I first got sucked into the weird vortex of Temperance Hymns while checking some facts in a book about the history of the university where I work. The book mentioned that “the program in the closing day exercises of the first term featured children singing, ‘Saloons Must Go’ as they marched determinedly around the room for the benefit of the spectators.”
There’s a cool Portuguese expression called saudade that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. From what I understand it describes a feeling of longing for someone you miss, although it can also express nostalgia for an experience you’ve never actually had. Maybe saudade is what I’ve felt about the backpacking trip across Europe that I didn’t get around to taking after college, first because I didn’t have enough money, then because I didn’t have…
From the Washington Post: "An ordained pastor with the United Methodist Church has been keeping a daily vigil outside the Waller County Sheriff’s Office and County Jail, where Sandra Bland died under disputed circumstances last month. On Monday, Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith let pastor Hannah Bonner know how he feels about her vigil by telling the pastor that she should 'go back to the church of Satan that you run.'…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's previous World of Wonder columns for The Butter can be found here. I’m so excited to talk about this animal, friends! But first: I should mention that my time here on The Butter is sadly coming to an end. I have just one more entry for the World of Wonder column at the end of the month. I’ll be on sabbatical at the small college where I teach, and that means I…
The Government: we need children to run the military Bonzo: welcome to battle school the only thing you need to know about life up here is that we only have two kinds of swearing "fart face" and vicious racial slurs Ender: oh Bonzo: we'll kill you as soon as look at you but we'll never say "shit" Peter: now that Ender has gone to space to become a general, we must do our part to…
The Toast presents a new set of horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant, formerly of The Rumblr. Aries: This month might feel like the ocean; this month might feel like the wind. This is a month for you to float, for you to feel the rhythm of the tides and the tug of the moon, for you to feel your body light as air. Your thoughts might not feel quite solid, and this isn’t a bad…
I. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN When I am driving across the desert at 85 miles per hour just after sunup moving back from Iowa channeling my mother’s father who died on the job trucking liquid nitrogen in three-day stretches around the country I am thinking about how perhaps the most subversive thing a female can do is travel alone. In the past year, during which I have I have lived in five different cities…
I thought I was familiar with every subterranean-race theory; I've even read Jennifer Toth's The Mole People, which is maybe one of the most discredited works of journalism ever published??? (I LOVE IT SO MUCH AND IF YOU EVER WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, or even just Dark Days, TEXT ME IMMEDIATELY). And yet I was not familiar with the Los Angeles Lizard People, until Christian Brown helpfully caulked that particular gap in…
Oh, apparently DuPont knew that the C8 in Teflon was hella bad and didn't care. My dad actually worked at a DuPont factory for a long time (people in my hometown either worked for DuPont or the prisons), but making nylon instead of pans, and does not have cancer as of press time:
Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more…
Previously: The Unchill Bible. Genesis 7:1 Then the Lord said to Noah, “Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are bitchin' before Me in this generation. Genesis 18:23-24 And Abraham came near and said, “Would You also destroy the bitchin' with the wicked? Suppose there were fifty bitchin' within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty bitchin' that…
mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. This past week, I started a new job. And with new jobs come new responsibilities, new people to meet, new expectations, new office politics. Combined, a culture shock occurs, so perhaps I’m reeling from the novelty of my new employment, the drastic, yet thankful (oh so thankful) changes that have come my way. This, I assume, is an explanation for what…
They'll be Friends forever, even if Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry didn't make the guest list for Jennifer Aniston's wedding to Justin Theroux. "I think they're a great couple. I think she's happy. And that's all I care about is that Jen's happy," LeBlanc, 48, told PEOPLE on Monday at a Television Critics Association press event in Los Angeles. "If she wanted me there, I would have been there." Perry, 45, also wished the…
“She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for.” --The Star Side of Bird Hill “Once in a while, you’ll stumble onto a book like this, one so poetic in its descriptions and so alive with lovable, frustrating, painfully real characters, that your emotional response to it becomes almost physical…[A] wrenching debut…The dual coming-of-age story alone could melt the sternest of hearts, but Jackson’s exquisite prose is a marvel…
Before I saw the man’s body shake, I saw his shopping cart shake. He’d pulled out the child’s seat and put three folded shirts there, all striped through three different colorways. The belly of the cart was empty, and so I looked at his arms. They held his hands awkwardly, palms pushed forward, like a child getting ready to push up his shoulders and say Idon’tknow. Then I saw the hands themselves, their fingers and…
