So my friend Googled “muffin top” just now for some reason, and noticed that the timing of Google’s indexing of the slang term’s wikipedia entry (the #1 result) was unfortunate for one young lady. Be careful out there, pranksters.
2 days ago • 5 notes
Cat food store cat at Myrtle and Washington
The first rule of being a dealer is “don’t sample the merchandise”
Emily Gould has been eating a lot of cats lately.
2 days ago • 12 notes
Financial news doesn’t get any more PUNK ROCK than this.
(Also: anyone looking for an example for their very-late social media article, you’re welcome.)
3 days ago • 2 notesI loved reading this, but it’s so parallel with so many culture essays about porn that I kept waiting for the “Are we going to become so accustomed to getting our cute-fix online that we stop wanting or needing real-world flesh-and-blood babies?” question that never came. You know, the old “Porn doesn’t want to have a talk about where the relationship is going/the hahaha baby doesn’t crap all over your house” argument.
So, I’ll make it: I don’t pay cute pictures and videos on the internet to give me a “cutegasm.” I pay them to leave.
3 days ago • 5 notesInitial reaction: Awww.
Then rationality kicks in: helicopter parenting to the extreme — that child must be a nightmare.
Then absurdity kicks in: what’s he going to do when she gets her first period? (“Take a close look at Joe Girardi’s mouth…”)
“About 100 law enforcement agents and others spent days scouring dense vines and marshes around the baby’s home in a remote, makeshift community of dirt roads, tin-roof shacks and old mobile homes.”
Read the whole thing, the story gets weirder and weirder (the missing child from 1987 was NEVER FOUND??) Chipley is about an hour from Tallahassee near the Alabama and Georgia borders, smack in the middle of a vast stretch of the Florida panhandle that cannot be driven through without “Dueling Banjos” from Deliverance going through one’s head (and usually hummed aloud, even though it’s such a cliche as to be always embarrassing to hum aloud — the scenery simply demands it.) It’s an intensely depressing, remote dead zone (cellphone and otherwise) where the only industry seems to be state prisons, designated by miles of roadside razor wire and out-of-place-looking guard towers rising above the pine trees. When I think of Chipley (and surrounding areas), I think of winding, stagnant rivers of dark brown tannin-ed water and a foreboding sense of decay — paradoxical, since it for all appearances, nothing ever grew there in the first place. The tiny towns are disturbingly segregated (often on a town-by-town basis), the schools failing, and many homes don’t have phones, electricity, or automobiles. The automatic assumption, driving through in 2009, is that this area has been ravaged by meth or something, and maybe it has, but it was ravaged by something else first. It seems like it’s always been the way it is now. It’s this huge part of Florida that nobody even knows about. There’s an unusual local accent/dialect, (which I can “do,” though “lapse into” is a better way of putting it), that I guarantee you have never heard on TV or in movies, which for some reason seem to give all Southern characters an upper-class Raleigh or Atlanta accent. (I can think of exactly two exceptions right now, neither of which are Florida panhandle but are at least closer: Edie Falco in Sunshine State and Mary Kay Place in Sweet Home Alabama.)
Anyway, I’m a little bit over-obsessed with the Florida panhandle, I guess, but if you’re a laid-off person with a gift for photography and a curiosity about forgotten corners of America, get your ass down to Chipley, basically.
3 days ago • 7 notesHere are some venues you might want to try:
- Mediaite
- Guest of a Guest
- ASSME
- BlackBook (Why not?)
Oh please, Gawker has been actively (even over-actively) trying to recruit and offer jobs to women for MONTHS now. Women keep turning them down. If there’s a story, it’s “Why is an editor position at Gawker no longer as appealing to a woman writer as it used to be?” Maybe there’s no answer, maybe it’s a coincidence, but if it was ever sexism it hasn’t been for a long, long time.
5 days ago • 13 notesHow to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. I did not know this trick. Start at :40.
5 days ago • 50 notesONN: Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck. This is too funny to even pull a quote out. Amazing. Just watch.
Daniel Radosh should consider changing his long-running “Why Not Bil Keane?” obit feature to “Why Not Glenn Beck?” (Like, when BK dies.)
5 days ago • 5 notesThis has to be true. Once my parents finally relented on their fundy Halloween ban, I trick-or-treated alone (with my brother and our friends) in the EIGHTIES. That was the whole fun of it. The idea that parents would have accompanied a child as old as 10 in suburbia in 1963 is just not realistic, especially for the Drapers. Hell, we had the run of the neighborhood (including a lake with a canoe we could use and acres of woods) every weekend day and evening until the street lights came on from age 8 up. Kids had a lot more autonomy back then.
1 week ago • 3 notes“So I become, once more, the kind of person I can’t bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn’t project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood. This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are “off-message” because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types.”
Emily Gould has written the essay of the year. Not just an essay, a clarion call. To put it Pentecostal-y: I feel convicted in my heart! But also, it’s an idea whose time has come, an idea that’s been in the zeitgeist, but nobody has been able to untangle it quite so compellingly until now. There’s nothing new about oppressed group (and I feel a need to add a big “or whatever” to that when it comes to women, in lieu of even more dismissive quotation marks) in-fighting (See Tyler Perry on Sunday’s 60 Minutes), but the whole “I hate women who don’t speak for women exactly like me…but, wait, men don’t think things like that!” paradox has finally been explored in an un-obnoxious way. And, like, wow, shit is well-written. If I didn’t already know this girl, I would be like “I MUST KNOW THIS GIRL. NOW.” God, it’s so smart. I wish I’d written it. Please, everyone, even BOYS, read the whole thing now. Awe.
1 week ago • 22 notesSaw this on TV last night. Every time I watch it, I laugh. “Don’t vote for Mike Bloomberg because he’s ugly!”
1 week ago • 0 notes
So true. To this I would add something that’s always driven me nuts: only one of them has a living mother at any point in the story, and she (Sleeping Beauty’s mother) has no lines. (Also, the villains are all other women, with the exception of Aladdin.)
1 week ago • 110 notesLast night I had a brief conversation with a person who has only ever seen a few minutes of Mad Men. It went like this:
Me: Tomorrow’s going to be brutal since I’m saving Mad Men for (other friend) tomorrow night and all the blogs are going to put whatever happens in their *headlines* like they did last week with “Betty Finds the Box”
Person: What’s the box?
Me: Oh, Don Draper keeps a box in a locked drawer full of all the evidence of his past life and real identity — photos, dog tags, a deed of divorce…
Person: Why would he do that?
Me: Oh, crap. It sounds so ridiculous when you try to explain it.
Person: Are you having that thing where you realize now that your life revolves around a stupid soap opera?
Me: Well, my life doesn’t revolve — but, yeah.
2 weeks ago • 28 notes