“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business

and eventually degenerates into a racket.” 

(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)

Poop

This kinda bums me out.

Seinfeld and The Fin

This is a few days old but it made my day.

"Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History"

if she plays another fucking organist recital i will literally and actually die right fucking here 

NO ONE CAN TALK OVER A BWAMP BWAMP BWAMP ORGAN BLAST
THIS ISN’T AN ORGAN PARTY
IT’S A REGULAR PARTY

THAT YOU ARE RUINING

BY PLAYING THE ORGAN DURING IT

Over at The Toast Mallory Ortberg is being very funny and you should follow the link to read it all.

Word

Via Rainbow Rowell

How to properly pet animals

Via Superior Distraction for the Bored

Gimme some sugar

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to food, chemicals, what's going to kill me and what's going to make me live until I'm 200. When the conversation about this or that foodstuff or food practice gets complicated my policy is to trust the weight of scientific consensus, with the understanding that sometimes scientists gets things wrong. I also think it's a fair assumption that in general unprocessed food is going to be better for you than processed food. You don't need to be a member of Mensa to appreciate that eating an apple is probably better for you than eating apple pie. At the same time that doesn't mean I don't eat apple pie.

What I don't particularly care for (but largely find it pretty easy to ignore) is the growing tendency to refer to sugar as "toxin", treat gluten like a poison and get smug about eating that chocolate pie because it's made with dates and almond meal instead of white sugar and the tears of dolphins.

All of which is a long way of saying I enjoyed (and mostly agree with) this takedown, via Gawker, of the Food Babe who is, uh, well she's kind of the worst.

Cooking and eating goals for 2015 or How I Plan to Become a Domestic Goddess

1. Learn how to make a decent hollandaise.

2. Make a decent hollandaise.

3. Bake a loaf of bread that doesn't have the consistency of a large, edible doorstop.

4. Expand my recipe repertoire.

5. Find a way to stop Mr Whiskerley from killing my herb garden with his big furry grey arse. (To clarify: my cat likes to curl up on top of my herbs on rainy days. It's cute but enraging)

6. Make proper lunches to take to work, rather than eating my own body weight in toasted sandwiches 5 days a week.

7. Learn how to cook more vegan food so I can have Clowney to dinner more often.

8. Invite people for dinner more often.

9. Trade out my 70% cocoa chocolate habit for a 85% cocoa chocolate habit because apparently that's the only way I'm not going to die of dementia.

“Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

Devastating realisations I made today

My precious Cadbury Creme Eggs are actually 39g, not 34g (like apparently they are in... Canada? I don't even know), which means they contain an extra ~25 calories per egg. Not a big deal in the scheme of things obviously but maaaaaaan 150 calories per egg really felt a lot easier to sneak into my daily diet than 177 calories does. I don't know why this is so but it is. That is all.

Mission accomplished.

Via Rainbow Rowell.

"Life is not all fun and games and hounds of Baskerville..."

"So, please, believe me when I say this — I don’t mean it in a completely bad way — but Benedict Cumberbatch looks, to me, like what happens if someone pulls a fire alarm while Ralph Fiennes is in the middle of getting made to look like Lord Voldemort and he has to run out of the dressing room with only half of his face covered in weird latex and makeup. I don’t want to bump into that guy on the street, you know?"

The latest edition of 'Would you Rather', featuring Sherlock vs John Watson, is GLORIOUS and you should read it all here.

"Captain America gets rained on, too. The difference, I think, is that at some point he would go out and buy an umbrella."

I really enjoyed this bit of musing on a key difference between how Batman and Captain America deal with their manpain.

On a related note I think I've mentioned before that one of the things I'm really loving about The Flash is the comparative lack of angst and melancholy in Barry Allen's life, despite a super bleak backstory involving a murdered mother and incarcerated father. The series would be about one-tenth as enjoyable if The Flash mooched around like some tragic Batman, boo-hoo-ing about how he was a super powerful billionaire with a butler who probably brings him tea in bed in the morning if he asks.

Sophia Loren making pasta

Because why not.

Shoegazing Wednesday

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Music to eat honey out of the jar by (that may just be me right now)

Meat is Moider

Arguably the thing I like least about the internet is the way it allows people to read only things they already agree with and surround themselves with people who reinforce exactly what they already think (see: Twitter, also: people who only read The Guardian or any other unabashed left/right wing news source). So my recommendation to go and read this The New York Times op-ed on the health benefits of a plant-based diet comes with the disclaimer that I may only have found it interesting because I'm a smug vegetarian who likes to read about how she's doing the right thing and will probably live to be 305 years old. Death to plants!

N.B: The title of this post was just a shameless excuse to run this brilliantly insane photo of Morrissey because why not.

Lights, Camera...

If you’d asked me yesterday I would have said I like action movies... okay. At their best (Die Hard, Predator and my personal favourite Terminator 2: Judgment Day) they’re a perfect mess of fun, violence and jokes. At their worst (too many candidates to mention) they’re too dumb, dumb, dumb and too loud, loud, loud.

But this very enjoyable (and long so you need to commit) Grantland article on the mythical “Action Movie Star Championship Belt” makes me realise just how many action films I still quote on a regular basis and/or would happily plop down in front of tonight, if the opportunity presented itself. It has also made me think about the career of Vin Diesel and Sly Stallone in far greater detail than I had… ever intended to.

The premise is thus: Steve McQueen’s role in the classic film Bullitt makes him worthy of being the first-ever Action Movie Star Championship Belt recipient.

After McQueen (spoiler alert!) kills the bad guy at the end, he should have hoisted the first-ever Action Movie Star Championship Belt. How many actors won that thing? How can we figure this out? And is this piece a convoluted excuse to celebrate the surprisingly awesome Liam Neeson era — which peaked yet again with the recent success of Non-Stop? To that end, I sketched out the past 46 years using a complicated set of guidelines I created three minutes ago…

The article then wallows in the subsequent decades of action movies to decide which other stars deserved to wear it.

There’s Stallone:

On the heels of Rambo: First Blood Part II, we didn’t care if Cobra was about cops, snakes or a cop named after a snake. The movie’s confusing trailer promised us machine guns, car chases, bullets, explosions, and a toothpick-chewing Stallone wearing sunglasses. Wait, he was playing a cop who didn’t play by the rules and cut his pizza with scissors??? Even better! I knew this movie was released in May 1986 without looking it up. Why? Back in high school, me and my buddies were counting down the weeks until it came out. In a related story, there wasn’t a girlfriend to be seen at the time. Not a one. Anyway, Cobra was legitimately incomprehensible; I’ve seen it 20 times and still couldn’t tell you what happened. The screenwriter should have just been credited as “Written by 200 Pounds of Cocaine.” We didn’t care — again, Sly was wearing sunglasses, chewing a toothpick and blowing people away. What else did you need?

There’s Schwarzenegger:

This wasn’t an apex, this was an a-fucking-pex. In two years, Arnold somehow crushed the science fiction, action comedy, summer blockbuster, three-boobed women, special-effects nerd-vana and “It’s not a toomah” corners. Everything peaked with James Cameron’s breathtaking T2, which left us stumbling from the theater like we’d just watched a UFO land. There had never been a cinematic experience approaching T2 before. And this was coming off Total Recall, a movie that EVERYONE loved. Amazing. In 1992, a rattled Stallone waved the ceremonial white flag with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Our enduring action-hero scoreboard: Arnold > Sly.

Hey it's JCVD:

Even more incredible, JCVD had to “act” differently as the two twins: One was a good guy and the other was a woman-slapping drunk, but you knew they were both Van Damme because neither one of them could act

Even Swayze makes an appearance:

Everyone discovered Road House on their own timetable. My moment happened during my sophomore year in college, when Nick Aieta and I rented Road House from Blockbuster just because the VHS cover cracked us up. Is this a comedy? Is it an action movie? What is this?

And many many more. It’s a great read. Get on it.

Ex Machina is a film apparently made simply to please me (and frankly it's about time)

1. It's about artificial intelligence, one of my favourite sub-genres in the broad church of science fiction.
2. Features object of my affection Oscar Isaac, who has made me love all kinds of things I didn't think I could love - a list that apparently now includes beards.
3. Features another OOMA affection Domhnall Gleeson - who continues to pop up in projects I love, which makes me only more certain that he and I are destined to be together forever.
4. Written and directed by Alex Garland, who as both writer and director is very much in my wheelhouse. By which I mean I think he and I both really enjoyed seeing Cillian Murphy naked that one time.
5. Seems creepy as hell.

Movie scenes to weep by

** Spoilers **

Bridges of Madison County.
(Get out of the truck, get out of the truuuuuuuuuuck, Meryl.)



Brokeback Mountain
("There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.")



Blue is the Warmest Colour
(I freaking loved this movie so much. Also just watching this scene makes me want to cut off my hait all over again.)