The photographer scouting locations stops in front of a beer stall in the center of the Farmers Market. Would Carrie Fisher mind posing on a bar stool? Or would that be, uh, bad for her image?
“Bad for my image?” the 30-year-old actress-turned-author echoes incredulously, her voice so loud that everyone standing or sitting nearby starts to stare. “I wrote a partly biographical book about my drug addiction that starts out, `Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number,’ and you’re worried about my image? There is not one area of sensationalism that I have not wandered into and trespassed wildly.”
‘Tis my opinion C.S. Pacat is extremely brilliant. It is a joy to see her construct memorable and moving conversations and scenarios, and set up tropes and knock them down. As her first books are just the beginning for her, I’m VERY excited to see what she does next.
I am glad the thing you think would be cool is true, and glad that you think it is cool! I like the idea of sparks of love for writing travelling from one person to another, from readers to writers to writers who are readers and readers who are writers and back again, until all our heads have sparks clustering around and we are crowned with stars.
remember being little and thinking dandelions were fun or a pretty color or something and every adult in an 80 mile radius wouldn’t let you say that without screaming ITS A WEED
also like:
dandelions are edible, easy to grow, and are rich in vitamins a, c, k, beta-carotene, calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium
dandelions can be made into wine, tea, soft drinks, and a coffee substitute
they are used in herbal remedies to treat liver and digestive problems and as a diuretic
they’re good for bees!
they make good companion plants for various herbs and tomatoes; their long taproot helps bring up nutrients in the soil and they release ethylene gas which ripens fruit
dandelions secrete latex which means they can be used to make natural rubber
they make great flower crowns
Why ARE they considered a weed? They’re a good flower? Who decided they were bad? =(
You can also make beautiful jelly from the blossoms!
They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
Let’s back up.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
Lawns are terrible things, a redundant status symbol (‘I don’t need to grow food on my land’ is no longer a proud boast), boring verging on ugly and vastly consuming of water and labour. Let the dandelions grow!
this video really haunts me. the way it manages to match every lyric of the song while also being completely at odds with everything about nick carraway’s personality
was this in the directors cut
The Great Gatsby is by far Taylor Swift’s best spider-man music video.
Whenever someone cries on the Great British Baking Show, I get sad because it’s so somber and peaceful and positive there that I’m just like “No don’t cry. Go outside and find the baby goat the cameramen showed a few minutes ago. Hug the baby goat. Baby goat will eat your baking no matter how it turns out.”
Bauer-Ross headed back to the Shoppers the next day with her receipt and says the manager offered a full refund, or exchange. She accepted an exchange under the condition that she could open the bottle in the store. When she did, she says it was also filled with pasta.
The flummoxed store manager then snatched a third bottle off the shelf and popped the cap, only to find more dried penne. A fourth bottle yielded a similar result.
ive been laughing uncontrollably about this story for a good five minutes or so
if you’re an adult that works with kids of any age do me two quick favors:
learn the symptoms of adhd and autism and their presentation in all genders. you dont have to be an expert, just know a bit about it beyond popular knowledge.
learn to recognize signs a kid is being abused in any way. beyond bruises and black eyes. learn to recognize the fearful apologies and hesitation. do some research.
do me these two favors and save tens of lives.
that’s no exageration either. after teaching my mom basics about mental disorders, she started spotting neurodivergent kids in her classrooms and helped them get help. almost every child she’s helped has been diagnosed with the disorder she predicted and none of them would have been diagnosed at a young age without her help. knowing this stuff matters.
learn. save lives. don’t make kids grow up in fear of their symptoms and family.
in ALL GENDERS. very important. Girls present autism and ESPECIALLY ADHD differently than boys. and i don’t even know how it would work for an intersex kid. learn that shit.
the reason why snakes don’t have arms or legs is bc they lost their sonic the hedgehog gene
this sounds like an awful shitpost but its really not the sonic the hedgehog gene is an actual gene and snakes lost this gene hundreds of millions of years ago as they evolved
im serious u can google it its a real thing
Someone in science made the decision to cause this chaos.
So the Smithsonian posted this an hour ago. Just because.
The Smithsonian is pulling no punches.
“But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.
When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post.
Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.
In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.”
We are literally. Repeating history.
WE ARE ACTUALLY REPEATING HISTORY. The parallels are terrifying and they are very, very real.
Read “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It’s a good 101-course in this complete and total clusterfuck.
Sigh.
Our entire lives we have normalized Nazi ideals and leadership, turning them into a joke and relic of the past. Now that we are seeing these parallels, so many people choose to ignore them, and see this movement just as ridiculous and comical as we have portrayed them in the media for the past 70 or so years. So many people say never forget the holocaust, but so many others have never stopped to think about what that means.
This is the cover of my new book IN OTHER LANDS, out in August! Read all about how it came to be sarahreesbrennan.com/2017/06/I-have-a-new-book-out-in-august-or-how-the-story-turned/
my dad just exploded into laughter out of nowhere and told me ‘imagine the lion king but with sea lions’
he has been chuckling about it for 5 straight minutes now
apparently it
doesn’t matter that i’ve told him 10 times it’s the monkey who raises the newborn and not the lion himself, this is the scene he has been imagining
A New Hampshire Republican State Representative anonymously created the “Red Pill” subreddit.
Wow.
these aren’t just bullshitter dweebs in their mom’s basements trolling the internet, these are men who formulate the way we implement laws and who govern the way we live our lives.
^^^ Hello, yes, everyone needs to see this. It’s not always a bunch of nobodies trolling around on 4chan. It’s, doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, bankers, law enforcement, etc. People who have pulls on society. They literally don’t see other groups besides themselves as human or equal
…holy shit like this is bad really really bad but so much clearly so if you’ve ever read the scum that floats to the top of the Red Pill. Like basically he was just outed as the creator of a neo-nazi misogynist pro-rape forum explicitly to recruit online loners and groom them like it’s EVERYTHING we’ve been saying these people do but this is like, the hive.
For the anon asking why not trust red pill guys
Fuck Conservatives
Fun fact: the Red Pill was 90% of the reason I left reddit. I think it’s important everyone understands why, without having to subject yourselves to actually looking at the subreddit.
The Red Pill is a confluence of gross misogyny, rape culture, and vile social darwinism, all tied up under the banner of it being the “truth” behind some grand lie that is PC culture; that is to say, taking the red pill to withdraw yourself from the Matrix, a metaphor nearly as dated as the ideals they espouse.
If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. I spent nearly two years on reddit before toxic bullshit like this drove me out. These people build an elaborate construct about treating women like property and sexualizing children because ~evolution~ programmed them to like it, and ~evolution~ can’t possibly be wrong, as though club-wielding Neanderthal brutes are something to aspire to and not something we left behind millennia ago.
They’ve created an incredibly detailed fantasy about how women are evolutionarily predisposed to react to certain behaviors of “alpha males” (another false equivalence; the theory of the alpha male comes from a since-disproved theory about wolf behavior), and how the trick to success in sex is about taking on these characteristics which, spoiler alert, explicitly encourage treating women like garbage.
I cannot overstate how incredibly toxic the Red Pill is and how disgustingly large the community became by the time I left reddit. I wish I could say I was surprised that a Republican senator founded it, but this is the kind of shit they’ve been legislating for years.
THE LIST OF THINGS NINTENDO PREDATES INCLUDES, BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO:
THE SHERLOCK HOLMES FRANCHISE
UNITED STATES PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISHENHOWER’S BIRTH
THE NOVEL “DRACULA”
THE NOVELS “THE TIME MACHINE” AND “WAR OF THE WORLDS” BY H.G. WELLS
THE FIRST MODERN OLYMPIC GAMES
THE DISCOVERY OF HELIUM ON EARTH
… Okay. I believe you. But like… how?
NINTENDO WAS FOUNDED IN 1889 AS A CARD GAME MANUFACTURER AND ALL THOSE OTHER THINGS HAPPENED IN 1890 OR LATER
WHAT THE FUCK I THOUGHT DRACULA WAS EARLIER WHAT THE FUCK
YOU COULD WRITE A DRACULA FANFIC WHERE DRACULA TRAVELS TO JAPAN AND BUYS A PACK OF NINTENDO BRAND PLAYING CARDS AND IT WOULD BE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. SAME DEAL FOR SHERLOCK HOLMES.
No no no no no!
Don’t write fanfic!
Those things are in the public domain!
You can legally write, publish, and sell a Dracula book where Dracula travels to Japan and buys a pack of Nintendo brand playing cards!
Same deal for Sherlock Holmes!
what if you write a book where dracula and sherlock holmes travel to japan at the same time and reach for the last pack of nintendo brand playing cards that they both wanted
