iwilltrytobereasonable

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so when food is too salty we might say "打死卖盐的" basically meaning "did you beat the salt merchant to death" but one time in an attempt to be a little polite and a little funny to the chef (my mother) i said "……是不是又跟卖盐的有矛盾了" meaning "are you... having a dispute with the salt merchant again" and now it's a whole thing in my family

anyway point being there has been another altercation with the salt merchant

[iwilltrytobereasonable]

Blake Lively sues ''It Ends with Us'' costar Justin Baldoni for sexual Harassment, claims he caused her severe emotional distress. Blake Lively is suing her It Ends with Us costar Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment, followed by a retaliatory public smear campaign to "destroy" her reputation.

The complaint, which is a precursor to filing a discrimination lawsuit in California, states there was a meeting held to address Baldoni's alleged actions and "the hostile work environment that had nearly derailed production." It was attended by various figures, including Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds.

Some of the demands that were addressed included safeguards such as a full-time intimacy coordinator, "no more showing nude videos or images of women ... to [Lively] and/or her employees," "no more mention of [Baldoni's] previous 'pornography addiction,'"... "no more discussions to [Lively]...about personal experiences with sex," "no more inquiries by [Baldoni] to [Lively's] trainer without her knowledge or consent to disclose her weight," and "no more mention by [Baldoni] of him 'speaking to' [Lively's] dead father."

"No more adding of sex scenes, oral sex or on camera climaxing by BL outside the scope of the script BL approved when signing onto the project," were other requests the complaint alleges that Baldoni and the other filmmakers agreed to.

She detailed her complaints during a meeting with Mr. Baldoni, Mr. Heath and other producers in January, according to the legal filing. She claimed Mr. Baldoni had improvised unwanted kissing and discussed his sex life, including encounters in which he said he may not have received consent. Mr. Heath had shown her a video of his wife naked, she said, and he had watched Ms. Lively in her trailer when she was topless and having body makeup removed, despite her asking him to look away. She said that both men repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.

In Lively's complaint, which includes texts obtained through subpoena, and summarized in a report released on Dec. 21 by The New York Times, the steps allegedly enacted by Baldoni to orchestrate a smear campaign are laid out.

Texts included in the complaint include messages from Baldoni's crisis PR representative floating proposals to hire contractors to dominate social media through “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change narrative.”

Justin Baldoni has hired Johnny Depp's crisis manager amid the reported It Ends With Us cast drama. Baldoni has hired veteran PR crisis manager Melissa Nathan who represented Johnny Depp during the Amber Heard trial.

Mr. Depp successfully sued Ms. Heard for defamation, and the trial became a spectacle amid suspicions of an online campaign to damage her credibility.

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on the thirteenth day of christmas my true love was investigated for his many flagrant violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918

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The first time I heard WttBP in 2008 or whatever, I got extremely excited and posted online and excitedly told people all the references I caught in it, including Bohemian Rhapsody - and my ex just went like. Well yeah. Of course it references Bohemian Rhapsody. Anyone can see.

And I’m like, you rude fucker. I did not grow up with Queen songs. (This stuff was only recently on my radar, I didn’t even become a fan of the band properly until like 7 years later when New Horizons reached Pluto.) How dare you not let me enjoy being one of today’s lucky 10000.

So I’m glad someone else’s mind is blown by that too.

I’m a little upset because my husband (stressed out little Englishman, old as balls) had never heard Welcome to the Black Parade. What do you mean you’ve never. Like never heard it ever. You’ve heard it, though?? and it turned out that - NO.

And he said: well i wasn’t an American child during the millennium or indeed at any point in my existence now was I? So of course I had to explain about welcome to the black parade, I mean, REALLY. Really? Really!

Anyway unbeknownst to me it CLICKED for him and he liked it in quite a normal, I-will-hear-that-song-again way and he added it to his playlist of what he fondly believes to be similar-sounding songs, which in context affected me like a blow to the back of the head. Sir; your brain. Explain it to me please.

And he was like wdym. Sounds like Queen.

And the thing is. If you are a virgin to MCR and don’t give a damn about anyone or anything and you’re a highstrung little guy who is not an American and is a million years old, and if you spent your ENTIRE teens in a healthy outdoors attitude of underage drinking and smoking and banging other teens on unsupervised hiking trips while being attacked by swans, and other worldly and mentally healthy adventures that did NOT involve being on the internet too young, so that you genuinely wouldn’t know who Gerard Way was if he leapt out from behind a mailbox and bit you suddenly;

If MCR means nothing to you at all, net zero context, net zero interest, genuinely no nostalgia or cringe or judgement or admiration because you are NORMAL,

fuck me. Sure. It DOES - fuck me: okay. You win this Dr Glass. It does - yeah actually you’re right. It’s - it sounds like Queen.

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Well that’s the key: in this and many other episodes (The Indian Affairs Affair and The Very Important Zombie Affair spring to mind - heck let’s include the very first episode!), the show writers were explicitly trying to be anti-racist without any modern tools.

The revolutionary thing they were trying for was to make the person of another race fully competent and admirable - even as base level as coherently human. They didn’t dodge stereotypes because they were actively using stereotypes to communicate - every one was essentially a regular, recognizable trope to the average viewer, intended to get them to engage with the characters and then accept the second aspect of that character being competent and a person.

MFU also frequently made use of the trope of villainy from oppression - plenty of their villains were women or other individuals of oppressed groups who were essentially only given scope for their intelligence and skill by THRUSH, after the world at large failed them. The point was supposed to be that without equity, immoral methods become more desirable. The effect today could be misread as wow these writers must not have liked women.

So I think the important thing to appreciate is that these things are equivalent to the Strong Woman trope in general - useful early on in feminist and anti-racist efforts, but not a long term solution. Flaws with the best of intentions.

"the yukon affair" (2x14) is a mixed bag of an episode—mildly interesting plot meets period typical racism/cultural insensitivity, which happens a lot on tmfu—but i love the character of murphy so much; she's shown to be super smart (she's a mcgill grad!) and self-reliant, she's super proud of her people, her character is given a fair amount of nuance in regard to how she talks about navigating both the western and indigenous worlds and the struggles therein ("it's not easy to be part one thing and part another. no one treats you as if you're real"), her chemistry with illya is spot on (their flirting featuring the line "i've always adored blonde men" is so fun), and it's cute to see her give him and napoleon a kunik at the end of the episode before she heads back to school to get her master's (back at mcgill!). of the innocents we see throughout the series (especially when episodes are otherwise mid to bad) i think she's one of the stronger ones overall!

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Full names and details of every man who was convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot. The list includes 50 men who could be identified, besides Gisèle's husband, ranging in age from 27 to 74. Among them are a firefighter, a journalist, a nurse, a construction worker, and a prison guard. Most have families of their own, and only about half had previous convictions.

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Hhhate it when people on my side of an argument are making bad points. You’re literally right why are you being stupid about it

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I finished watching Crá yesterday and now I need to try to persuade as much of tumblr as possible to watch it too.

It's an Irish-language murder mystery TV series set in Donegal, though it's subtitled in English, so you don't need Irish to follow it. It's not a cheerful series - Crá translates to torment - and nearly every single character is in some way corrupt, compromised or morally grey. But it's extremely well-produced, it's gripping, it has an utterly stunning soundtrack (by a Breton composer!) and it's visually gorgeous:

This is the first ever Irish-language TV show to get a primetime slot in Northern Ireland. And I would utterly love for the BBC to invest in more of this kind of thing (it's a BBC/TG4 coproduction). So if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please help make it a success!

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this dude’s wikipedia entry is the most buckwild nonsense i’ve seen all week

ok, you know you’re in for a good time when this

and this

are the first two things you see, right?

tl;dr, John R. Brinkley was the early 1900s version of quack-doctor-meets-Rush-Limbaugh; his big thing was these goofy surgeries to restore male verility by implanting them with goat testicles.  which is extremely funny except for the part where people died!

normally THAT would be the craziest shit a dude had going on, and yet—

well, okay, first, let’s hear about the dude’s dad:

Brinkley senior’s first marriage was annulled because he was underage.[3] After he reached adulthood, he married four more times, and outlived each of his young wives. 

five marriages!  holy shit.  was the dad poisoning these women or…

anyway, Brinkley himself has a similarly messy love life.  for instance, here’s one way to handle a divorce:

Sally filed for divorce and child support, but after two months of payments, Brinkley kidnapped his daughter and fled with her to Canada. Sally Brinkley, unable to obtain an extradition order from Canada, dismissed her suit for alimony and child support, allowing Brinkley to return to Chicago with the child. 

In Memphis, Brinkley met 21-year-old Minerva Telitha “Minnie” Jones, a friend of Crawford’s and the daughter of a local physician. On August 23, 1913, after a four-day courtship,[14] Brinkley and Jones married at the Peabody Hotel, even though he was still married to Sally Brinkley. Minnie and John Brinkley honeymooned in Kansas City, Denver, Pocatello and Knoxville. Brinkley was arrested in Knoxville and extradited to Greenville where he was put in jail for practicing medicine without a license and for writing bad checks.[13] Brinkley told the sheriff that it was all Crawford’s fault, and gave investigators enough information that they were able to arrest Crawford in Pocatello. The two former partners met again in jail.[13]

imagine your OTP…

in addition to all the goat gland transplants Brinkley was doing, he started concurrently running a radio show, which sounds like such a DELIGHTFULLY mixed bag of material:

Brinkley spoke for hours on end each day on the radio, primarily promoting his goat gland treatments. He variously cajoled, shamed and appealed to men’s (and women’s) egos, and to their desire to be more sexually active. In between Brinkley’s own advertisements, his new station featured a variety of entertainment including military bands, French lessons, astrological forecasts, storytelling and exotica such as native Hawaiian songs, and American roots music including old-time string band, gospel and early country.[32]

life before podcasts…

also, it’s kind of interesting to see an early predecessor of the whole “truth is paywalled but the lies are free” phenomenon here:

Fishbein’s interest in putting Brinkley out of business grew and he wrote more articles featuring stories about people who had grown sick or died after seeing Brinkley. But the [American Medical Association] journal’s readership was mostly restricted to other doctors, while Brinkley’s radio station poured directly into peoples’ homes every day.

eventually, Brinkley’s empire of lies collapses, and good riddance, but also i gotta admire his absolute determination to keep going anyway:

Brinkley reacted to losing his medical and broadcast licenses by launching a bid to become the Governor of Kansas, a political position that would enable him to appoint his own members to the medical board and thus regain his right to practice medicine in the state.

“i would simply become the government,” said he

and he goddamn near succeeded, too, if it weren’t for a rude twist of fate:

Three days before the election, the Kansas attorney general (who had prosecuted Brinkley before the medical board) announced that the rules surrounding write-in candidates had changed, and that the doctor’s name could only be written in one specific way for the vote to count (as J. R. Brinkley). As a write-in candidate, he received more than 180,000 votes (29.5 percent of the vote) and lost to Harry Hines Woodring, later Secretary of War in the cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[42] An article published at the time in The Des Moines Register estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 ballots were disqualified in this manner. Woodring later admitted that had those votes counted, Brinkley would have won.[43][44]

anyway, he gets so big mad after all this that he moves to the Mexican border, where the Mexican government is VERY eager to help him build the Most Enormous Fuck-You Radio Station In History:

The Mexican government, eager to get even with its northern neighbors for dividing up North America’s radio frequencies without giving any to Mexico, granted Brinkley a 50,000-watt radio license and construction began on XER, his new “border blaster” across the bridge from Del Rio in Villa Acuña, Coahuila (since renamed Ciudad Acuña).[16] As construction got underway, Fishbein and the U.S. State Department desperately searched for a way to shut Brinkley down. […]

Though Brinkley’s American radio license had been revoked, XER’s signal was so strong that it could still be heard in Kansas.[49] In 1932, the Mexican government allowed Brinkley to increase his wattage to 150,000 watts. Several months later, Brinkley was allowed to increase to one million watts, “making XER far and away the most powerful radio station on the planet” that, on a clear night, could be heard as far away as Canada. According to accounts of the time, the signal was so strong that it turned on car headlights, made bedsprings hum, and caused broadcasts to bleed into telephone conversations.[50] Local residents claimed to not need a radio to hear Brinkley’s station; with ranchers claiming that they received it through their metal fences and in their dental appliances.[51]

jfc, USA, maybe you should’ve fuckin been nicer to Mexico is all i’m sayin

anyway he’s big rich for a while but then he dies penniless with a bunch of counts of mail fraud against him, so.  about what you’d expect.

(big thanks to this rando blog post for alerting me to this dude’s existence, lol)

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These Business Cards Were the Only Logical Choice

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my mom didn’t believe in lying to children so when I first asked about santa claus as a small child she was like “oh santa claus is another name for a man named saint nicholas who lived a long time ago. he was a very kind and generous man and he loved giving people presents and he would do things like put presents in people’s stockings when they were hung up to dry by the fire, so they would find them and be surprised. so now when we give presents at christmas it’s fun to pretend saint nicholas or ‘santa claus’ brings them. and we hang up stockings by the fire and when we get up in the morning there are presents in them, just like if saint nicholas was still alive to bring them!”

so that thanksgiving one of my uncles said jovially “so mac, are you being good for santa claus?” and little (not quite three year old) mac looked up and raised an eyebrow and said witheringly “he’s dead.”