Smiley dog.
I am so amped to see Toasties tonight! Toasties are driving in from ROCHESTER. My heart is full. Also, I am probably very joyful as you read this, because I absolutely love flying when I don’t have kids to look after, and I have THREE different planes to be on today and a copy of Hollywood Babylon.
You know I would NEVER not link to an article about a serial killer, esp not one this good (the article, not the serial killer):
By late morning, the newsboys for the Daily Statesman were on Congress Avenue, hawking the Christmas Day edition, which had been reprinted overnight. “Blood! Blood! Blood!” screamed the new front-page headline, the ink scarcely dry on the paper. “The Demons Have Transferred Their Thirst for Blood to White People!”
People read the story, over and over, in disbelief. Even those who had already been told details of the killings gasped when they got to the part of the story describing the firewood laid across young Eula Phillips’s body—“evidently used for the most hellish and damnable of purposes,” noted the reporter.
Friend of The Toast Katie Heaney, now dating a WOMAN, gasp! (mazel tov, Katie!!!) has discovered that, well, she needs new clothes:
As my identity has shifted, so, too, has the audience I have in mind when I get dressed. While I still want my straight friends to think I look great, I really, really want my queer female friends to think I look great. I also just want to look queer. At least more so. At least enough so that when I see a pair of lesbians on the street in Brooklyn, it is possible they will look at me and recognize me as a card-carrying member of the club.
While I know that queer women can wear any style they want and be no more or less queer because of it, there are some signifiers. But my tattoos are minimal, and my face is unpierced; I am pretty sure I lack the edge to pull off sweatpant joggers, and most hats just look stupid on me. If I want to look a little gayer at a formal event, I could wear a suit instead of a dress. But on ordinary days (which is most of them), I’m still trying to figure out how to look both a little gayer and like myself. (Mostly, so far, it is in the shoes.)
no:
When applying for a job, why can’t we send a link to our LinkedIn page rather than a traditional resume? There’s more information on my page than I could ever fit on a one-page resume, and it looks great.
NOPE:
Like the other apprentice, Faurot felt a little uncomfortable climbing into bed with Lauer-Manenti, but she had more faith in her teacher than in her own instincts. “The trust was so intense,” she says. “I would never question her—why would Lady Ruth want to hurt me?”
And, in fact, nothing happened. But the next time they slept together, Faurot says, Lauer-Manenti spooned her, telling her how cute she was as she pulled her in close. Another time, Faurot says, her teacher rubbed her foot up and down her thigh. She would let her hand rest on Faurot’s breast or press her thigh between Faurot’s legs. Faurot says Lauer-Manenti constantly commented on her body, saying things like, “If I was your husband, Holly, I would love how little your feet are.”
When I was a little kid, I went on a protest march with my aunt that involved yelling FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND and to this day, I find myself yelling that at my laptop sometimes:
A Northern Irish woman who bought pills over the internet to induce an abortion has been given a suspended prison sentence.
The 21-year-old pleaded guilty to procuring her own abortion by using a poison, and of supplying a poison with intent to procure a miscarriage, and was given a three-month sentence suspended for two years.
Mallory will take care of you:
Q. Into my (maybe straight) friend and co-worker: This year, I met a new co-worker (I’ll call her Sara), whom I immediately had a crush on. We quickly became really good friends, and I didn’t want to mess up our friendship, so I crushed my crush. Skip to a few months later and I find out the feelings are reciprocated, but Sara has not been attracted to women before and is confused and cautious. At this point, we work together (not in the same division, fortunately), she’s one of my closest friends, and we hang out almost every day, but our friendship is filled with sexual tension and flirtation. She doesn’t know that I know how she feels, but I’m scared to act. I fear that our friendship will be hurt or that I’ll get hurt because she doesn’t want to act on these feelings. I know at this point I need to do something—what should I do?
Dear, cherished Friend of The Toast Carvell Wallace (he has a piece in the works for us which is…maybe the best thing we’ve ever had? GET EXCITED) on The Church of St. John Coltrane:
I’m not the only person who has had a spiritual experience listening to A Love Supreme. In 1966, a young musician and son of a Pentecostal minister named Franzo Wayne King heard John Coltrane play at the Jazz Workshop. King would later refer to this night as his “sound baptism,” and soon after Coltrane’s death in 1967, King and his wife formed a small church congregation based on the idea that the saxophonist was so badass that he might just be an incarnation of God on earth. This was not a run-of-the mill idea for a church, but in the city that gave us the People’s Temple and the Church of Satan, a Coltrane devotion constituted a relatively mild and harmless form of religious divergence. More than a place for music, the church, situated in the historic Fillmore District, became a nexus for political action, community healing, charity, and anti-racist work. In 1982, King met with an archbishop of the African Orthodox Church and gained recognition for his congregation. The result was the Saint John Coltrane Church, San Francisco, which is the only African Orthodox Church for which Coltrane’s own words constitute the liturgy and his music, the scriptures.
pictures of the Chernobyl cleanup
The BFG is my fav Roald Dahl novel (the man was Problematic with a capital P but I love his children’s books and always will) and I am dead now:
I’m so happy that PEI (that’s Prince Edward Island, to some of you) is finally being forced to get its act together in terms of providing abortions:
In 1986, PEI’s Therapeutic Abortion Committee was disbanded following protests by anti-abortion groups. For the next nearly 30 years, government officials there agreed to pay for abortions in Moncton or Halifax, but declined to provide them on the island itself. The costs of travel were, naturally, not publicly funded, meaning that the burden of the restrictions fell on poor people, as it always does.
All that changed today thanks to the work of the Abortion Access Now PEI,which formed in 2011. Earlier this year, they warned the PEI government that they planned to sue on the grounds that the province’s policies were unconstitutional.
On Thursday, PEI officials announced they were moving to make surgical abortions available, rather than fight the legal challenge. Health officials have been directed to begin planning a reproductive healthcare center that provides abortions.
I saw this and was just, oh, let’s not forget this is great for literal stalkers too:
Now a newly launched Web site may provide Tinder with its latest existential crisis. A new site, Swipe Buster, allows people to see for themselves whether their significant other (or boss, or friend, or ex-flame, or parent) is active on the app. For a $5 fee, users can input into a search field the first name, age, and location of anyone whom they want to check up on. Swipe Buster subsequently retrieves the data from Tinder’s application programming interface, or A.P.I., which holds all of this information about its users. (Tinder’s A.P.I. and database are public, making it easily accessible and sortable for anyone with a certain understanding of computer code. It is common among technology companies to have open A.P.I.s, so other companies can build ancillary products around their core experience.) Then the site displays the users who fit those criteria, allowing users to see their photos, when they logged on, and whether they are seeking out men or women.
