My friend Carrie’s puppy Carmella met a pug.
When you love those breezy summer dresses but are like “where does my big beige bra with wide straps fit into this look?” (my boobs are smaller post-kids, which has increased my options, but I definitely dress-shop based on Bra Accommodation first and Cuteness second):
I like to think I’m realistic about my body shape. Yet every summer it’s the same: an acute case of Booby Dysmorphia, accompanied by an unfounded conviction that I too can rock a spaghetti strap. I can’t rock a spaghetti strap. Not unless I wear a T-shirt underneath, thus disguising all the scaffolding.
No, do not do this, why would you not just have returned the laptop at the time:
I voluntarily left my employer after one year’s leave of absence, I gave a two-week notice and asked the HR person if I needed to speak with anyone specific. She told me she would handle my separation. I never heard a word from them so I shredded the company credit card and kept the laptop in a closet. Two months later, I get a letter telling me I need to drop the laptop off. I told them I would mail it but they would need to compensate me for my time, $100 as I no longer work for them. Is this a reasonable request regarding payment to return what they should have collected two months ago when I was prepared to do so during my two-week notice?
I am sure this is a delicious cake but I just read the recipe and now I have to go lie down and eat a handful of M&Ms.
The best part of this (this is my local zoo, btw) is the fact that escaped animals are “Code Houdini”:
Visitor Coleen Jennings said she was approaching the leopard area when the woman approached her and said: “I think I just saw an animal out of its cage. Is there a zookeeper around here?”Jennings waited while the woman found a zoo worker. The three women, children in tow, rounded the corner and saw the 60-pound cat lying on a rafter in the shade structure.“She didn’t say what kind of animal,” Jennings said. “If she had said it was a leopard, I wouldn’t have kept walking.”
This is a sweet tribute to Amadeus (the play) and to the late Peter Shaffer, who wrote it:
It is in its bombastic, tortured approach to the question of talent that Amadeusachieves the stature of masterpiece. What Amadeus knows is that the most vital part of art, and of art’s creation, is ineffable, and terrifyingly uncontrollable, and in many ways indescribable. This is the frightening part of making—or writing criticism about, or teaching—art. If we can’t control it, how can we be certain we can keep it? If we can’t describe it, how do we know what is good? In Amadeus, Salieri experiences this firsthand when he sees Mozart’s sheet music for the first time and says, “On the page, it looked [like] nothing.” But when he hears it: “This was a music I’d never heard… it seemed to me I was hearing the voice of God.” You needn’t be religious to understand what Salieri means here. Talent, or inspiration, or genius, appears to flow from outside of us, and cannot be explained. It has, at its best, the force of the divine, terrifying and thrilling at once.
Daveed:
I love a certain female fiction writerN.K. Jemisin’s The Inheritance Trilogy is the best book I’ve ever read. It is just great Sci-Fi/fantasy writing. With really wonderful characters and some of the best storytelling I’ve ever come across. Her writing just keeps pulling you deeper into the lives of the people/gods she has created. The rules of the world are very clearly drawn, but they don’t feel constricting at all. Even the strangest things in the books are fully realized and seem familiar.I’m pondering what to do with my Grammy AwardAlthough, I haven’t had it sent to me yet. I keep sleeping on that, but it’s coming. I’ll probably do something real eccentric with it, like put flowers in it, or use it as a doorstop. I just feel like, it’s a very rare thing to accident yourself into a Grammy, so I gotta do something.
OH BOY (there is also an update):
Hi, legaladvice. I can’t believe I’m in this situation.I was recently promoted to Store Manager of a grocery store after the original manager quit (I was assisstant manager before for about 6 months).We hired a woman, let’s call her Sally, a couple of weeks ago. She’s not terrible at her job (just basic cashier stuff) but she refuses to process payments that equal $6.66. I know, it sounds crazy.Our store prices everything ending in 28 cents as a ploy (kinda like Brandsmart). So anything priced at $6.28 will ring up to $6.66 after tax, and it happens quite often that people will buy just that one item (which I’ve learned after Sally started working here).Every time this happens, one of the managers or supervisors has to take over because she refuses and sometimes it throws a spanner in the works. I brought it up with HR and they said I can’t do anything about it because it’s her religious freedom (since 666 is the number of the beast in Christianity).The thing is, we have the same religion; we even go to the same church! But I don’t think she should be able to use that excuse to not ring those transactions. I’ve offered to move her to another part of the store but she doesn’t want to stock or do anything else.
The situation for Muslim refugees during Ramadan:
Swaid, who lives in a shelter north of the German capital, spends most of the 120 euros ($136) he gets a month on food. He and other asylum seekers chip in for flatbread, rice and vegetables, which they cook using a kettle.“I miss my wife, but during Ramadan I will miss my mother’s food more,” joked Swaid a few days before Ramadan, eating pieces of flatbread stuffed with chicken shawarma and garlic paste.Many shelters in Berlin are hosting Ramadan for the first time and some are trying to ensure a pleasant dining experience.At Tempelhof, a former airport built by Hitler to showcase Nazi power and now home to some 5,000 migrants, a spokeswoman for a company running the shelter said guests would be offered dates and water after fasting, in line with Muslim tradition.
you have to click bc of how cool and weird these hands are:
Thousands of years ago, some Greeks and Romans walked around carrying disembodied, twisted, corpse-like hands. Sometimes they propped them onto wooden poles and paraded them in processions. Adorned with snakes and sporting a secret compartment in the wrist hidden behind a hinged door, they were the sign of a religious cult that worshipped the mysterious Sabazius.Each ornate bronze and copper motif, called the Hand of Sabazius, was a sacred symbol of the god Sabazius, a deity of fertility and vegetation who was worshipped alongside other gods—particularly Zeus and Dionysus, the god of wine. Scholars are still digging for clues on the exact significance of the hand, but regardless of its particular meaning, it shows that Romans were influenced by outside religions and formed their own cults.
Jonah and Splett, forever in my heart:
One of the other things that has been so funny has been the pairing of Jonah and Sam Richardson’s Richard Splett, which is great because the power dynamic between them keeps shifting. What was it like to work with Sam even more this season?We started getting paired up in the second or third episode of last year, and it’s just amazing. Number one, Sam is unbelievably talented, incredibly funny, and just fun to hang out with on set. There’s something about Richard’s buoyant positivity that always plays well compared to Jonah’s weird negativity and aggression and defensiveness. No matter what, if he just keeps being sunny and I keep being doom and gloom, it always works.But one of the things I liked about the power shift at the beginning of the season was how quickly Richard just takes that mantle. The man has two Ph.D.’s in veterinary sciences and recount strategies in the West, and he is okay just getting people coffee. But when he got that power, he so easily took it on. But he’s so passive sometimes, he won’t ever hold on to it, which is terrible, because he is the one that should be in power. He is the one who should be running for Congress and for office. He is smart and he works well with people, and he’s kind. But he doesn’t seem to have that dogged determination.
hey, pissy catladies, go to Worcester before Sept. 4th:
“I’m a dog person,” a visitor told Adam Rozan, as he stood amid 230 artworks showing cats at the Worcester Art Museum. Big cats. Tiny kittens. A cat wearing Andy Warhol glasses printed against a background of Campbell’s Soup cans. A cat-shaped tea cozy and a cat-printed quilt. A collage of cats in hats. A Magic Marker stick-figure cat.“Isn’t that interesting, dividing ourselves into dog people and cat people?” Rozan asked. “We don’t do that with types of cars, or even other animals. No one says, ‘I’m a bear person.’ I think that comes from a place of loving our own animals so deeply. This exhibit is really about that love.”Rozan is director of audience engagement at the museum, where “Meow: A Cat-Inspired Exhibition” runs through Sept. 4. This was in the “Community Cats” segment of the exhibition, which features work submitted by local artists (including one attributed to a 5-year-old). The exhibit, both Rozan and museum director Matthias Waschek said, is part of a push to reengage the community with the museum.
