaf ear to your prayers like a cruel and vengeful God, HBO and Time Warner have finally decided to answer them: A standalone version of HBO Go is on the way. Soon.

That’s right. At some as-yet-undetermined point next year, for some as-yet-undetermined price, you will be able to legally access all of HBO’s programming without paying for a cable subscription. This is kind of a big deal for everyone involved, including Netflix, who has a new big fancy Emmy-hoarding competitor in the streaming content business. Sayeth the suit:

“It is time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO,” [HBO head Richard Plepler] said, “so, in 2015, we will launch a stand-alone, over-the-top, HBO service in the United States. We will work with our current partners. And, we will explore models with new partners. All in, there are 80 million homes that do not have HBO and we will use all means at our disposal to go after them.” [Hypable]

Call your mom and tell her she can cancel HBO. You won’t be needing her password anymore. Starting soon you can have your own. LIKE A REAL GROWN-UP.

Filed under: TV Tagged: cord cutting, HBO, hbo go, time warner

by Nicole Dieker

I ate at Jimmy John’s twice last weekend. I was at Geek Girl Con, and there’s a Jimmy John’s right down the street from the Convention Center, and if you thought I wouldn’t make as many excuses to eat there as possible, you don’t know how much I love those sandwiches.

It’s like they’re Jacob and I’m Renesmee, and they stared at me with their hot pepper sandwich eyes the day I was born.

And, to continue the Twilight metaphor, they’re also apparently super-controlling.

The Huffington Post got a copy of Jimmy John’s non-compete agreement, which states that workers cannot work at a competing restaurant for at least two years after their Jimmy Job. What counts as a competing restaurant? Any restaurant that is within 3 miles of an existing Jimmy John’s that also earns at least 10% of its revenue from sandwiches.

The non-compete agreement lists the types of foods it considers sandwiches, including pitas and “wrapped or rolled sandwiches.” That means they’re even stricter about what constitutes a sandwich than the USDA, which—as NPR noted—does not consider a burrito, a wrap, or a hot dog a “sandwich.”

Jimmy John’s employees are currently putting together a class-action lawsuit which includes this non-compete agreement as well as the wage theft issue that came out earlier this summer.

It gets worse. When Jezebel reported this story, they added a note that Jimmy John’s founder, Jimmy John Liautaud, liked to shoot endangered species for sport. (I followed up on a lot of links to see if this was true. Here’s a summary from Chicagoist, which includes an image of Liautaud with a dead elephant.)

So… I have to break up with this sandwich shop. It’s funny that I’m able to rationalize the poor treatment of employees as “everybody does that kind of thing,” but I draw the line at the image of a man hugging a dead leopard.

Anyway, it’s done. I took my Jimmy John’s poster down off my wall and moved my picture of Ada Lovelace over to fill the space.

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Listen, I don’t care about your political leanings and you certainly don’t care about mine. But I care about pop culture and I care about “Turn Down For What” Vines. And I’ll be damned if the First Lady didn’t just ruin it for everyone.

Sasha and Malia: “Hey we’re feeling sick today, we can’t go to school.”
Michelle O: “Both of you?”
Sasha and Malia: “Yeah.”
Michelle O: “That’s bizarre.”

*TURNIP FOR WHAT blares in the background

Filed under: Web Culture Tagged: michelle obama, Michelle Obama Vines, Turn Down For What, vines, Viral Videos

It makes for a charmingly local headline: Area Man Picks Up So Much Roadside Litter, District Council Names Garbage Truck After Him. Except in this case, the Area Man is the famous author and humorist, David Sedaris, whose fame is apparently (and even more charmingly) unknown by the district council and the paper covering the event.

Thrilled to have the vehicle named after him, David 'Pig Pen' Sedaris, said: "When I first moved to Horsham district three years ago I was struck by the area's outstanding natural beauty but I was also struck by all the rubbish that people leave lying around the roads.

"I'm angry at the people who throw these things out their car windows, but I'm just as angry at the people who walk by it every day. I say pick it up yourself. Do it enough and you might one day get a garbage truck named after you. It's an amazing feeling."

Don't know how I missed this story over the summer...a chapter of his next book just wrote itself. The paper followed up with a "holy shit, this dude is famous" piece the next day. (via sedaris' reddit ama)

Update: I had also missed reading Sedaris' piece about his Fitbit, in which he talks about his anti-litter efforts.

I've been cleaning the roads in my area of Sussex for three years now, but before the Fitbit I did it primarily on my bike, and with my bare hands. That was fairly effective, but I wound up missing a lot. On foot, nothing escapes my attention: a potato-chip bag stuffed into the hollow of a tree, an elderly mitten caught in the embrace of a blackberry bush, a mud-coated matchbook at the bottom of a ditch. Then, there's all the obvious stuff: the cans and bottles and great greasy sheets of paper that fish-and-chips comes wrapped in. You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins. It's like going from the rose arbor in Sissinghurst to Fukushima after the tsunami. The difference is staggering.

(via @mmorowitz)

Tags: David Sedaris

by Nicole Dieker

As you may have seen on either Jezebel or NBC News this morning: Facebook and Apple have become the first two companies to offer to pay for their employees’ egg freezing procedures.

To quote NBC News:

The companies offer egg-freezing coverage under slightly different terms: Apple covers costs under its fertility benefit, and Facebook under its surrogacy benefit, both up to $20,000.

It appears at this point that Facebook and Apple only offer this benefit to female employees; they don’t, for example, offer married couples the chance to freeze the eggs of the spouse who does not work for the company. (I’m making this assumption because the news stories I’ve read have only mentioned offering the benefit to women. I’m also hoping “women” encompasses all people with ovaries, but again, they didn’t say.)

It’s an interesting move, first because it acknowledges that delayed childbearing is a true cultural shift, and second because it’s a subtle reminder that one of the reasons women delay childbearing is because they’re working to build their careers at groundbreaking, all-encompassing companies like Facebook and Apple.

Lean in, don’t leave before you leave, and put your eggs on ice.

Would you freeze your eggs if your workplace offered to pay for the costs? My initial instinct is that I would, but it’s also an invasive and uncomfortable procedure that lasts 4-6 weeks, so it’s not something I would do lightly, even if it were free.

But if my workplace offered it, I’d probably take them up on it.

And then, of course, I’d get back to work.

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by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

I’m not sure when I decided that my eyebrows—thick, dark, and joined—weren’t considered attractive, but I was a preteen when I realized that I would have to do something about it. When I was 12, I begged my mother to let me get the offending patch waxed. Getting my eyebrows “fixed” was Step One of the makeover process that I just knew was necessary if I was going to be a pretty teenager. In teen magazines and on The O.C. (everyone’s favourite show in 2003), I saw smallness and whiteness celebrated in bodies, in clothes, and in upturned noses. Even Kristin Kreuk, the only image of non-white beauty I remember from that time, was hairless and thin.

I always wondered if my eyebrows could be a little better—a little more arch, a little less thick, a little further apart. Maybe, by some miracle, my eyebrows would make the rest of me seemed smaller, small enough to fit into a white, blonde, hairless ideal that seemed to be attractive to everyone around me. I understood that to be small, to not offend, was to be feminine, which seemed instrumental to achieving all the milestones of successful teenagehood—parties, boys, Marissa Cooper’s hipbones.

My friend Sheila told me that for her, trying to mold her eyebrows into an acceptable shape was one of the most important problems of her teenage years. “I was going through puberty in the early 1990s, when super-thin pencil eyebrows were the style at that time, and dead-straight hair,” she explained. “Neither the hair on my head nor the hair on my face was compliant with that dominant hair narrative. I remember spending so much time just trying to make my eyebrows fit into this shape that they weren’t going to fit.”

Ronak, an Iranian-Canadian friend, told me about the time she brought photos of her family vacation to show her Canadian friends, including one of her cousin, whose eyebrows joined in the middle. “I thought it was gorgeous,” she says. “But when I was showing my friends [in Canada] the photos, they said “Why does she have a unibrow?” They didn’t understand why anyone would want one.”

At the time, I didn’t understand either. It seemed like social suicide. I knew from watching TV and movies that shaping the eyebrow is an essential part of the feminizing process. From The Princess Diaries to A League of Their Own, big eyebrows are used to show that someone is truly hopeless in their pursuit of femininity—curable, but not without some work.

After my first fateful trip to the waxer, I thought maybe my problems would be solved. But instead of being relieved that my eyebrows no longer joined in the middle, I was terrified that someone would find out that they weren’t always like that.

Eyebrows have been part of cultural discussions around hair and gender for centuries; references to eyebrow grooming can be found in texts from as far back as the Roman Empire. Claudio Da Soller, a scholar of medieval literature, cites a fourth century poem by the Roman Claudian, who compliments a bride: “How delicate the space between your dark eyebrows!”

In eleventh century Andalusian poetry, ugliness goes hand in hand with “thick, black, [and] joined” eyebrows. This disdain for joined eyebrows are found alongside praise for women with white skin and “delicate” features.

Along the same lines, Chaucer’s epic 14th century poem Troilus and Criseyde refers to the beautiful Criseyde this way: “Except for the fact that her eyebrows joined together, there was no blemish in anything that I can learn of.” Criseyde falls from grace after a sexual encounter—only then does Chaucer mention her joined eyebrows, equating her sin with her newly noticed ugliness, basically linking her newly discovered impurity with the facial imperfection.

Modernity, the rise of mass advertising, and the entrenchment of conventional gender roles have all played a part in how women think about their eyebrows. In her fascinating book Men without Mustaches, Women with Beards, Afsaneh Najmabadi points out that images of beauty in Iranian art weren’t based on gender difference in the 18th and 19th centuries. During that time, painters depicted beautiful men and women with joined black eyebrows, big green eyes, and generally similar features. The ideal image of beauty in these paintings was often shown to be a male youth (the amrad), who was depicted with a wispy mustache. Women accentuated their eyebrows and facial hair using mascara and other cosmetic products to more closely resemble the boyish image. Najmabadi argues that the desexualization of male homosocial culture led to the erasure of the male youth as the vision of beauty in Iranian art, at the same time that Iranian women were moving into public spheres, interacting with foreign media through magazines and advertisements. By the 1920s, the practice of mascara mustaches had all but vanished, as beauty ideals for men and women emphasized traditional masculinity and femininity in opposition to one another.

Around this time in Europe, there was also a growing medical field that dealt specifically with hypertrichosis, the disease of “superfluous hair.” In the late 1800s, Darwinism dictated that hair was a crucial element in discerning “real” men from “real” women. Kimberly A. Hamlin writes that “while facial hair on women of all races was considered unusual, hirsute white women were considered diseased individuals.” Hirsute women of colour were considered visions of evolution at work.

This scientific take on body hair was brought to mainstream female audiences through women’s magazines and popular advice manuals, which cautioned women to get rid of any excess hair if they were ever going to be happy. This was coupled with beauty advice that advised against looking too “bold” with a heavier brow.

But while women around the world were certainly influenced by Western ideals of beauty celebrating hairlessness and whiteness, they also found ways to negotiate these ideals for themselves. In her article on the Indian “modern girl,” gender scholar Priti Ramamurthy shows that some Indian film stars negotiated patriotism with global fashion through eyebrows. Some were directly influenced by Western fashions, like Patience Cooper, while others maintained a natural shape, like Jahanara Kajjan. Scholars of modern girls write that ultimately, designers and artists were inspired by many different cultures and customs during this time that traveled from East to West and back again.

I’ve been waxing my eyebrows for thirteen years. I’ve come to appreciate that my eyebrows, like most people’s, are not naturally tidy creatures. But I’ve also cared less and less about their possible impact on my life. Instead, I’ve started looking for ways to negotiate the complex relationship. There have been game-changing moments: the first time I saw the Indian film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which co-stars Kajol, a beautiful film star who also has a unibrow, the day I stuck a picture of some brown girl singer named M.I.A. to the wall of my college dorm, the first time I saw a photo of Cara Delevigne. These events were evidence that I could find beauty role models outside of what had come before, and I took them with relish.

Ronak and Sheila are also finding ways to do their eyebrows on their own terms. Every week, Ronak’s mother threads her eyebrows for her and they spend the time talking and catching up with each other. Sheila went to the same threader for years and found her to be a comforting presence in her life. For me, and for them, these are important ways of navigating our relationships with hair and with other women.

Today, my eyebrow grooming habits are a choice, like putting on makeup or wearing a weird skirt. Instead of going to a fancy place called a “wax bar,” and being embarrassed for showing up with big eyebrows in the first place, I go to a South Asian-owned threading salon, and I get to feel like part of a community of women who get what I’m about.

When I think about myself at 12, trying to figure out how to be good at womanhood, I wish I had seen more diverse examples of beauty around me. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so bad about not fitting in if I had known about the beautiful people outside of my copies of YM. I wish my preteen self could know that the most important development in my eyebrow acceptance has been talking to other women about how they feel about theirs, that it’s not as shameful as we’re led to believe. Instead of being scared that someone might find out about my eyebrows, I talk about it first. I know that my hair is part of what defines my identity, but not what defines my value.

Previously: On Hair, There and Everywhere, and Intra-Cultural Shame

Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite writes and edits in Toronto.

Georgia Webber is a comics artist living in Toronto, where she is the Comics Editor for carte blanche and the Guest Services Coordinator for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. She is most often making work about her vocal disability. Georgia wants you to consider your voice. See how at georgiasdumbproject.com.

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The Ebola outbreak has been terrifying in a lot of ways, but to people who aren’t on the ground, it can feel distant and abstract. However, disease outbreaks can have economic side-effects, and one of Ebola’s will be that the chocolate you get in the coming months will cost more and be a lot crappier.

Why? Chocolate is based, of course, on cocoa, which only grows in a narrow band of the Earth ten degrees north and ten degree south of the Equator. Guess which continent most of the world’s cocoa comes from? Granted, the world’s biggest producer, the Ivory Coast, hasn’t seen any Ebola outbreaks (yet) but it borders two of the three countries that have seen outbreaks, and which promptly closed their borders.

This is a problem, when the majority of your workforce comes from those two countries! The chocolate market has actually been in trouble for a while, now: Demand is beginning to outstrip supply, to the point where chocolate companies are trying to figure out how to pass off generic candy as “chocolate.”

Even if Ebola doesn’t hop the border, the lack of labor creates some serious supply chain and quality issues. Essentially, either less chocolate will be made and it’ll cost more to make it, or crappier chocolate will be made and sold. Nor is it out of the realm of possibility the need for labor might mean some workers try to sneak over the border anyway… possibly bringing Ebola with them. Just in case all of this wasn’t depressing enough, odds are pretty good these farms will be staffed by child laborers to get that crappy choconugget to your mouth.

In other words, Ebola could wind up causing massive human misery even for people who never get near it. And also, you get crappy chocolate. Everybody loses!

Filed under: GammaSquad Tagged: CHOCOLATE, Ebola, economic effects, human misery

For the past year, Joanna Goddard has been running a series on her blog called Motherhood Around the World. The goal of the series was to tease out how parenting in other countries is different than parenting in the US. From the introduction to the series:

We spoke to American mothers abroad -- versus mothers who were born and bred in those countries -- because we wanted to hear how motherhood around the world compared and contrasted with motherhood in America. It can be surprisingly hard to realize what's unique about your own country ("don't all kids eat snails?"), and it's much easier to identify differences as an outsider.

The results, as Goddard states upfront, are not broadly representative of parenting in the different countries but they are fascinating nonetheless. I've picked out a few representative bits below. On parenting in Norway:

Both my kids attended Barnehage (Norwegian for "children's garden"), which is basically Norwegian pre-school and daycare. Most kids here start Barnehage when they're one year old -- it's subsidized by the government to encourage people to go back to work. You pay $300 a month and your kids can stay from 8am to 5pm. They spend a ton of time outside, mostly playing and exploring nature. At some Barnehage, they only go inside if it's colder than 14 degrees. They even eat outdoors-with their gloves on! When I was worried about my son being cold, my father-in-law said, "It's good for him to freeze a little bit on his fingers." That's very Norwegian -- hard things are good for you.

The Democratic Republic of Congo:

No one thinks twice here about sharing breastmilk. Why let something so valuable go to waste? Not long after my second daughter was born, I went on a work trip to Kenya. I pumped the whole time I was there and couldn't bear to throw away my breast milk, nor imagine the nightmare scenario of leakage in my luggage. So I saved it all up in the hotel fridge in Ziploc bags. On the day I left, I took all the little bags to the local market and said, "All right, ladies. Who's got babies and wants breast milk?!" Not a single Kenyan woman at the market thought twice about taking a random white woman's breast milk. My driver even heard I was handing out milk and asked if I could pump some extra to take home to his new baby.

Abu Dhabi:

There are no car seat or seatbelt laws here. You will regularly see toddlers with their heads peeking out of sunroofs or moms holding their infants in the front seat. The government and the car companies are trying to educate people about the dangers, but the most locals (Emiratis as well as people from countries like India and Egypt) believe that a mother's arms are the safest place for her child.

India:

In a country in which space comes at such a premium, few parents would dream of allocating a separate room for each child. Co-sleeping is the norm here, regardless of class. Children will usually sleep with their parents or their ayah until they are at least six or seven. An American friend of mine put her son in his own room, and her Indian babysitter was aghast. The young children from middle class Indian families I know also go to sleep whenever their parents do -- often as late as 11pm. Our son sleeps in our bed, as well. He has a shoebox of a room in our house where we keep his clothes and crib, and he always starts the night in there, falling asleep around 8pm. That way Chris and I get a few hours to ourselves. Then, around 11pm, Will somehow senses that we are about to fall asleep and calls out to come to our bed. It's like clockwork, and he falls right back into a deep sleep the second his head hits the pillow.

Australia:

On sleep camps: Government-subsidized programs help parents teach their babies to sleep. I haven't been to one (though I did consider it when we were in the middle of sleep hell with our daughter) but many of my friends have. The sleep camps are centers, usually attached to a hospital, that are run by nurses. Most mums I know went when their babies were around six or seven months old. You go for five days and four nights, and they put you and your baby on a strict schedule of feeding, napping and sleeping. If you're really desperate for sleep, you also have the option of having a nurse handle your baby for the whole first night so you can sleep, but after that you spend the next few nights with your baby overnight while the nurses show you what to do. They use controlled crying and other techniques. I have friends who say it saved their lives, friends who left feeling "meh" about the whole thing, and a friend who left after a day because, in her words, "they left my baby in a cupboard to cry."

Chile:

Giving treats to children is seen as a sign of affection, so strangers will offer candy to kids on the street. I'll sometimes turn around and a stranger will be handing my daughter a chocolate bar! Several months ago, we were on a bus, and a woman near us was eating cookies. She saw my daughter Mia and said "Oh, let me give you some cookies." I said, "No, thank you." But she kept on insisting. Then, a random stranger, who was not even connected to the first woman, chimed in, "You should give your daughter the cookies!" They were very serious about it! I was frustrated at the time, but after the fact I found it funny.

And then more recently, they talked to a group of foreign mothers about how parenting in the US differs from the rest of the world. For one thing, there's the babyproofing:

Here in the U.S., there is a huge "baby industry," which does not exist in Romania. There's special baby food, special baby utensils, special baby safety precautions and special baby furniture. In Romania, children eat with a regular teaspoon and drink from a regular glass. They play with toys that are not specifically made for "brain development from months 3-6." Also, before I came here, I had never heard of babyproofing! Now I'm constantly worried about my daughter hurting herself, but my mom and friends from home just laugh at me and my obsession that bookshelves might fall.

And the more permissive and involved parenting:

I was surprised that American children as young as one year old learn to say please, thank you, sorry and excuse me. Those things are not actively taught in India. Another difference is how parents here tend to stay away from "because I said so" and actually explain things to their children. It's admirable the way parents will go into basic reasoning to let the child know why some things are the way they are. When I last visited Bombay, I explained to my then four-year-old about that we couldn't buy too many things because of weight restrictions in the flight, etc. My relatives were genuinely wondering why I didn't just stop at "no."

Like I said, the whole series is fascinating...I could easily see this being a book or documentary (along the lines of Babies).

Tags: Joanna Goddard   parenting   travel   USA

If you thought Will Arnett’s sarcastic, self-important, Bale-parodying LEGO Batman was the highlight of The Lego Movie, you’re not alone. (But he’s alone. NO PARENTS.) Warner is now fast-tracking a LEGO Batman spin-off movie, with Arnett returning, and they plan to release it in 2017 before The LEGO Movie 2. THR says The LEGO Movie sequel is being pushed back, as director Chris McKay will now helm LEGO Batman. Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and we’ll never let him live that down, will pen the script.

LEGO Batman will likely take the May 26, 2017 release date formerly occupied by The LEGO Movie 2. He’ll still be all “darkness” and “no parents”, but at least he has his own movie. Kinda makes it better…

Filed under: GammaSquad, Movies Tagged: Batman, CHRIS MCKAY, CHRIS MILLER, LEGO, Music, PHIL LORD, SELF-PORTRAIT, Seth Grahame-Smith, THE LEGO MOVIE, THE LEGO MOVIE 2, WARNER, WILL ARNETT

Guy: What do girls do at sleepovers?
Me: Pass the Bechdel test.

The average woman loses $11,000 every year from the gender wage gap. According to Sarah Silverman in a video for the Equal Payback Project, “Over the course of her working life, that’s almost $500,000. That’s a $500,000 vagina tax.” No wonder she’s shopping for a penis.

The campaign aims to close the wage gap by crowd funding an admittedly ludicrous number: $29,811,746,430,000. That “vagina tax,” as Silverman names it, represents the how much women lose when each of the US’s 69 million female workers are paid nearly $500,000 less than men over their working careers.

The money raised from the Equal Payback Project will go towards funding the National Women’s Law Center – a non-profit that works against employment discrimination and focuses on legislative issues to promote gender equality. “They fight to help women get the money they deserve,” Silverman says, waving a prosthetic penis, about the areas that the organization works in. “They’re very good at what they do, you know, for a bunch of girls.” (Via)

Among the penises looks at are the Gentleman, the Frat Boy, and the Seinfeld, which is much better than the Costanza. Can’t get that thing wet.

Via the Guardian

Filed under: Web Culture Tagged: GENDER EQUALITY, SARAH SILVERMAN, VAGINAS, WAGE GAP

With federal job satisfaction ebbing in recent years because of fiscal pressures and a lack of confidence in top managers, the government’s personnel office on Wednesday highlighted one group of civil servants that seems relatively happy: millennials. Employees born after 1980 now make up 16 percent of the workforce, and according to a forthcoming survey of federal employees, […]

by Dan Nosowitz

The most outrageous area of the grocery store is not the frozen section, nor the canned section, nor even the gross pre-made foods section. I am happy to partake of certain kinds of frozen or canned produce in the wintertime (they are usually better than fresh, when out of season), and I have been known to buy whole rotisserie chickens, theoretically to turn the carcass into stock, but really to gorge on heavily salted flesh for two days straight. No, the most frustrating and worthless aisle, the one from which no self-respecting adult should ever purchase anything, under absolutely any circumstances, is the salad dressing aisle.

There is no greater substantiation of the international reputation of American home cooking than pre-bottled salad dressing. A simple vinaigrette, like a classic balsamic, has like three ingredients—not one of which goes bad—and a superior version can be made at home for a small fraction of the price in about fifteen seconds. To save those fifteen seconds, Americans will sacrifice money, flavor, and, frankly, our dignity, and buy pre-made garbage. This is not always our fault! Sometimes we have been raised on these dressings, and sometimes the tv chefs can make them seem difficult. Whisking? Drizzling a thin stream of oil to emulsify? Lightly macerating shallots? This seems complicated, and unwelcome, given that this dressing is usually going to go on a salad, a dish many of us only grudgingly eat. But no, friends: Salad dressing can be extraordinary.

I love salad dressing, and vinaigrettes in particular. Creamy dressings, like ranch and blue cheese, are immature, inferior condiments; they mask, rather than accentuate, the flavors of vegetables, which are often more subtle and delicate than the big dumb idiot flavors of meats. Use blue cheese dressing on buffalo wings, not on vegetables. A vinaigrette, though, is a beautiful thing. I use them on salads, sure, but also on pretty much everything else: on a stir-fry, on a platter of roasted vegetables, on a sandwich, on oysters or fish. The vinaigrette—at its core, nothing more than an emulsion (a homogeneous mixture) of oil and vinegar—is fantastically flexible; I have yet to find a cuisine that a vinaigrette can’t encapsulate.

Making vinaigrettes is a great introduction to cooking. New cooks often aren’t quite sure how to season—not because they don’t understand the techniques, but because they aren’t sure how to taste and adjust. Something like a soup, which may have many many ingredients, can be very hard to season for the inexperienced cook; the knack of knowing when a soup needs butter, or salt, or dried herbs, or stock, is something that comes with time and practice. But a vinaigrette never has more than a few ingredients, and can thus serve as a cook’s version of dissecting a worm: It’s all pretty simple in there.

The key to a great vinaigrette is to capture several different flavors at once: something sour, something sweet, something savory, something fatty, and usually something spicy. An inexperienced cook can play around, adding more salt, more oil, more vinegar, more spice, more whatever, tasting and re-tasting until it seems right. This is how you become a good cook, not by reading things; cookbooks are dumb, this column is dumb, I am personally very dumb.

The most important tool for making vinaigrettes is a small glass container with a lid, which I got in a large collection of glass containers just like this one. When buying these, make sure to get glass—plastic is definitely going to kill us all one of these days—and make sure it says “oven safe” on it. These tupperware-type glass containers are MAGIC. I use the big ones for baking bread, the medium-sized ones for quick-pickling, and the little ones are my favorite; I use them for vinaigrettes. Here are some recipes.

Uncle Dan’s Spicy Southwest Vinaigrette: Take your small tupperware, fill it up about a third of the way with olive oil or a neutral oil like grapeseed, and sprinkle in a bunch of ground cumin, ground turmeric, and the chile powder of your choice, at a ratio of roughly 2:4:1. (Not chili powder, that garbage that comes in packets that’s designed for lousy versions the dish called chili: I’m talking about some kind of dried chile that’s been ground into a powder. I use chile de arbol powder from New York’s best spice shop, Kalustyan’s.) Put the lid on and shake loosely to combine, then remove the lid and place your glass tupperware right on the burner. Yeah, right on it! Turn the burner on the lowest setting and stand over it; it will burn quickly if you’re not careful. Wait until little bubbles start forming at the edges, and notice that there is an OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD aroma emanating from this tiny tupperware. As soon as it smells incredible, which should only take a minute or two, turn the heat off and walk away. It has to cool down before you can add any other ingredients, otherwise it will angrily spit hot oil at you. Once cool, add about a half to three quarters as much apple cider vinegar as oil, and a squeeze of honey. To mix, don’t bother stirring: just put the lid back on (SECURELY), and shake vigorously, which will emulsify better than any whisk (properly trained chefs will tell you to blend everything besides the oil, then slowly dribble in the oil while whisking. This is boring. If you’re going to serve it right away, fuck it, just shake it all up). Too oily? Add more vinegar. Too sour? Add more honey. When it’s done it should have a bunch of flavors all balanced just right: smoky, spicy, savory, sweet, sour. I like to use this vinaigrette on a slaw: Take a big bowl, dump a bag of broccoli slaw in (cabbage works well too, but I like broccoli slaw more; it can be found at Trader Joe’s), a bunch of raw corn (fresh in summer, canned all other times), black beans, feta cheese, and either fresh cilantro or cilantro pesto. Let sit overnight if possible for all the flavors to get friendly.

Variations: Want something a bit more autumnal? Do the same thing as the above, but replace the southwest spices with pumpkin-pie spices: cinnamon, clove, nutmeg. Use on a salad of raw apples, roasted squash, beet greens, and candied walnuts (which you can make, but don’t bother if you live near a Trader Joe’s). Or something vaguely Indian? Replace spices with a madras curry mix and use lemon juice instead of cider vinegar. Use it over any ordinary green salad or over roasted sweet potatoes and cauliflower.

Thai and Vietnamese flavors take very well to vinaigrettes as well. Here’s one I use for cold noodle salads a lot: Take a frozen knob of ginger, grate into your little glass tupperware. Add in rice wine vinegar, a little soy sauce, a little sambal oelek (chili-garlic paste), a little fish sauce, some brown sugar, some neutral oil (grapeseed, but use less than you would with western vinaigrettes), and a little bit of peanut butter. Pop on the lid and shake vigorously. Serve with cold noodles, raw or pickled vegetables (cucumber, daikon or other radish, carrot, bean sprouts), some cubed tofu or chicken, crushed peanuts, and cilantro. Alternately, toss with the non-noodle ingredients and serve in a hoagie roll for a sort of mutant Thai banh mi.

Variations: For a more Japanese take, try a miso vinaigrette. Combine a spoon of miso (I like white best for this one), rice vinegar, a couple drops sesame oil, sambal oelek, soy sauce, and a neutral oil, and shake vigorously. Serve over any crisp vegetables, either raw or lightly stir-fried.

Assuming you have some pesto in your freezer, which you should, how about an herb vinaigrette? Toss any kind of pesto into tupperware with a little extra olive oil, lemon juice, and maybe some crushed red pepper flakes and/or honey. Any kind of pesto vinaigrette would be great over warm boiled potatoes, as sort of a quick fancy potato salad, but a sweet-ish basil pesto vinaigrette is especially great over a fruit-heavy salad of greens (I like purslane for this), halved grapes, and pickled shallots.

Vinaigrettes might seem intimidating or not worth the trouble, but, in order: they are not, and they are. They are an introduction to sauce-making, a palette to explore the arts of balancing flavor, and pretty much any dish can be improved with the addition of one. The basic combination of fat and sour can be expanded to so much more, to a sauce that hits every single flavor receptor on your tongue—and it can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Never buy vinaigrette. Always make it.

Photo by Nicole Susanne

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30% of Americans don't drink any alcohol during a typical week. On the other end of the scale, ten percent of Americans consume more than 10 drinks every single day. More from Wonkblog.

I double-checked these figures with Cook, just to make sure I wasn't reading them wrong. "I agree that it's hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day," he told me. But, "there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey."

As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don't drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

This is shocking to me. I wonder what the distribution is within the top 10%...there must be people in the top 1% who drink, what, 30 drinks per day? Is that even possible day after day without very serious consequences? (via mr)

Update: Over at Forbes, Trevor Butterworth casts doubt on the conclusions in the Wonkblog article.

The source for this figure is "Paying the Tab," by Phillip J. Cook, which was published in 2007. If we look at the section where he arrives at this calculation, and go to the footnote, we find that he used data from 2001-2002 from NESARC, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which had a representative sample of 43,093 adults over the age of 18. But following this footnote, we find that Cook corrected these data for under-reporting by multiplying the number of drinks each respondent claimed they had drunk by 1.97 in order to comport with the previous year's sales data for alcohol in the US. Why? It turns out that alcohol sales in the US in 2000 were double what NESARC's respondents -- a nationally representative sample, remember -- claimed to have drunk.

Additionally, the statement I made above -- "ten percent of Americans consume more than 10 drinks every single day" -- is not true, even if the data is correct. Instead, it is accurate to say that top 10% consumes an average of 10 drinks daily...some individuals may drink 4/day and some 18/day. Looks like it's time for a reread of How to Lie with Statistics and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. (via @harryh & @gfilpus)

Tags: alcohol   food

“Millenials have steered the country to a place where diplomats tweet, gay marriage is turning mainstream, and running a blog can be more financially secure than a company gig. If we’ve done all that before 35, get ready.”

-

NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin reporting for her latest story, “Why You Should Start Taking Millenials Seriously.” It’s the first installment of our new series on millenials, #NewBoom. Join the conversation. (via npr)

I REALLY HOPE WE START VOTING THO.

(via thelifeguardlibrarian)

WE REALLY NEED TO START VOTING.

periwinklebleu:

period panties

Entertainment Weekly enlisted Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele — the titular Key and Peele of Key & Peele — to guest-edit its upcoming comedy issue. In a post today to promote the issue, the two discuss their super-full dance card of late: producing a Police Academy reboot, working with Judd Apatow, and apparently, turning one of their most popular sketches into a full-length feature film.

On top of that, the duo are also currently looking to get Mr. Garvey— a.k.a the star of their viral instant-classic “Substitute Teacher” sketch—his own movie.

“We’re in negotiations at Paramount to make a ‘Substitute Teacher’ movie,” says Key, who plays Mr. Garvey on the show. “Two of our writers are penning it. Well, they’re not penning it as we speak — it’s getting there.”

If we’re going by YouTube views alone, “Substitute Teacher” is the show’s most popular sketch by a wide margin (almost 60 million, compared to about 25 million for one of their other viral sketches, “East/West College Bowl“), so it’s certainly understandable that Hollywood would be willing to throw some money at it. But, man, I was really hoping thy’d go with “Magician Cop” first. That dude’s got some dark, dark secrets. I’m sure of it.

Filed under: TV Tagged: JORDAN PEELE, KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY, KEY & PEELE, substitute teacher

Few things in this world are better than Joe Biden with a live mic, so this one isn’t so much a surprise as it is another one for the file, but here goes anyway.

During an event at Harvard University yesterday, Biden fielded some questions from the students. That’s when this happened:

STUDENT: I’m a senior at the college. I’m the vice president of the student body here…

BIDEN: Isn’t it a bitch? I mean, excuse me, the vice president thing?

Yup, still the greatest.

Source: Vanity Fair

Filed under: TV, Upcoming Tagged: cussing politicians, joe biden

About two weeks ago, I sent out this tweet:

I didn’t write a post about it here at The Impulsive Buy because that’s all I knew. But now I know a whole lot more thanks to the press release Mars sent out this morning. Crispy M&M’s will be re-released in January 2015, it’ll be a regular flavor, and it’ll be available in 1.35 oz., 2.83 oz. and 9.9 oz. bags.

For those who’ve never had the pleasure of eating Crispy M&M’s, they were milk chocolate M&M’s with a crispy rice center. They were originally released in 1998 and discontinued in 2005 in the U.S., but they have been available in the U.K. and Europe.

Now that Crispy M&M’s is coming back, we should all now focus our attention on asking Mars to bring back Cookies-n-Creme Twix.

(Image via Mars)

Is your friend …

• Unemployed and searching for a job?
• Wanting to find the right someone but hasn’t?
• Trying to get pregnant and having a hard time with it?
• Waiting to hear back from that dream grad school program?

When the thing they have desperately been waiting for happens, they will tell you. Peppering them with questions and/or unsolicited advice on how they can better achieve this life goal is probably not what they’re looking for.

Instead, it’s just depressing to have to vocalize, again and again, that no, the thing they want has not yet happened, and then have to sit patiently while the other person tells them to keep their chin up, or that the right one is coming, or whatever.

It’s great to ask, more generally, how everything is with them. If they want to cry on your shoulder or share great news, they will. 

whippit-princess:

lasso:

Guys seriously would you LOOK at mini Adam Scott from Boy Meets World circa 1994

was this when he was mayor

reblogging for the comment :)

If you're anything like me, you have an obsession with pizza that can only be fed with, well, with pizza I suppose. Which means you probably make a lot of it at home, which means that you probably have at least a wooden pizza peel for launching pies and a metal peel for retrieving them. Right? Here's the best way to store them to keep your kitchen organized. Read More

bookoisseur:

catsbeaversandducks:

“… he will be our friend for always and always and always.” - Rudyard Kipling

Via Bored Panda

#bestbuds