Jill V

by John Herrman

♫ Shorts, shorts, shorts, short shorts ♫:

At this summer’s weddings and white parties, the nattiest gentlemen will be wearing shorts with a corresponding suit coat. At least, that’s what J.Crew would have you believe, along with a few other menswear companies that are giving the look a hard sell this season…

From all perspectives, the short-suit is an odd pairing. Sartorially, the look is equal parts business and schoolboy. Functionally, it’s both breezy and stifling, and socks are a no-no, unless they go up to one’s knees. The list of people who can pull it off doesn’t stretch much beyond professionals in Bermuda and street-style icons such as Nick Wooster and Pharrell.

A minor problem with this, one maybe not apparent from the design studios and agency meeting rooms of New York, is that a crude variation of this style is already popular, particularly in the easternmost regions of the Southern Frat Belt (one of at least four belts and one midwestern quadrilateral zone). Just loosen the fit and add either neon Wayfarers or an Oakley/Croakies combo. Put a red cup in the hand. Bad look. Death. If you look like a model, and your short-suit fits perfectly, maybe you can pull this off. If you carry yourself like anything BUT a model, your best possible outcome is looking sort of like Angus Young.

There is also the moral dimension, but it is complicated.

What often comes to mind when I see things like this is an image of an older man, who is one part my dearly departed grandfather and one part everyone else's, politely declining to comment on his grandson's outfit. This grandson remembers his grandfather's story about the first suit he bought as an adult, during the Great Depression, with paychecks from the slaughterhouse where he swept blood after hours. He kept it for years, and its legs were ironed, straight, and full.

But when grandfather gently changes the subject, he wants to talk about time, about all the things he doesn't know and never will, and how what he is most proud of, after the times he stood up for helpless people, is how he tried never to get in the way of the young ones with energy—not the zealous wide-eyed monsters, but the few who somehow knew, intuitively, how to assert themselves with candor and humility. The children are the future, and the preternaturally wise are their corrective. Change is good.

Then I still think he would ask, eventually: Can you please change?

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In 1944, at the age of 16, Maya Angelou walked into Muni's personnel department to ask for an application to become a streetcar conductor, and she was initially refused. She told the story to Oprah last year... [ more › ]

alithea:

i love her so much.

eee

It may be hot outside today, but inside it's getting even hotter after catching a ripe whiff of Josh Reddick's sexy new walk-up music: "Careless Whisper" by WHAM!. Mmmm, delicious. [ more › ]

by Casey N. Cep

Loretta Lynn wrote and recorded “The Pill” in 1972. Her label didn’t release it until 1975, but three years wasn’t long enough to cool the controversy stoked by Lynn, one of the biggest names in country music, singing the praises of oral contraception to an audience of “unliberated, work-worn American females.” The Associated Press’s lede about the song in February of that year read, “To some, Loretta Lynn’s new song ‘The Pill’ might be too bitter to swallow. But to the country music star it has the sweet taste of success,” selling some 25,000 copies a day. The New York Times even gave it a few column inches under the headline “Unbuckling The Bible Belt.”

Despite the coy coverage, Lynn’s song is anything but bashful. Not once, but seven times a wife delights in reminding her husband that she’s “got the pill.” Angry that he’s running around town while “all [she’s] seen of this old world is a bed and a doctor bill,” she announces that her birth control is evening the score. “I’m tired of all your crowing how you and your hens play,” the wife says, and then threatens that she’s headed out on the town, too.

By Lynn's own account, she married at age 13 and had four children before she turned 18; by the time she released the song, she’d had two more. “I’ve had six kids and I’ll take the pill anytime,” Lynn told the Associated Press in 1975, and then made light of her own naïveté about pregnancy: “I didn’t know at first what was causin’ all this.” A little stage play of sorts, almost as delightful as the song itself, unfolded during the interview:

“I went to the doctor the first time and he said, ‘You’re pregnant.’

I said, ‘What’s that?’

He said, ‘You’re gonna have a baby.’

I said, ‘I can’t have no baby!’

He said, ‘You’re married, aren’t you? Sleeping with your husband aren’t you?’

I said, ‘Yes and yes.’

He said, ‘Well then you’re gonna have a baby.’

“I tell you,” Lynn says, “if they’d had the pill a little earlier, I think I’d have eaten ‘em like popcorn.” If she seems cavalier in the interview, she seems even more so in the song. “I’m tearing down your brooder house,” the wife jokes, announcing “this chicken” is taking control of her own eggs. The “incubator is overused,” but, with the pill, “roosting time” is becoming a time for play, perhaps even with other roosters.

The song was banned on some country stations, but that failed to keep it from spreading. The pill was already popular, but Lynn’s lyrics seemed to laugh at the worst fears of those who opposed it: weakening families (even though the wife in the song already has several children) and breaking homes (even though the husband in the song is already sleeping around). The comedy, of course, is that the wife singing is actually pleading with her husband to stop cheating on her; the pill might, in fact, save the couple from divorce.

People Magazine found a preacher in West Liberty, Kentucky, who devoted a sermon to denouncing Lynn and counted at least 60 stations that refused to play the song. Also denouncing Lynn was W.R. Morris, author of “The Country Sound” column that appeared an Alabama newspaper, The Times Daily. “Controversial Song Makes Money For Artist Despite Ban By Stations” was the title of Morris’s column for February 16, 1975.

“Personally,” Morris wrote, “I feel that the song is poorly written and done in poor taste.” Morris was even more critical in his claim that “if an unknown female artist had cut the song, no radio station in the country would have played it. But since Loretta Lynn recorded it, some stations will spin it.”

This is, of course, not true. The song would have gotten play no matter who wrote or recorded it, but because Lynn, a Grand Ole Opry star and the only woman to be named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association, did both, women not only listened to the lyrics, but followed her advice. Her songs, about alcoholism and adultery, heartache and honky tonks, standing up to your husband and the women he was cheating with, coming from nothing and having it all, made her, according to People Magazine,the “poet laureate of blue-collar women.”

So while W.R. Morris of Alabama thought that “Loretta should let the welfare workers tell folks about the pill while she concentrates on recording some good, clean country music songs,” part of the trouble was that those workers had been talking about the pill for 15 years already, but not all women felt it was safe or socially acceptable. The Catholic Church had taken a moral stance against it, and the United States Senate had only a few years before held hearings on its medical safety.

That a folk hero like Lynn, whose life and career were devoted simultaneously to women’s independence and the importance of family, would not only admit to taking the pill, but craft her admission into a cutting attack on a cheating spouse meant that many women, especially rural women, considered oral contraception an option for the first time. You could, the song argued, have children, love your husband, and oppose adultery, all while still taking the pill.

A song like “The Pill” would still raise eyebrows today, not because the pill isn’t taken daily by millions of women, but because it says candidly what so many women are expected not to acknowledge, much less advertise. I cannot imagine what it was like to hear the song for the first time in 1975. I can’t say I’ve ever heard it on the radio, but I remember the first time I ever heard it. It was 2002, and Tim McGraw had just released the first single from his new album, “Red Rag Top” a story of young love like so many others on country radio, except for the turn one minute in, when McGraw sings: “Well the very first time her mother met me, her green-eyed girl was a mother to be for two weeks” and then a few beats later, “We were young and wild, we decided not to have a child.”

I remember catching my breath when McGraw confesses, “We did what we did and we tried to forget and we swore up and down there would be no regrets.” It was, I’m sure, the first time I had heard anything about abortion in a country song; it was also, I’m fairly certain, the first time I’d heard such an honest, non-health-textbook account of the experience anywhere in pop culture.

I was taken by the song, and when I asked my mother if she’d heard it and what if anything she’d made of it and whether she thought country music was becoming more progressive or more honest or anything like it. She listened to all my excited questions, told me Tim McGraw had nothing on Loretta Lynn, and then played me “The Pill.”

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

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If you’ve read any books about popular economics, chances are you’ve heard of the Dutch Tulip Mania of the early 1600s. One of the first examples of a bubble economy, at its height, tulip bulbs were selling for 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. Well now someone’s making a movie about those crazy Dutch flower lovers, an adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel Tulip Fever, which is set to star Zach Galifianakis and Christoph Waltz.

The film was part of The Weinstein Company’s upcoming slate being sold at Cannes, as reported by ScreenDaily:

Rounding out the slate is Tulip Fever. Justin Chadwick directs from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O’Connell, Holliday Grainger, Christoph Waltz and Zach Galifianaki star. Alison Owen produces.

Here’s the book synopsis:

In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy.

Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia’s likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist.

As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household’s inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception — and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax.

I just hope that at the climactic moment, the painter Van Loos turns to Sophia solemnly and says, “You like tulips?” And when she responds in the affirmative, he replies, “Then put your two lips right here, madame,” and points to the convergence of his breeches. I’d love to see that, plus the earliest examples of “tickets to the ball game” and “have you seen my new watch.”

 

Filed under: Film Drunk Tagged: CHRISTOPH WALTZ, DEBORAH MOGGACH, DUTCH TULIP CRAZE, JUSTIN CHADWICK, TOM STOPPARD, TULIP FEVER, Zach Galifianakis

by Heather Havrilesky

I teach a Popular Criticism class to MFA students. I don't actually have an MFA, but I am a professional, full-time writer who has been in this business for almost two decades, and I've written for a wide range of impressive print and online publications, the names of which you will hear and think, "Oh fuck, she's the real deal." Because I am the real deal. I tell my students that a lot, like when they interrupt me or roll their eyes at something I say because they're young and only listen when old hippies are digressing about Gilles Deleuze's notions of high capitalism's infantilizing commodifications or some such horse shit.

Anyway, since Friday is our last class, and since I'm one of the only writers my students know who earns actual legal tender from her writing—instead of say, free copies of Ploughshares—they’re all dying to know how I do it. In fact, one of my students just sent me an email to that effect: "For the last class, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown of your day-to-day schedule. How do you juggle all of your contracted assignments with your freelance stuff and everything else you do?"

Now, I'm not going to lie. It's annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world's young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule. Here we go:

Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. because one of my dogs was making a strange gulping sound. I sat for several minutes listening closely, wide awake, wondering if she wasn't developing esophageal cancer or some other gruesome ailment that the pricey animal specialty hospital might guilt me into actually treating. I imagined sitting in the posh chill of their giant waiting room, the pricey coffee and tea machine humming away next to me, filling out forms instructing them to never crack my 10-year-old dog's chest  and do emergency open heart surgery if she starts coding. "Option 1: LET MY DOG DIE." That's one I had to check off and sign, over and over again, when my other, eight-year-old dog had an unexplained fever and it cost me $6000 to save her. The vet's eyes would dart over my forms and the corners of her mouth would pinch slightly, and then she'd treat me like someone who might just yank the IV out of her dog's leg and twist her neck at any minute, the Jack Bauer of budget-minded dog owners.


Anyway, right about now you're starting to understand why the morning hours are so potent for a working writer: The mind spills over with expansive concepts and sweeping images that just cry out to be tapped in another scintillating essay or think piece.

Rather than get up and spoil my inspired revelry, though, I know to let these thoughts swirl and churn until they take a more coherent shape. My mind soon shifts to tallying up the costs of college for my stepson, who for some nutty reason applied to a wide range of insanely expensive private colleges on the East Coast. After I marvel over that sum for a while, I try adding together his costs with the costs of sending my two young daughters to college in ten years. Then I think about how we should probably try  to pay off our credit cards and our home equity loan first, and THEN focus on coming up with this mammoth amount for college, and then of course we'll be retiring right after that but we'll still have 15 years left on our massive mortgage. "We're never going to retire," I think. "We're going to have to keep working forever and ever and ever. And we can't turn on the AC this summer. And we have to stop going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant every other week and drinking margaritas, which are an inexcusably expensive indulgence.” Old people problems, LOL.

Then I think about margaritas for a while. I think about how there should really be a breakfast margarita. Breakfast 'Rita. Breakarita. Sunrise 'Rita. Maybe with Chia seeds. I think about how I worked at Applebee's when I was my stepson's age. And he's never even had a job. Ever! I think about how weird that is, that he's never had a job, but he's applying to colleges that cost $250k, all told. YOLO, I guess.

Then I think about how my black Applebee's polo shirt always smelled like nachos because I didn't wash it often enough. See how I was thinking about a smell? That's how you know I'm a real artist and not some fucking hack who writes light verse for The New Yorker. Artists can conjure a stinky odor using only their raw powers of imagination and long-term memory. That's also how you know it's time to write.

By now, it's 5:30 a.m. I get up and tiptoe past the kids' rooms, put water on for tea, and swiftly unload the dishwasher. Ahead of the curve, motherfuckers! I high-five myself in my mind. (It's important, as an artist, to reward yourself whenever you do something right. Your life can't be all "You suck, work faster, you're falling behind!")

By 5:45 a.m., I am sitting down to write. First, though, I need to fire off an email to the editor of my weekly advice column about maybe getting a check soon since it's May and I haven't been paid yet this year. "HEY IS THERE A CHECK ON THE WAY FINALLY? LOL! THIS BIG GUY WITH A BASEBALL BAT AT MY FRONT DOOR WANTS TO KNOW! OMG MY KNEES! XXXOOO" Always be super-polite and light-hearted with your editors, and never give them any indication that you've been waiting for a check for so long and your credit card balances are getting so high that your pulse starts racing every time you think about it, so much so that you've started to soothe yourself by imagining choking the life out of their ineffectual shit faces with your bare hands. Lol.

At 6 a.m., I quit email because that's what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done. But I have to go on Twitter for a second to favorite a few of my editor's tweets so he'll know that I'm not mad or anything. It's so easy for people to think that you're full of rage when you're a woman and a writer and oldish and you never, ever get paid! Ignorant dummies. Then I reply to a youngish writer who just moved to LA and hates her job and hates LA and is panicking. "Remember you're having an adventure!" I tell her, because she's young and she probably doesn't have dogs with health problems yet. So then I end up scrolling through my Twitter feed, probably just to remind myself that all of these other writers don't have 8,204 followers like I do, because I'm so fucking esteemed and accomplished after having done this for almost two decades. I'm a professional, is the thing. I know my fucking shit. I just keep producing high-quality work. That's why I have 8,202 followers.

Hold on. Where did those two followers go? Was it the thing I wrote about having an adventure? That probably made me sound really old. I probably shouldn't be so upbeat or urge people to have adventures. You're not old yet, guys, but you should remember this for when you get older: DON'T EVER WRITE THINGS THAT IMPLY THAT YOU'RE OLD.

At 6:15 a.m., my five-year-old wakes up. "Can I play on your iPad?" she asks. "That's not how we start the day," I reply. "We don't do dumb things like that to start the day, ever."

At 6:25 a.m. I am checking out the Twitter page of some teenager who makes YouTube videos about fashion. Someone tell me, how is that a thing? Her profile page bio line says "My viewers are my besties and I love them 5ever." She has 1.43 million
followers.  I would write something here about how making YouTube videos and assuring 1.43 million strangers that they're your besties 5ever is probably much more lucrative than, I don't know, teaching teenagers how to write and recapping "Mad Men" at midnight. But I'm a professional fucking writer and a true artist, not a teenager in leopard print rollerskates. LoL.

At 6:55 a.m., I have to start my 5-year-old's breathing treatment for her cold and make both kids a kale smoothie so they don't die of scurvy or rickets. The rest of the morning passes in a blur. 

7:01 a.m. OK, it's not really a blur at all. But you should never, ever detail your domestic chores or rail off the cute things your kids say unless you're Louis fucking CK. If you're a woman, forget it. People will think you're a mommy blogger, which is bad, because it's a woman thing. Suffice it to say, there's lots of screwing little rubbery straws into little cup lids and struggling to keep the dirty laundry piles from mixing with the clean laundry piles. In the end, the kids looked fresh and beautiful and ready for the day and I looked like a bedraggled, angry old whore. Or sex worker. YAAASS! (Is that how you spell it?)

8:45 a.m. Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first.  It's going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don't want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there's one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it's exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You'll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that's pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you'll think about the fact that you should've been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

9:20 a.m. Leaving house for run with dogs. High-five!

10:20 a.m. Hydration. Crucial. As Al Swearengen from Deadwood once said, "Those that doubt me suck cock by choice." Actually, not sure if it was Swearengen or that grisly looking dude, what was his name?

10:40 a.m. I go to look up that quote, because: fact-checking, hellooo! Every good freelance person fact-checks everything religiously. Clean, error-free copy is how you get the high-end writer gigs, and it's also how every editor contacts you all the time and asks you to read a 500-page book and write 2000 words for a $300 check you'll receive four months later. Boo-ya! See, when you're an acclaimed critic and a fucking pro, you get paid $40k a year to do complicated theme-paper type assignments, instead of paying $40k a year. So there! See ya, wouldn't wannna be ya!

11:15 a.m. This is lunch time, because I woke up at 4 a.m., remember? And I can't just eat a few slices of cheese and bread, because that's not brain fuel. Brain fuel is kale, and you have to chop kale up and then massage it with lemon juice and honey for a long time, so it's not prickly and bitter, and then you add shallots (also chopped) and pine nuts (toasted). Those that doubt me suck cock by choice. (See how I used that Swearengen line again, as a callback? If you work really hard and write every day for two decades, this kind of stuff will just spring into your mind.)

12:00 p.m. I read an article about South Korea ferry accident. Feel depressed. This is my humanity I'm getting in touch with, so it's important.

12:30 p.m. I clean up the mess from lunch, still feeling depressed. Feeling feelings is a crucial part of the professional writer's day. You'll never write anything worthwhile if you don't feel your feelings. Also, you always have to clean up your messes, because as the day progresses it gets harder to write, and when you see a big mess in the kitchen that can be super disheartening if you're already struggling to put words onto the fucking page.

1:05 p.m. Finally time to write! This is when I pull up the piece I'm working on about BuzzFeed and John Updike and the enforced cheer of American pop culture. This piece is the fucking shit, is what I'm thinking as I'm reading it. When it's ready, it is going to blow some high-falutin' editor socks clean off.

1:25 p.m  I decide I should really read this Updike biography from cover to cover right now if I want this essay to be worth reading. 

1:55 p.m. I stop myself! Because I'm not writing, and this is my time to write. Remember this one thing, even if you forget everything else: WRITERS WRITE. If you're not writing, you're not a fucking writer. I am a writer, so I write every fucking day. So I open the piece and…

1:56 p.m. I realize I have to finish that review of "American Idol" because it's due this afternoon. And honestly, at first it's hard to write the review, because that other essay is going to be way better. But then, when I start to write about how J. Lo always says she's "getting goosies" when she likes someone's singing? Well, that's the kind of little detail you just know to include when you're a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I'm in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!

2:23 p.m. Time to go get the kids from school. 

3:30 p.m. The kids are doing their homework now, so you probably think this is a good time to write. WRONG. I'm too tired, and if I try to write AND answer their incessant fucking questions, I'll start to say things like "Please don't talk to me," and "Please shut up," and "Don't look at me right now."  And sure, there are people out there who are thinking, "Christ, Heather, YOU ARE THE REAL DEAL. The world needs more of your fine prose and insights, not less. If you need to tell the kids to fuck off, then do it. If not for them, then for HUMANITY."

And I do care about humanity. The people of the world matter to me at a deeper level than most, because I'm a true artist and I'm sensitive. But here's the truth: It bums ME out to tell my kids to fuck off. Weird, right? But I need to be available to them. So I'm playing Candy Crush instead.

3:45 p.m. My 7-year-old asks me a question and I tell her, "I'M ON A TIMED LEVEL, HERE! GIVE ME ONE MINUTE!" and then "NO, STOP TALKING! TIMED LEVEL! A TIMER IS TICKING DOWN! ONE MINUTE ONE MINUTE!"

4:04 p.m. A confession? I fucking hate Candy Crush once you get past the Minty Meadow. It's too hard, but there's no skill involved. It's at once incredibly tedious and taxing, and yet there's very little reward for it. You try and try and try and try and you work and work and work and you tell the whole goddamn world to go fuck itself, and you know what you have to show for it in the end? A fucking headache. You have the illusion of accomplishment, but really? You aren't doing shit. You're pretending that you're accomplishing something, that's all.

What do you mean, is that a metaphor?

4:35 p.m. I'm making myself a margarita but it's not what you think. I'm doing this so I'm not a total jerk when my husband walks in the door. My husband has a real job, FYI. He's an awesome guy and he also keeps the lights on around here, just in case you were saying to yourself, 'WTF? How do the fucking lights stay on, because even with her being the real deal and all, she never seems to get paid or anything?" Have to be cheery, for the breadwinner! Booze.

4:55 p.m. I should add that tequila is a very important part of surviving life as a big-deal professional writer. You don't believe that now, but you will later. I am having some great ideas right now that I would never have without the tequila, and I'm tweeting them all so I don't forget a thing.

5:19 p.m. OK. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "This person is kind of an asshole. If I become a professional writer, I won't be so discombobulated and distracted and self-hating." That's what I used to think about my creative writing teacher in college, who always said depressing things about her life and had uncombed hair and a tote bag filled with crumpled papers. I thought she was old and weird and wishy-washy about the whole world, her kids, everything. But I had coffee with her last year, and I realized that she wasn't even old back then, and besides, we have so much in common! Anyway, time for another margarita.

6:35 p.m. Husband got home. Hi babe. Mmm so fucking tired. I know, I DO work too hard.

7:15 p.m. Use the washcloth. Stop. Good job. Don't hit her. You're right I said "Dummeldore." OK nighty night. No, don't even. President? Of a professional organzination? That's what blowhards do. You'll have to fly to Dubai or whatever and I'll have to deal with all the shit. Well, bring home more bacon, then. We need much, much more bacon. Much more. I'm just saying, I'll be the one dealing with the shit, as always. I only had two of them, that's not the thing. Margaritas, not kids. What does that mean. You don't get it. Whatever. Fuck. 

Zzzz. 

4:00 a.m. I'm awake because my husband is snoring in a weird way and I think it must be sleep apnea. What the fuck is sleep apnea? I hope it's not something that could kill him, or worse, maim him. So now I'm thinking about how fucked we'll all be if anything happens to any one of us, given how much debt we have to pay off and how many huge piles of cash we'll need to save our kids from also having giant debts and how we'll never, ever be able to retire, ever. I think about us working forever and ever and then I think about earthquakes and that ferry disaster again and, right about now you're probably starting to understand why the morning hours are so promising for a working writer! The mind spills over with vibrant imaginings that just beg to be formed into another scintillating trend piece or capsule review or "Real Housewives of Atlanta" recap!

But this is just how writing professionals do it. We wake up super duper fucking early and we start thinking our big thoughts and then we write. It's that simple. This is how you get 'er done, motherfuckers! Those that doubt me suck cock by choice. 

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Ed Yourdon.

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Shardcore writes, "I've built a new bot to troll/delight hipsters. It algorithmically creates post-post-ironic t-shirt designs, posts them on twitter and tumblr and offers them for sale. No human is involved in the process at all."

The pleasure in these cognitively dissonant juxtapositions comes from our recognition that they come from the same class of things, but the referent is wrong. One of the most popular examples emerged immediately after the death of Lou Reed, featuring an image of Iggy Pop. It’s delightful because it allows us a moment of smugness as we recognise the ‘mistake’ being made. We wear this pun on a t-shirt as a form of social signaling – ‘Look at this joke I’ve recognised, do you recognise it as well?’ – it allows us to show a particular aspect of our taste to strangers, displaying an glimpse of our inner mental life to the world at large. For this to work, the juxtaposition has to be from the same domain; Lou Reed/Iggy Pop works, but Lou Reed/Katy Perry would not.

If we look closely, there are two distinct outputs to the system – the actual t-shirts (which remain in potentia until someone actually clicks ‘buy’), and the ‘shareable image’ which can be used as a signal of taste inside social networks. You don’t need to actually own the t-shirt to share the joke. The image fulfills much the same function in the ‘online’ world as the actual t-shirt does in the ‘offline’ world.

@hipsterbait1 (Thanks, Shardcore!)

Lifetime has green-lit a reality show about five young women living in a Catholic convent, who are trying to decide whether or not to become nuns 4 life. Titled The Sisterhood, the show is the brainchild of Hot Snakes Productions, who are also behind the painfully fake and boring Breaking Amish. Hopefully the nuns will fare better.

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True Detective + The Family Circus = timeisaflatcircus.tumblr.com

(thanks, @sfslim!)

If you enjoy this, perhaps you will also like Marcus Aurelius, Sports Broadcaster.

On the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906:

Concerning the great earthquake, I was not able to gain any information from philosophers or scientists, nor could I gain any satisfactory explanation from the inhabitants of the city, who could explain neither why the great city had toppled nor why it had burned.

Some academicians, wishing to seem clever, have attempted to explain the motions of the earth in this place in the following way. They posit that all the earth is comprised of great plates of rock, like the ridges on a turtle’s back, and these float together on a sea of molten earth, and sometimes bump into one another like boats at anchor in the harbor, and that these jolts produce great perturbations of the earth. This is of course is absurd, for if the earth were so composed, then what is the turtle eating?

I will therefore proceed to explain what I think is the reason for the periodic quaking of the earth in these parts. The city of San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean, and this ocean is cold in every part of the year, and the sun is unknown there. Now, when the waters of the ocean are cold it is necessary that the great fish that inhabit these waters would remain slumbering because of the action of the cold water on their blood. But should the sun pass too close to the water due to an unusual wind, it stands to reason that the great fish would wake up from their long slumbers, become enraged and thrash their tails, disturbing the natural course of the tides in this place. These tidal waves, in turn, would thrust themselves against the unprotected shores, resulting in exactly the type of earthquake that so devastated this unfortunate city.

On the Death of Rasputin, 1916:

In the old days, the people of Russia declared that they would overthrow the Romanovs, whom they called despots, and install a government of the people. The Romanovs in those days were greatly influenced by a priest and scholar called Grigori Rasputin and so during the February Revolution the Russian people conspired to murder him by means of poison. When poison failed to kill him, they attempted first to shoot him, then to beat him to death. At last he was wrapped in a curtain, still alive, and thrown off a bridge into the Malaya Nevka River, where he at last ceased to breathe. But there are others who say Rasputin survived these tortures by secretly drinking a mixture of ginger ale and pigeon’s blood, and that he roused himself from the river bottom and fled Russia together with his son, who was a lion.

On the Stock Market Crash 1929:

As things are at present, the leaders of nations would do well to remember the story of the great market crash and the misfortune that followed, for the wise will declare that immoderate greed is the cause of all evil things.

On the Assassination of Trotsky, 1940:

Trotsky and Stalin were also in conflict over their position on the Republic of China which had been established that year in the east. Stalin hoped that Chinese Communist Party would unite with the Kuomintang to bring about a class revolution, but Trotsky was critical of Soviet support for the right-wing Kuomintang. Stalin and Trotsky also disagreed over the pace of industrialization and economic reform. In the winter of that year, Trotsky rode a dolphin to Mexico.

On the Moon Landing, 1969:

For on the moon the sand is made up of very large diamonds, which are polished by the actions of the atmosphere, and are naturally made smooth and perfect. And among these diamonds live a type of dogs, which are similar in size to a baby elephant, and which are very ferocious. And these dogs have the head of a cat, and the body of a boar, and the tail of a peacock, with hooves like a goat, and a moose’s antlers, and a zebra’s stripes, and a call like a chimpanzee, and no part of them in any way resembles a dog at all. And these dogs, as I have chosen to call them, fill their cheek pouches with smooth moon diamonds and hold them in their mouths to quench their thirst and in place of drinking water, for the water on the moon is noxious. And the astro-men who conquered the moon were wary of them, for these moon dogs are the most territorial and aggressive of all the animals on the moon.

On the Watergate Scandal, 1972:

Following the release of the audio tapes, Nixon immediately committed suicide by sitting cross-legged on a river bank, which everyone knows to be fatal.

On the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989:

It is the custom of the Germans to build massive concrete walls to commemorate important feast days, and to decorate these walls with pictures and inscriptions in brightly colored paint, and to set guards and towers and barbed wire and trenches along the walls to decorate them. The Berlin Wall was the greatest of these feast walls. The wall was four hundred feet tall and eighteen feet wide, and at the base was a moat twenty feet wide and filled with water and oil that was kept perpetually boiling by means of a sieve. I know this for a fact, I have seen it with my own eyes when I traveled to Berlin, which I did, personally, and on more than one occasion.

On the Establishment of the World Wide Web, 1990:

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee constructed a giant net of woven fibers and cast it over the earth, from which the “web” gets its name.

Read more Herodotus Writes a History of the 20th Century at The Toast.

Sometimes I am a very bad liberal. Trigger warnings and waaahing about #rapeculture make me want to yell at all the baby feminists. I am not good at Intersectionalism. Don’t care about drones. And now I honest to God don’t know why we’re supposed to be mad about the Google Bus.

I get it like “gentrification is : (” and “the rent is too damn high” and I totally get it that tech bros and glassholes are making your lovely hippie city of San Francisco grotesque. (Hint to SF: you got pretty yuppie all the way back in the ’80s, and Apple or Snapchat or whatever had fuck-all to do with it.) But complaining about the buses? Blocking the buses? Doing funsy clown-dressed protests about the buses, even if you are as wacky and funny as former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus (dudes, EVERYONE watch Cities on Speed, like, NOW) and dress as clowns or mimes or mimeclowns?

Here, have some Mockus, because awesome.

EARTH TO BRENT, buses are an environmental positive. They are good for your city. They are keeping your city from having more smog and more traffic and more adverse health effects from the stress of shitty soul-sucking commutes and more surface-level ozone and FEWER OF THESE FUCKERS CUTTING YOU OFF, because you know if they were driving their Lexii or their Teslas or whatever to work, THEY WOULD TOTALLY CUT YOU OFF.

Anyway, Valleywag’s got the statement from the protestors about whyyyyyyy, and it is full of stuff about evictions being up and how much in fines the Google buses would have to pay in fines to use the bus stops if they didn’t have a “backroom deal” with the SF transit authority, which, I would like to point out two things that will further make me an Enemy of the People: if they have a deal with the transit authority, which controls the bus stops, they are probably not acting in a manner that is “illegal,” and YOU get a fine when you stop in a bus stop, because YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY DOING MASS TRANSIT. You are driving one or two people in a car. MASS TRANSIT IS GOOD, EVEN IF IT IS PRIVATE.

For the earth and other living things.

[Valleywag]

The post I Just Don’t Get Why Everyone Is Mad At The Google Bus appeared first on Happy Nice Time People.

What's cold and sharp and bled all over?

(By a friend of this redditor, no name listed)

THE IRON THRONE!

(Eh? EH??)

 

So gather your dire wolves, dragons, and impaled heads on stakes, my friends, because WINTER IS COMING:

(Posted here, baker Anna Tyler Cakes)

 

If impaled head stake cake pops aren't your thing, then how about this fabulous Weirwood heart tree?

(By Chelsea of The Inn at the Crossroads)

It's always nice to see a baker branching out.

 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that a show named Game of Thrones has so many throne cakes - but what IS surprising is how awesome this one is:

(By Sweet Ruby Cakes)

The crown, the chained dragon, the carved wood detail? YES, PLEASE.

 

Oh, you need a place for birthday candles? Nooo problem:

(By Sugar and Spice)

C'mon. That is GENIUS.

 

Ok, enough thrones. How about some house sigil cupcakes?

(By Regali Kitchen)

 

Or everyone's favorite character?

(By Au pays de Candice)

Those airbrushed flames are perfection.

 

Of course, I know Daenerys isn't everyone's favorite character, so let me quickly cover all the other potential candidates:

(By Cake Retro)

Any questions?

 

(There was a fan at MegaCon last week who turned his wheelchair into the Iron Throne, and then dressed as Tyrion, complete with false legs. It was so. cool.)

House Targaryen does have the sweetest emblem, though:

(By Cake Central Member bikemom3)

 

And it's hard to beat the mother of dragons, if only because she has the best stuff in her closet:

(By Cake Central Member attackofthecakes)

Closet, chest... CLOSE ENOUGH.

 

Some couples are even having dragon eggs made for their wedding cakes, which is a surprisingly elegant touch of geekery:

(By Sophie Taylor, found here)

 

And speaking of elegant, ALL OF THIS:

(By Cake Haute Couture)

From the cobblestone board to the chain mail to the sculpted emblems, I'm pretty sure George R.R. Martin would need at least 300 pages to describe this cake.

(OH YES I DID.)

 

And finally, it's time for me to come clean: I've never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones.
But I will say this:

(By Choccywoccydoodah)

You gonna eat that?

 

Curious which bakers in your area have been featured here on Sweets? Then check out our Sunday Sweets Directory!

Shopping Amazon through these links (USA, UK, Canada) gives us a small percentage of your purchases, but at no cost to you. Thank you for helping keep Cake Wrecks up and running!

So my son has a test soon on the Bill of Rights.

Lucky for me, Wreckerators make explaining them easy!

 

Freedom of Assembly

Even if no one else understands why you're there.

 

The Right To Bear Arms

He'd like his back, please.

 

Freedom of Speech

Remember, just because you can say something doesn't mean you should...

 

Freedom of Religion

AMEN.

 

The right to a speedy, public trial.

Er, that's "PUBLIC" -- with an "L". o.0

 

No Unreasonable Seizures

I can't decide whether the sight of this cake causes seizures, or it was made by someone having one.

Lucky me, works either way.

 

The Right Against Self-Incrimination

One should always plead the fifth after drinking one...

 

No Cruel And Unusual Punishments

Let's see... Starting a lifetime fear of dolls:

✓ Cruel
✓ Unusual
✓ Punishing

Nailed it!

Y'know, I think my son's test is going to be a piece of cake.

 

I proudly assert my right to thank Heather P., Robyn D., L&K K., Kathy K., Ashley, Sarah S., Kelsey V., and Rachel M. for having strong enough constitutions to take these pictures.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

If you’ve ever seen a Wes Anderson movie, you’ve probably noticed that he really, really loves the old-timey storybook aesthetic (so much so that he even writes like one). Part of the reason Royal Tenenbaums is regarded by many (mainly by me) as his best movie is that it gave him the perfect sandbox to play in, considering almost every character in it wrote a book.

Some clever Reddit user compiled them all:

What’s most impressive about them to me is that they all manage to capture that “seventies/eighties textbook” aesthetic, but in mostly different ways. It’s easy to imagine myself writing “Lindsay Olson has epic boobs” on the inside cover during social studies (what, dude, she totally did).

For me, the obvious stand out is “Dudley’s World.”

Can the boy tell time?

Oh, my Lord, no.

If you were wondering about the kid who played Dudley, his name is Stephen Lea Sheppard, and despite his name he did not go on to become an assassin. He’s 31 now and lives in his native Canada, where he writes video game reviews for Vice. He appeared in Freaks and Geeks before Tenenbaums, but aside from a commercial, hasn’t acted since.

The Canadian magazine Maclean’s recently checked in on him and found out that his early years weren’t easy — in addition to relentless bullying, he endured the cancer-related death of his father, a recovering alcoholic, and had to live with family friends while his mother went to school to become a midwife. After he impressed Paul Feig and Judd Apatow just by being himself, and they wrote the role of Harris just for him, Wes Anderson came calling. But while his Freaks and Geeks co-stars went on to A-list fame, Sheppard flubbed auditions and made just one commercial. These days, the 29-year-old moderates gaming forums and writes video game reviews for Vice. [Flavorwire]

I’m glad he quit acting and seems to have become a well-adjusted adult. I shudder to think what would’ve happened had he stayed in LA and become a Scientologist or something. A three-named, former child actor Scientologist is almost guaranteed to be a murderer. Maybe instead of doing away with child actors completely, as I’ve long advocated, we could just make a law that they have to be Canadian.

I don’t live very well. I’m poor in a town that’s seen better days. I’m poor in a town that closes up as soon as it’s dark out. I’m poor in a town that is wracked by paranoia and fear and sees gun control as a nebulous evil scheme perpetrated by faraway cities. To the extent that I have an inner monologue, my prevailing concern is alienation. In a town so private and quiet, it’s very easy to think I’m the only person who doesn’t live well.

Which of course is bullshit. Most people don’t live very well. They just hide it. They’re poor and lonely in their apartments, or their houses, or their cars, and they drift around their respective niches on the outskirts. But still it’s easy to make the mistake of feeling special, as if I’m the only twenty-something who’s poor and lives in the sticks.

I’m on the internet too much. I spew thousands of words on bands that will never play in my town, and I say phrases I’ve never heard anybody use in real life, like “avant-garde” or “outsider art” or “content.” And I’m just hollering into the void. It’s all alienation, the whole way down.

How do I cope? I read sheriff and police reports.

I read them because my town is uncomfortably quiet, because its character doesn’t present itself out in the open. During my phase when I was basically a drifter with a student loan, I’d go out on the weekend and walk around for sometimes 8 or 9 hours, looking for something worth photographing. Just waiting for something to happen. And almost nothing ever did. I never got any idea how people lived, why the place existed. I still thought I was special: the lone survivor of economic apocalypse.

Reading the sheriff’s report levels the playing field. It’s not a newspaper. They don’t have to sell or distribute. It’s not a PR firm. There’s no image to maintain. It’s just an honest depiction of what the sheriff sees when people call. And the narrative synopsis of a particular call is never misleading. It’s how people live in this town, with the artifice stripped away.

Beneath the quietness, it gets dark right away.

There’s a predictable pattern of the daily narratives. As much as half of every report was accidental 911 calls by children. And many of the calls were dead ends, where someone saw, for example, an unfamiliar RV across the street a few hours ago. People were always overeager to report innocuous hooliganism. Several reports were just disinterested follow-ups on teenagers who were caught with beer or cigarettes in the high school parking lot.

So there was a lot of white noise. Accidental 911 call. Johnny has a carton of cigarettes. Accidental 911 call. Dog in the road. Accidental 911 call. Transient apprehended buying cigarettes for a “Johnny.” But then out jumps strangeness again.

The result is a very specific picture of a town. There are recurring names, of repo men and feuding neighbors. There are recurring themes. Often, it’s escape through drugs or alcohol. As well, a kind of paranoid ghostliness, a sense that people isolated outside of town let their imaginations run wild when a tree branch falls over.

Many of the entries from surrounding communities are the only significant public record of people so isolated that they barely exist, farmers who no longer do a lot of farming and people whose world hasn’t changed much since the Carter administration. People with signs that say things like “STICK YOUR FIRE TAX GOVERNOR MOONBEAM” and “SOCIALISM = COMMUNISM.” Places where the only concession to modernity is a satellite dish.

Entries from the outskirts of town are usually startling. After the comfortable noise of kids calling 911 and Johnny with his Marlboros, you’ll find one near the county line and hope it’s about a pet llama that cries too much or a cow blocking the road, because if it’s not, the entire first act of a Lynch movie just happened. Someone dangerous who appeared and then was gone. A nude woman standing on a secluded hill. A man dressed all in black with his head hanging low. Property disputes are a pleasant relief after a few entries of rural terror.

The dichotomy is striking. In the town itself, people are quiet, and generally afraid of rising crime rates. But out in the country, where there are houses not meant to ever be found, there’s a sense of lawlessness, where people have been too hardened by rain and fire to care if Johnny stole a beer from the convenience store. Anything illegal that can happen with a chainsaw happens in the country. Chainsaws and shotguns come up almost as often as people in the rural reports.

But really, that kind of doom doesn’t come up often. More common is people doing their best in an area hit hard by the recession. People who got desperate and stayed desperate. People who are too concerned with staying above water to worry about alienation or loneliness and must accept it.

Looking at the realities of crime in a small town is a look over the emotional fence of those places where nothing ever seems to happen, where isolation is almost encouraged. It’s what a town looks like without the selective filtering of a Wikipedia article or a nice stock photo. And there’s something beautiful about that.

The post The Strange Poetry of Police Reports appeared first on Happy Nice Time People.

Baffling calendars, made-up quotes, and ominous livers underlie the story of Julius Caesar’s death Julius Caesar, the famous dictator, was assassinated in 44 B.C. on the “Ides” of March. We’ve all heard of the Ides—but what exactly were they, and what made them so ominous?

Sorting Out the Roman Calendar

Common sense doesn’t rule our daily lives; culture and habit do. Proof lies in the Roman method of describing calendar dates. You could not make this more unreasonable if you tried. Every month had an Ides (Idus in Latin), signifying a day (although, to complicate things, the noun is plural) in the middle of the month...sort of. In the longest months—in the calendar that Caesar reformed only a few years before his death—there were 31 days in March, May, July, and October, and the Ides fell on the 15^th. In all the other (shorter) months, the Ides fell on the 13^th. And it gets worse; that’s not even touching on the Kalends, the Nones, and an impossible system of counting back from fixed days. For example, the day after the Ides of March, the 16th, was expressed as “17 days before the first day of April.” (Why 17? Because both March 16 and April 1 are included in the count.) This dating system is the bane of Latin students everywhere. The Wikipedia entry on the Roman calendar isn’t bad, if you can follow it. At any rate, the Ides per se were not all that special, but they got a lot of attention after Caesar’s assassination.

Really, The Ides Are Shakespeare’s Fault

Despite Caesar’s fame, the only reason most of us have heard of the “Ides of March” (now that everybody doesn’t have to read Latin) is that Shakespeare made them famous in his play Julius Caesar. In real life, did anyone ever really say to Julius Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March?” Not exactly. Roman sources such as Suetonius, Plutarch, Cicero, and Valerius Maximus report that an Etruscan soothsayer named Spurinna warned Caesar about danger on (or leading up to and including) the Ides. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, published in translation in 1579, was especially popular. The text was first translated from Greek into French, and then by Thomas North into English, so the ancient text was a bit diluted by the time it influenced Shakespeare. Interesting aside: in 1864, John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, acted with his brothers in a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York. It was probably Shakespeare’s decision to turn Spurinna into a mysterious figure in a crowd—issuing a clipped command about the Ides, in a loud shrill voice—that kept the term active (Act I, Scene II).

How Did the Soothsayer Know?

How did the soothsayer Spurinna know the Ides would be a bad day for Caesar? Roman soothsayers were in the business of checking out omens and portents in order to identify lucky and unlucky times for private and public activities. This particular seer is identified in ancient sources as an haruspex, one who could assess the good or bad implications of the entrails of sacrificial animals. The name Spurinna is Etruscan, and Etruscans were known for their skills with guts. This life-sized Etruscan bronze sheep’s liver unearthed in Italy in the 1870s probably served as a training tool for seers; it is divided into regions, possibly reflecting the heavens, inscribed with the names of gods. Livers and other organs were read for signs of divine approval or disapproval. Discoloration, defect, oozing, bad smell, failure to burn properly, and many other clues provided indications of divine ill will, and different regions of an organ might point the interpreter in different, usually bad, directions. However, the details of this once essential practice are now mostly lost. Haruspices also paid attention to strange animal behavior and unusual weather. But since, according to the Roman historian Suetonius, Spurinna warned Caesar while the seer was performing a sacrifice, presumably there was something defective in the organs of the unlucky animal. Around this same time, at a sacrifice conducted by Caesar (perhaps on the very day of his assassination, or on the occasion when he first sat in public in a kingly purple robe), the sacrificial ox was missing its heart—a terrible sign! Furthermore, during a sacrifice the next day, his sacrificial victim was missing part of its liver (says Cicero in On Divination 1.119). Of course, although a sacrificial victim with a disgusting or missing organ was taken very seriously, there were also plenty of opportunities to twist interpretations for political or personal reasons.

Why Didn’t Caesar Beware the Ides?

In hindsight it might seem a bit odd for Caesar to have disregarded the warning about the Ides, but the dictator had in fact discounted many a divine warning before, including plenty of bad news about the Ides...keeping in mind that many of the reported omens probably came later, with hindsight. He followed protocol, but often didn't believe in, or just thought he was above, the negative messages from the gods. One bad sign did worry him. The night before the Ides, his wife had a dream about his bloody murder that upset them both. This delayed his attending the Senate the fateful morning of his death, but his friend Decimus Brutus—confusingly, not his more famous, deceitful friend Marcus Brutus—ridiculed seers and dreams and talked him into coming to the meeting place (Plutarch, 64.2–5). There he was stabbed 23 times (Plutarch, 66). As Caesar entered the Senate, he supposedly said to Spurinna, “You realize the Ides have come?” (As in, “How good a seer are you?”) Spurinna’s reply: “You realize they have not yet gone?” (As in, “Just wait!”) That swift retort, more dramatic in the ancient sources than the third-person statements of warning, also survives in Shakespeare (Act III, Scene I), but is not as famous. Moral of the story: “If the sacrificial liver looks bad, stay home.”

What to Do the Week of the Ides

It would be appropriate to muse on the Ides of March during a visit to the Getty Villa, inspired by the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum—very possibly the getaway villa of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. The villa was buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, and its ground plan inspired J. Paul Getty when he commissioned the original Getty Museum. Perhaps even visit the Villa on the Ides...if you dare.

What to Read Next

On Julius Caesar Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, 81.2–3 Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar, 63–66 Valerius Maximus, Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 8.11.2. Here's an English translation. Cicero, On Divination, 1.119 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar On Haruspicy (aka what a haruspex did) Interesting evaluation of the warnings to Caesar and a consideration of whether astrology was a skill of Spurinna’s (verdict: no): John T. Ramsey, 2000. “’Beware the Ides of March!’ An Astrological Prediction?” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 50 (2): 440–454 Analysis of the Piacenza Liver L. Bouke van der Meer, 1987. The Bronze Liver of Piacenza: Analysis of a Polytheistic Structure

appendixjournal:

Tips for brain health from 1597 (tip #1: avoid eating “All manner of Braines”).

mmhmm yes yes got to keep that brain chuggin’ 

*eats sage, but not too much*

As the Captain of the Morning Links, I read a lot of headlines. Upworthy headlines, snarky headlines, poorly written headlines—they all blend together. The internet is a Headline Farm, and clicks are saltwater. Headline Smasher generates fake headlines from real ones, and the results are absurd, gibberish, sometimes hilarious, and surprisingly poetic. It’s easier to recognize the stupid tropes in online media when you see them amped up to 11 at Headline Smasher. “Everything You Need to Be Stopped” sounds totally plausible when the real world is spewing out garbage like 29 Life-Changing Quesadillas You Need to Know About (for real). Who clicks on that?? And how close are they to clicking on some of these gems:

How I Learned to Stop Her Crying
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart
The Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley Can’t Stop #Skywriting
Goodbye, GameCube Controller. It’s been Raining Rocks in Sicily
Um. How Close Are We to Being Photoshopped Into Cover Models
WATCH: How to Eat in Real Life
What’s the Weirdest Places You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

If you could get paid to make these up I would finally have career goals. Your move, Ranker.

FOLLOW Vince on Twitter. FAN US on Facebook. SUBSCRIBE to the Frotcast. NOMINATE for Comments of the Week.

Man at grappling contest is farted on, causing him to both submit and vomit |FilmDrunk|

15 Jon Hamm birthday GIFs that make straight men question their sexuality |UPROXX|

Best fails of the week |UPROXX Video|

‘True Detective’ Season 1 finale discussion |Warming Glow|

Mr. Met joined Twitter today and the results were underwhelming |With Leather|

‘Snowpiercer’ has a release U.S. date, hold all my calls |Gamma Squad|

Peter King pear-shaped |Kissing Suzy Kolber|

Frank Ocean tells Chipotle what you’ve always wanted to tell Corporate America |Smoking Section|

15 things you should do now that ‘True Detective’ is over |Holy Taco|

The Wolf of Sesame Street (NSFW) |death&taxes|

Colorado collects $2 million in recreational marijuana taxes in first month |BuzzFeed|

The Justin Bieber deposition tape is a modern masterpiece |Pajiba|

Why did Sandy Hook happen? Because Nancy Lanza was an idiot survivalist? |The Superficial|

A cereal commercial just spoiled ‘Amazing Spider-Man 2′ for you |IDLYITW|

Horrible prank video ever features an idiot robbing people at an ATM… until justice is served |BroBible|

10 things you didn’t know about beer |Guyism|

Black bear climbs across a rope for food. learns the hard way that he’s a bear |The Chive|

26 famous people (allegedly) killed by the Illuminati |Ranker|

Here is a thing for you to learn today: The latest craze to hit the beautiful elites of Manhattan isn't plucked from the runways of Fashion Week, it's ripped from the sale section of the Lands End catalog. The trend—dubbed "normcore" because it involves dressing up like a "normal" (and/or a guy named Norm)—consists of bland, blank, or cornily name-branded '90s "mall clothes." Half-zip mock-turtlenecks. Chunky athletic socks with Tevas. The kind of ill-proportioned hoodies you buy at the drug store for $4.99. Uncle chic.

Read more...

Cliff House , c 1900 .

It looks like the house photobombed the picture

Over the weekend, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan took the paper to task for its characterization of Wendy Davis on a recent Times magazine front cover. In case you missed it, the cover featured a close-up of Davis's face with the captions: "CAN WENDY DAVIS HAVE IT ALL?" and "A Texas-Size Tale of Ambition, Motherhood, and Political Mythmaking." It came on the heels of their bizarro Hillary Clinton cover just a few weeks before, which portrayed the former First Lady as a leering, fleshy Death Star dominating politics with her "gravitational pull."

Read more...

Few things are more luridly delightful than midcentury food porn—fishy Jell-Os, mayonnaise frosting, all canned everything, foods ground up and then moulded into the shapes of other foods. If you've ever flipped through your grandma's post-war Betty Crocker cookbook, then you know what I'm grimacing about. These are recipes from leaner times, grounded in thriftiness and imperishability and resourcefulness. And, yes, Hot Dog Aspic Ambrosia is fun to gawk at in 2014, but what would happen...if you actually ate the food? Some friends and I decided to find out.

Read more...

The best original song from a movie released in 2013 won’t win Best Original Song this Sunday. That’s because “Please Mr. Kennedy” wasn’t technically eligible, because it’s a blah blah blah UH OH. Even though the unstoppable snowball-rolling-down-a-mountain that is “Let It Go” is going to win, it would have been nice if Llewyn Davis had taken the slot that went to U2′s snot-rag of a song, “Ordinary Love.”

Oh well, we should be used to this by now, the real best song losing to the technical Best Song. It’s happened time and time again since the Academy Awards debuted the category in 1934. Here are 15 soundtrack classics (not including Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which won Original Song Score, for some reason) that were either nominated for Best Original Song and lost, or were ignored altogether. That thing you DON’T do, Oscars, is give an Academy Award to Madonna over the Oneders.

“A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles (A Hard Day’s Night)
What actually won: “Chim Chim Cher-ee” by Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins)

“Springtime for Hitler” by the Springtime for Hitler Ensemble (The Producers)
What actually won: “The Windmills of Your Mind” by Noel Harrison (The Thomas Crown Affair)

“Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield (Superfly)
What actually won: “The Morning After” by Maureen McGovern (The Poseidon Adventure)

“Waste of Time” by the Stains (Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains)
What actually won: “Up Where We Belong” by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes

“Rainbow Connection” by Kermit the Frog (The Muppet Movie)
What actually won: “It Goes Like It Goes” by Jennifer Warnes (Norma Rae)

400 square feet of cabin in Wisconsin.