Lindsay Robertson

So my friend Googled “muffin top” just now for some...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38:34 -0500

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.

thingsiatethatilove: Cat food store cat at Myrtle and...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:12:19 -0500

thingsiatethatilove:

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.

Financial news doesn’t get any more PUNK ROCK than...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:20:40 -0500

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.)

Addicted to Cute (Vanity Fair)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

Addicted to Cute (Vanity Fair):

I 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.

Joe Girardi Gets Braces Because of Promise to 5-year-old Daughter

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:44:00 -0500

Joe Girardi Gets Braces Because of Promise to 5-year-old Daughter:

Initial 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…”)

Fla Baby Missing for 5 Days Found Alive Under Babysitter's Bed

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:45:00 -0500

Fla Baby Missing for 5 Days Found Alive Under Babysitter's Bed:

“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.

If You're Going To Pitch A Story About Gawker Being Sexist

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:30:00 -0500

youngmanhattanite:

Here 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.

How to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. I did not know...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:12:47 -0500

How to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. I did not know this trick. Start at :40.

ONN: Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck....

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:38:00 -0500

ONN: 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.)

Mad Men Anachronism: Kids Trick or Treated Alone in 1963

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:14:08 -0400

This 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.

They Don't Speak For Us (But Who Cares?)

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:58:55 -0400

“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.

Saw this on TV last night. Every time I watch it, I laugh....

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:49:51 -0400

Saw this on TV last night. Every time I watch it, I laugh. “Don’t vote for Mike Bloomberg because he’s ugly!”

getthatlook: Oh, my god! Nothing more can be said.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:21:49 -0400

getthatlook:

Oh, my god!

Nothing more can be said.

So true. To this I would add something that’s always...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:41:56 -0400

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.)

Mad Men Might Be A Dumb Soap Opera, Guys

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:49:48 -0400

Last 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.

My Special Thoughts About Amelia

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:43:00 -0400

Probably for procrastinatory reasons, I woke up this morning and decided to go and see the movie Amelia at my neighborhood movie theater by myself. It was just me and like four old couples. Anyway, it was bad, of course. It’s kind of heartbreaking that nobody I know is ever going to see it, however, because it’s one of those movies you want to tear apart with someone. Anyway, some things about Amelia:

* Biopics: seriously, is there just one guy out there who writes every biopic? They’re all terrible in all the exact same ways!

* There’s this pivotal scene when Richard Gere reads a letter that’s supposed to be “old” (though it can only actually be like four years old, tops), and in order to convey its age, the prop people actually did that thing where you burn the paper with a lighter in several places around the edges. You get a really good look at this letter, too - the camera keeps coming back to it, this piece of paper that has very obvious burn marks all over it. It’s so weird. I’m pretty sure Hollywood can make paper look old better than the average middle schooler. They have that technology now.

* The biggest mystery inherent in this story is not what happened to Amelia after her plane went down, but on her many 19-hour trips, WHERE AND HOW AND IN OR ON WHAT DID AMELIA PEE???????

* It’s very hard to watch a 2-hour movie of a pretty lady trying as hard as she possibly can to look as ugly as possible. It’s painful. I don’t know exactly how a person can act like they have huge gigantic horse teeth, but props to Hillary Swank for pulling it off.

* I’m not going to look it up, but I find it very hard to believe that on her first trans-atlantic flight, Amelia and her co-passenger both almost fell out of the plane, and were each hanging out at one point, because a door came open.

* I also find it hard to believe that Amelia Earhart took Eleanor Roosevelt on an impromptu late-night flight around DC one night after dinner at the White House, just for the hell of it.

* WE GET IT, MOVIE, THE LITTLE BOY NAMED GORE IS GORE VIDAL. Matthew Weiner could have taught this movie something about period piece subtlety, and that’s saying something. I’m surprised little five year old Gore didn’t have any lines like “Gee, I sure do like writing, and once I find out what sex is, I’m going to have it with men!”

* Um, there are parts of the movie where Amelia narrates over scenes when she’s flying, and the words she says are in some cases recognizably poetry? Like famous poetry? Like, specifically: Fog by Carl Sandburg is in there. I guess it would be awkward for her to say “copyright Carl Sandburg, 1919” or whatever, but I fear a whole generation of young girls is going to think Amelia Earhart wrote those lines, like my friend’s little sister did with the saying “If you love something, set it free…” and Demi Moore’s character in Indecent Proposal.

* This movie, and Hillary Swank, portray Amelia Earhart as so perpetually sunny and witty (though she’s not actually ever witty, she just says things with this self-satisfied smirk that conveys to us that she’s supposed to be witty. I just realized that kind of describes me too, but whatever), and she’s so totally PERFECT and ADORED all of the time, that by the end of the movie you hate her and want to punch her in the face so much that you’re not even sad when she dies. It almost seems like that was the point of her performance, actually, to get us all over Amelia Earhart’s death, as a nation. It worked.

It’s taken me almost ten years up North to find a hat I...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:57:00 -0400

It’s taken me almost ten years up North to find a hat I don’t hate. This morning, I fell in love. Everything about this hat is me, including the $12 Target price tag. It reminds me of the people-hunting-hat in Catcher in the Rye, even though I only remember that part by way of Six Degrees of Separation. Anyway: good hat.

YES THIS IS A FASHION POST. (!!) (??) (afjsdkjafksdj!)

"The first thing you need to know is that the internet is amazing."

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:23:24 -0400

““The first thing you need to know is that the internet is amazing.””

- http://www.everythingisterrible.com/2009/10/internet-for-kidz.html

"Interestingly, the name “Lee Garner Junior” has exactly the same number of letters (15) in the..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:20:00 -0400

““Interestingly, the name “Lee Garner Junior” has exactly the same number of letters (15) in the exactly the same places as “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Also, one the technicians in the editing room with Sal and Lee announces that he’s going to “the booth.” This could certainly be a subtle reference to another assassin of presidents with three names: John Wilkes Booth.””

- The insane Mad Men theorists over at Basket of Kisses are a near-daily source of hilarity for me. (See also: the significance of the Bowdoin tshirt worn by Miss Farrell in the last episode. You won’t believe how significant!) I wish this was more famous. It would be really fun to parody.

It’s trying to escape!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:05:32 -0400

It’s trying to escape!