22%: The percentage of USians who identify themselves in a new Gallup poll as a supporter of the Tea Party. This is a record low. And I can't believe it's that high.
I mean, I can believe it. But you know.
Number of the Day
Question of the Day
What is your favorite television show that got canceled before you were ready for it to end?
What I'm Listening To
Pink: "Try"
I love this song and this video so much. And because I'm me, I can't listen to it without crying, lol. WHICH I AM DOING RIGHT NOW. Thank you and have a nice day.
This Is Terrible Advice and Do Not Take It
[Content Note: Sexual violence; rape apologia. NB: Marriages are not exclusively comprised of different-sex couples, nor exclusively of people who desire sex.]
As everyone knows, I am a huge fan of garbage television. (Seriously, it is all for which I have mental energy left at the end of a day of writing.) But some garbage television is Not Fun (for me; like what you like!) and while I could easily lose myself in a Ghost Mine marathon, I have never watched an episode of Real Housewives. Of any county or state. It's just not my scene.
So I have no idea who Melissa Gorga is, but evidently she is a Real Housewife of New Jersey, and she has just published an advice book [NOTE: Please see additional context discussed in comments] titled Love, Italian Style: The Secrets of My Hot and Happy Marriage, which contains the following passage:
Men, I know you think your woman isn't the type who wants to be taken. But trust me, she is. Every girl wants to get her hair pulled once in a while. If your wife says "no," turn her around, and rip her clothes off. She wants to be dominated. Women don't realize how easy men are. Just give us what we want.Nope. No. Wrong. Absolutely not. That is called spousal rape, and it is a crime.
Let's try this advice instead: Men, I know many of you think the Patriarchy is your friend, but, trust me, you are complex human beings who should not routinely be diminished, or diminish yourselves, as so thoroughly uncomplicated (and terrible) that the only thing it takes to make you happy is a sandwich and being allowed to rape your partner.
And this advice: Men, never rape your partner. Or anyone else. Ever.
TV Corner: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
[Content Note: Spoilers for Brooklyn Nine-Nine and discussion of a rape culture joke.]
I know there are a lot of posts about TV shows this week, but the new television season started in the US this week, so there are a lot of new shows to discuss!
So, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a new cop comedy on Fox, probably isn't a show I would have watched, except that I love like half the cast. So I watched the first two episodes to see if it was any good. And I was very pleasantly surprised!
First of all, let's talk about the cast: In the above picture, there are seven people, three of whom are women and four of whom are people of color. The show has passed the Bechdel Test, and even in the first two episodes, each character has been fleshed out, with varying degrees of success, beyond lazy stereotypes.
Andre Braugher plays the new hard-nosed but awesomely witty captain who won't let Andy Samberg jerk around all day anymore, and also the captain is gay. Also. In both episodes so far, his character has had serious things to say about what it has meant for his career to be a black gay police officer. Whoa.
Last night's episode was centered around police cars being vandalized with spray-painted dicks (lol), and the perpetrator turns out to be the police commissioner's kid. (Or deputy commissioner, or whatever. Some police muckety-muck.) Which puts the investigating officer (Samberg) in an awkward position. Originally, he decides to prioritize his career and lets the kid go, but then his new captain says smart things that make him reconsider.
He arrives to make the arrest, and the father defends his terrible, privileged, white son who he continually bails out of trouble so he avoids accountability—a defense which ends with (paraphrased from memory): "You can't arrest him. He's going to Duke next year on a lacrosse scholarship!"
[Reference, if you need it.]
I almost did a real-life spit take!
This was, in my estimation, what I call a rape culture joke:
Rape jokes uphold rape culture, while rape culture jokes seek to examine, challenge, dismantle it.The joke here, which followed a scene in which Braugher's character observes that never holding this kid accountable isn't doing him any favors, traces a direct line between privilege, entitlement, lack of accountability for harm, and hostility toward consent.
And even still, I understand and respect that some survivors do not and cannot find any rape-related humor funny.
I don't think that makes them "oversensitive." I think that means they've got a different sensitivity than I do.
Maybe Brooklyn Nine-Nine will turn out to be total garbage, but, for the moment, it's got my attention.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by swirls of color.
Recommended reading:
Congratulations, Jessica Luther! I love you. ♥
Julio Salgado and Mia McKenzie: Unfit For Product Placement: Radicalizing the Cartoon Characters of Our Childhoods [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of appropriation and body image.]
Golda: Your Fat Is (Allegedly) Killing You!!!: Weight Stigma and the Dangerous Nocebo Effect [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of fat bias and medical malfeasance.]
Sonya: Weight Stigma in Diverse Populations [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of fat bias, body image, and racism.]
TLC: PA School Won't Let Trangender Student Kasey Caron Run for Homecoming King—Sign Petition!
Jamilah: Five People of Color Named 2013 MacArthur Geniuses
Brian: Obama's Real Problem on Capitol Hill? Race. [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of racism and violent imagery.]
Kathy: Dear Pastor Rick Warren, I Think You Don't Get It [Content Note: The post at this link contains discussion of racism and appropriation, racist imagery, and Nazi imagery.]
Susana: Clark Gregg on What Really Made Him Sign up for Agents of SHIELD
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
[Content Note: Misogyny; gender essentialism; coercion.]
I guess it's Proposal Day at Shakesville. Shakers NineOfCups and IndyM both forwarded me this piece of shit from the NY Post about a woman who decided to earn a marriage proposal from her boyfriend by making him 300 sandwiches.
Listen, whatever you do inside your relationship (short of abuse) is your business. But once you turn it into "a beautifully photographed blog that documents [your] quest to woo [your] boyfriend with bread-and-meat creations" and a column in the NY Post, it's a problem. Especially when you start snarking at a "single gal whose kitchen was used for shoe storage," as if it's inherently better to be making sandwiches for a man than being single and using your kitchen for whatever the fuck you want.
And not when "make me a sandwich" is a thing used to demean women in the world. Even presidential candidates.
I mean:
"You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it's so easy," [the man who has been made 176 sandwiches] says. "We're not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich."What. The actual. Fuck.
For the record, I am not opposed to women cooking for men. I do almost all the cooking in our house. (And Iain does all the washing up. TEAMWORK!) But I do it because I'm the better cook, I enjoy cooking more than cleaning, Iain enjoys cleaning more than cooking, and Iain's got a three-hour commute a day that I don't have.
I do it because we both need to eat, not because I'm trying to earn something.
And About the Menz...
[Content Note: Patriarchy narratives; homophobia; misogyny; abuse.]
The proposal thread put me in mind of another thought that's been rumbling around my brainpan recently, another one to be filed under Patriarchy Ain't a Picnic for Men, Either.
I was recently watching an episode of Chef Wanted with Anne Burrell, and one of the cheftestants was talking about his parents, and how they'd been happily married until his mother died, and how all he wanted was the same kind of happy relationship.
He reminded me of some of the men in my life for whom a happy partnership is a priority, either because it was modeled to them by their own parents, or because they never had a stable, functional, safe family life growing up and want very much to create one in adulthood.
These are men we don't often see represented in pop culture.
There are slightly different narratives that disappear these sorts of men, depending on whether we're looking at representations of men partnered with women or men partnered with men.
Men partnered with men who prioritize a happy and enduring equal partnership are disappeared beneath the metric fuckton of homophobia and heterocentrism that means gay/bi men's stories are rarely told, unless they are tragic; beneath stereotypes about promiscuity, men who just want to fuck and have no emotional life; beneath stereotypes that equate gay men with stereotypes of damsels awaiting their rescue—blushing virtual-girls who just want to be swept off their feet.
Men partnered with women who prioritize a happy and enduring equal partnership are disappeared beneath similar stereotypes about promiscuity, often intersecting with stereotypes about men who fear commitment and/or men who refuse to grow up, and beneath narratives about men who will do anything to keep a woman, deceitful and manipulative and creepy and harmful and violent things, because we are meant to imagine the only sort of man who actively wants to share his life with a woman must have something wrong with him.
Men who want to be in a stable and happy relationship with a specific person whom they adore are disappeared by the presumption that romance is the purview of women, and women want to be rescued, or fix a terrible guy, so let us make eighty-seven biebillion romantic comedies with the conceit that love begins with stalking, or the tragedy of incompleteness, or a jerk who needs to be tamed, none of which have wide appeal among men (or women) who want to see people who look something like their emotional selves projected back at them, so then let us conclude that men hate romance.
Men are dogs, who don't want to settle down. Or: Men are weirdos, who want to control women.
The man who is a human being in search of an egalitarian relationship with a woman who doesn't need him to complete her doesn't exist in pop culture.
He's too boring, I guess.
But those men exist. The men who want to be happily married to/partnered with a specific person with whom they've fallen in love. The men who say that their wives are their best friends, even though they know other men will sneer at them. The men who think it might be kind of neat to be proposed to by their partners, rather than doing the proposing. The men who are romantic.
Iain is about eleventy times more romantic than I am. In every sense of the word. He is dreamy by nature, and prone to sweeping fantasies. He wanted the romantic proposal. I have given him thoughtful and personal and terrific gifts; I have written him songs. But he is the one who sent me a half-smoked cigarette. He is the one who, after twelve years, still gazes at me in a way when I'm not looking that made my friend Ari stop mid-sentence while we were chatting about nothing in particular and say, "Look at how he looks at you."
There are men who love their partners hard, who didn't rescue them and didn't have to be tamed. There are men who want to spend their lives with someone in a way that only women are supposed to want (and that all women are supposed to want, women who are disappeared, too, in equal measure, for the same reason if by different methods). And no one is more hostile toward these men than the Patriarchy, which demeans anything that suggests women are not prizes and property.
And anyone who might suggest the same, in words or actions.
If women are encouraged to want the Grand Gestures to feel like they matter, men are encouraged to make the Grand Gesture to feel like they matter, too. That they are men. That they know how to give a woman what she wants, irrespective of what they may want themselves.
It is another pernicious trick of the Patriarchy. Men are not meant to love women, not really. They are meant to make Grand Gestures in order that they may own them, may win their prize. They are meant to fuck women, and any man who may be less interested in sex than love is broken. Hardly a real man at all.
And men are not meant to be loved, either. Obeyed, feared, fucked, served. But not loved.
The love of an equal does not exist in the Patriarchy. Men are not supposed to love each other, and women are not men's equal. The Patriarchy doesn't care about love; it cares only for dominion.
So it disappears men who want more, to give more and get more. Who feel capable of love, desirous and deserving of it.
Love and dominion cannot exist in the same space.
Daily Dose of Cute
Sleepy Dogs are sleepy. Meanwhile: Livsy photobombs. And also tries to figure out how she can get in on the hot cuddlesnooze action.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today!
[Content Note: Injury; death] A devastating earthquake in Pakistan has injured at least 350 people and killed at least 327 people. "The quake—initially recorded at magnitude 7.8—hit 145 miles southeast of Dalbandin, in the remote province of Balochistan—which is near the Iranian border. It was felt as far away as New Delhi, the Indian capital, some 740 miles away." I have not yet found information about how to help or contact information to connect with survivors; please feel welcome and encouraged to leave info in comments if you find it.
[CN: Sexual violence] Senator Kristen Gillibrand's amendment to the annual national defense authorization bill, which would "remove the responsibility for the prosecution of rape, sexual assault and other criminal cases from the chain of command and hand it to independent military prosecutors," now has support from three retired generals: "Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy, the first woman to reach the rank of three-star general, and brigadiers general Loree Sutton, formerly the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the US army, and David McGinnis, a former principal deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs."
[CN: War] The US Army has instituted a new regulation "that prohibits fresh recruits from showing tattoos while in uniform." The first comment on the article observes: "My guess is that this rule will be relaxed when a new round of cannon fodder is needed to defend some far flung corporate interest." Yeah.
Congratulations to Rep. Patricia Todd, Alabama's first openly gay legislator, and her wife Jennifer Clarke, on their marriage in Massachusetts!
Speaking of marriage, Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul says marriage is easy! Sometimes it is!
Did you follow the inscrutable Twitter account @Horse_ebooks and/or the inscrutable YouTube channel Pronunciation Book? I didn't! But apparently they are A Thing, and it turns out there are real people behind them. So that might interest you! Or not!
Popular Science is shutting down its comments section. Because shit-stirrers are exhausting and moderating is hard work! Please take a moment to say thank you to Shakesville's volunteer moderators, who are literally some of the best people on the planet. I haven't met everyone on the planet, but I feel extremely confident that, even if I did, I would still think the Shakesville mods are among the best of billions.
Green Eggs and Wev
Republican Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is on an epic filibuster in the Senate chamber, 20 hours and counting, during which he has "touched on a broad mix of subjects and sources, including lyrics from a song by country music star Toby Keith; quotations from the popular reality television show 'Duck Dynasty;' recollections of how his father, Rafael Cruz, used to make green eggs and ham for breakfast; and a recent acceptance speech by actor Ashton Kutcher at an awards show."
What has prompted this display of political pugnacity (aside, of course, from a desperate bid for media attention in service to Cruz's presidential ambitions)? Why, trying to block funding for the Affordable Health Care Act, of course.
This is what moves Republicans to action: Cutting funding for food stamps and trying to block funding for affordable healthcare.
Great party you've got there, assholes.
TV Corner: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
[Spoilers for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are blowing stuff up herein.]
Okay, I know several Shakers will red-face explode if we don't immediately discuss the premiere of ABC's new Marvel series Agents of SHIELD (fuck all those periods), so here we go!
What did you think? I thought it was pretty good! Holy moly the production values! That Avengers money bought a very nice-looking TV show! The establishing story was okay—although, if I'm honest, I was a little confused about the raison d'être for SHIELD, despite the amusingly sarcastic exposition provided by Chiseled White Hero. Iain, however, did not find it confusing, but he reads way more Marvel comic books than I do, so.
I definitely didn't feel like I wanted to root for them, though! They seemed ethically ambiguous at best!
Anyway. I won't belabor it, because we can talk about ALL THE THINGS in comments.
In summation: Ming-Na Wen!
I Have a Proposal for You
Probably everyone who has ever even heard my name, or three syllables of my name, knows how I feel about public marriage proposals (so terrible) and pranks (the worst), so you can imagine the disdain with which I read last night about a public proposal that was also a prank. (No, I'm not linking to it, because people who do these things and then post videos of them on the internet don't need any more attention!) Gross! If there was one thing that could make me hate public proposals even more, it was adding the element of PRANK! And if there was one thing that could make me hate pranks even more—JUST KIDDING I AM PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE OF HATING PRANKS EVEN MORE THAN I ALREADY DO!
Anyway.
Did you know there are such things as Proposal Planners now? People who can help you plan your elaborate public proposal which definitely needs choreography and back-up dancers and several professional camerapeople to record and edit the entire thing so you can upload it to YouTube and hopefully get on The Today Show or whatever I don't even know.
Do you think it's a coincidence that weddings now have to be BIGGER and BETTER and WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than they used to be, and proposals now have to merit national interest if you don't want to be the LOSERS whose engagement didn't even warrant a spot on morning television, especially if you're a straight white pair of gorgeous kyriarchetypes, right around the same time the nation started considering that maybe treating marriage as a privilege is kind of a jerk move? I think it's not a coincidence!
"Let's reclaim privilege with badly choreographed dance moves to some garbage currently on the pop charts! Or something!"—Straight America.
(Not that different-sex couples have the market cornered on this stuff. But they're definitely seeing your baseline equality and raising you Beggaring Ourselves in Celebration of Our Special Love.)
Anyway. Again.
I was thinking about when Iain proposed to me, which was just a total comedy/tragedy of errors. He lost the engagement ring somewhere between the airport and my apartment—the engagement ring he'd designed himself, based on something I'd casually mentioned in conversation like two weeks after we'd met but he'd always remembered. He crushed roses in the process of trying to conceal them, but didn't realize it, and unwittingly handed me a smashed bouquet. He was gutted, and, worse, he was afraid that I wouldn't want to marry someone who did something like lose track of an engagement ring, who couldn't even propose right.
Iain didn't even yet know me well enough to know, or maybe a better word is believe, that I couldn't have cared less about an engagement ring, and I certainly wouldn't have broken off our relationship over a proposal that (for me) was merely a formality since we had to get married to be together and had already made that decision.
And I didn't even yet know him well enough to understand how much proposing to me was very important to him. I would only really begin to understand this six months later, when he conspired with my dear friend Miller to surprise me (privately) with a do-over proposal that was as romantic as he'd imagined.
Of course the story we tell of our engagement is the one in which the ring got lost and the flowers were falling apart. We love that story.
The thing is, there are people who want, genuinely, to stage a huge public proposal or to have a huge public proposal staged for them, and that's okay! Whatever makes you happy! (As long as you are certain your partner will be happy about that, too! Like, totally certain! Like, you've talked about it kind of certain! Which kind of undercuts the whole surprise thing, so I'm just not really sure how you do a public proposal that is both a surprise but also free of possibility of embarrassment or coercion by way of bystander expectation! I hope you work it out, though, if that's what you want!) But I think there are also a lot of people who just feel like they need a grand gesture to feel like it matters.
I think there are, increasingly, a number of people—especially young women partnered with men, who are entrained to believe that their value as a human is deeply tied up in being loved by a man, and who view Important Days Associated with a Wedding to be some of the rare days in a lifetime where they are allowed to be the center of attention and aren't expected to cater and defer to everyone else—who feel like they need a grand gesture to feel like they matter.
And, at a certain point, it becomes tough to distinguish what you really even want to fulfill you from what you feel obliged to have to fulfill external expectations. Intense cultural pressure can make it incredibly hard to tease out what's an authentic internal desire from a planted external expectation of compliance. How much HD documentation of public proposals, and bachelor/ette parties, and bridal showers, and weddings, and receptions, each with their own choreographed numbers and professional photographers who will definitely photoshop a dragon into your wedding photos is about, entirely or in part, just having something to put on social media, in an age of "pix or it didn't happen"? Do you need the grand gesture to feel like your relationship matters, like you matter?
And I just want to say: You don't.
I'm not in the business of telling people what they should or shouldn't want. Want what you want! I just want to say, like the old fart that I am on my digital front porch, that you don't have to want it, if, really, you don't. You don't need to feel obliged to perform your relationship in public to matter. You already matter.
Also? It turns out, as unlikely as it may seem, that it is possible to say, "Yep, I'll totes go all in with you, even though it will be evident years from now that we seem to not know fundamental things about each other, ha ha, oh well, let's go for it!" while holding a wilted rose, and have just THE BEST partnership with someone who, just last week, left the beautiful bouquet of purple flowers he bought for you on the train.
To which you will say, "That just means someone else, who maybe isn't as sure about how loved they are, will get flowers tonight, from someone who wouldn't have thought to buy them. You love me so much you make other relationships better, too!"
Because to love someone is an infinite action, not any single gesture. No matter how grand.
Question of the Day
Inspired by a conversation with Shaker aforalpha: What is the last book (or other thing you read, if you prefer) that made you cry?
The last book I just remember bawling buckets of tears while reading is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
[Content Note: Misogyny; ageism.]
As I have previously mentioned, the Take Your Boobs to the White House Watch series was started: 1. In response to overwhelming public pressure for Hillary Clinton to run for the 2016 presidential nomination, long before she stated that she was even contemplating running; 2. As a bookend to the Take Your Boobs and Go Home Watch series, which was a catalog of the overwhelming public pressure for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the 2008 Democratic primary, even when she still had a decent chance of winning the nomination.
So it is with no small amount of tumbling, contemptuous laughter that I share with you the excellent news that, even as Clinton is being publicly pressured to run, she is simultaneously being publicly pressured to not run.
I give you: "Hillary, Don't Run for President."
There's a lot of fun ageism in the piece (Executive Summary: "Hillary is old blah blah fart"), and the usual tired admonishments that Clinton definitely shouldn't run because Republicans will attack her (*that face*) (which makes her different from other potential candidates how, exactly?) (and don't we know at least that she is capable of fighting them, not to mention willing to, unlike some other presidents I could mention?) (other parentheticals!), but this is definitely my favorite, ahem, part:
In spite of the fact that Clinton's accomplishments as secretary of state are significant, including diplomatic efforts that averted a war between Israel and Hamas, she is likely to be forced to endure campaign onslaughts accusing her of character flaws for forgiving her husband's indiscretions, which means the electorate probably has to endure at least some painful flashbacks.PERFECT. Sure, sure, she brokered globally important agreements, but some assholes (not me! ha ha! but SOMEONE!) will bring up how her husband fucked around on her and she stayed with him, which is objectively a flaw in her character, as I'm sure all reasonable people can agree (just like we'd all definitely agree that she was a disloyal bitch if she'd left) (amirite, bros?), and when those OTHER PEOPLE drag up that her husband engaged in what at best could be described as profoundly unethical breaches of conduct two decades ago and was used by his political opposition to justify millions of dollars of taxpayer money investigating him not because they gave a shit about the safety of women but because they wanted to implode his presidency and were happy to destroy his family in the process, it will cause PAIN to the people who have to listen to reminders that that happened.
So Hillary Clinton shouldn't run.
My contempt for this shit cannot be measured on a scale fathomable by human intellect.
* * *
On a vaguely related note, it has been my consistent observation that men who are most inclined to concern troll the blowback on Hillary Clinton (or the Democratic Party, or Democratic voters, or whomever) if "someone else" invokes Bill Clinton's affairs, are also the men who are most likely to elide the very real issues of consent inherent in any sexual interaction between a president and an intern. Because they don't actually care about what Bill Clinton did, except insomuch as it's a great way to try to discredit Hillary Clinton. You know, for failing to hold him responsible (by divorcing him) for behavior that these same dudes argue was definitely just a private matter between two consenting adults.
TV Corner: Sleepy Hollow
[Content note: violence, racism. This post contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Sleepy Hollow.]
I know that everyone here has been SUPER EXCITED to see the new comedy/horror/supernatural/procedural from FOX, "Sleepy Hollow," previewed in this space. Well, I have finally caught up on the first two episodes. And they were definitely episodes! And some characters have names from Washington Irving' books! Also, witchcraft. Awesome, right?
The show follows Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), an 18th century professor at Merton College, Oxford (what) who joined the British army (okay) to fight against the Continentals in the American Revolution (sure). Once in the colonies, he changed sides because tyranny! So he spies for George Washington. He also gets elected to the legislature (which seems very stealthy and spy-ish) and tries to abolish slavery. Also, he cut off the head of a Hessian officer. Also, he married a witch. Then he died. All of which was totally in Washington Irving's Sketch Book, the Director's Cut. (If you have actually read any Washington Irving, then I encourage you not to think about that.)
"So THAT's where I hid the actual Legend of Sleepy Hollow!"
ANYWAY! Crane wakes up in the future, is befuzzled by cars and Starbucks, and gets picked up as a suspect in a murder. We know he didn't do it though, because we saw the Resurrected Headless Hessian Horseman kill Sheriff "Kindly" Clancy Brown. Whooooops! The police hook Crane up to the Lasso of Truth lie detector. (SPOILER: He's not lying!) More importantly, Captain "Grumpy" Frank Irving (Orlando Jones, who seems to wish he hadn't taken this job) puts him in the charge of Nicole Beharie as Abbie Mills.
Abbie, along with her sister, saw something nasty in the woodshed in the woods years ago. In response to seeing spookystuff, Agent Mulder Abbie went a little wild. Her sister went to a distinctly unhygienic mental institution, where she now passes her time doing Linda Hamilton impressions and talking to supernatural evil. Like you do!
Meanwhile, teenage Abbie was talked out of a life of crime by Sheriff Kindly. If only more troubled teens had an avuncular cop around to eat pie and prompt them into life-changing choices! Now she is an accomplished police lieutenant, who was accepted to Quantico but decided to ditch that in order to solve Sherriff Kindly's murder.
So Abbie and Ichabod crawl around in underground chambers, read waterlogged old Bibles, and dig up the Horseman's head. He calls her "leftenant" a lot, in case you forgot he is Canadian British. The horseman shows up, police make wisecracks, and people we don't know or care about get murdered. There are doughnut jokes, and Ichabod definitely hates taxes.
Ichabod also discovers his wife's gravestone, helpfully inscribed, "BURNT (whut) FOR WITCHCRAFT, 1782(whut???)." So we finally have gotten to witches! And there are good covens, and bad covens. Also, the good ones worked in secret, because(Ichabod explains) the late 18th century was an Age of Reason(tm), buuuuut witches were still burned (arrrgh) by the hundreds (math is hard) in New York. We even get to see a witch-burning (omg stooooooooop!) in a flashback to Revolutionary times; it's held at night, because apparently public executions are a more effective deterrent when you can only dimly make them out in the dark. (If you have actually read anything about witchcraft trials, then I encourage you to REALLY not think about that.)
Anyway! So the town has a history of good witches fighting bad witches, which is all connected to the Horseman (remember him?) and the Apocalypse somehow. Ichabod's wife, Katrina "Exposition" Crane, helpfully turns up in his dreams to explain all this, and to have awesome hair. Ichabod leads Abbie though the mysterious 18th century tunnels (which look a lot like modern sewers, but I encourage you not to think about that) connecting the police station to its storage building; I guess walking across the street was too mundane?
Between visions and research, Abbie and Ichabod discover that a witch is coming back from the dead. Her name is "Serilda of Abadon," and yes, that does work out to "A Bad One," just in case you were wondering. She's a BAD WITCH! She's also Romani ("gypsy," Ichabod helpfully explains) by the way, and can I tell you how excited I am that the only confirmed bad witch so far is a member of a much-persecuted minority? This is really NEAT! It is also neat that she speaks in (alleged) Greek, for no reason.
So, we have evil witches and good witches in a cosmic showdown, a creepy devil-figure who talks to people in mirrors, a headless Horseman/Death of the Apocalypse, and an astonishing number of spooky underground chambers (did colonial New Yorkers ever get around to building houses, or did they just live in the palatial basements? Wait, never mind. I encourage you not to think about that!)
Also, John Cho is in this.
If you like campy, faux-gothic fun delivered with a slick atmosphere, you might enjoy this. The special effects and spooky atmosphere are pretty cool; it seems to have a decent budget, or else extremely clever tech folks who can make a small budget look big. The dialogue is standard goofy horror schlock, so the jokes are frequent and terribad. Abbie is really the star, and it's fun to watch Beharie play her; she gets most of the "straight" lines and I'm genuinely interested in her character's development. Mison has pretty much nothing to work with, but he delivers that nothing with aplomb; if the writers figure out that he's actually the goofy sidekick, not the star, that would help. I was disappointed that Clancy Brown was murdered at the beginning, but since dead people come back to life at an alarming rate in this series (my count thus far: 4 in the flesh, 2 in dreams), that doesn't seem to be an issue.
So, as long as I overlooked the plot and fact that the writers did their research reading Wikipedia skimming Wikipedia calling a friend who skimmed Wikipedia once, long ago not at all, this was cheesy, atmosopheric fun. I just had to switch my brain firmly to 'off.'
Indiana's Republican-Controlled Legislature Isn't Listening to Hoosiers on Marriage Equality
[Content Note: Homophobia.]
I know everyone is positively shocked to hear that my state government is behaving like a bunch of retrofuck heapshits yet again. This time, it's another proposal to codify marriage discrimination into the state constitution, despite the fact there is already a state law restricting same-sex marriage and in flagrant disregard for the will of the people:
A clear majority of Hoosiers do not want the state's existing ban on gay marriage and a new prohibition on civil unions written into the Indiana Constitution, according to a new public opinion poll.So, just to be clear: A majority of Indiana residents not only do not want discrimination codified into the state constitution, but additionally want the state to repeal its ban on same-sex marriage. And yet our state legislature is plowing ahead in precise opposition to what is wanted by the people who elected them to represent us.
The Sept. 17-19 cellular and landline telephone survey of 800 registered voters by Bellweather Research found 64 percent oppose the pending marriage amendment and 36 percent support the proposal. The survey has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.5 percent.
The survey even found 54 percent of self-identified "very conservative" voters are against changing the state constitution to address marriage. Among Republicans generally 57 percent oppose the amendment, as do two-thirds of Democrats and independents.
A majority of Hoosiers also said the state should repeal its longstanding ban on gay marriage and offer some form of legal recognition to same-sex couples, with 35 percent endorsing gay marriage and 38 percent supporting civil unions.
Twenty-eight percent said there should be no legal recognition or rights accorded to same-sex couples in Indiana.Our elected representatives are literally legislating the will of less than one-third of the entire state.
Megan Robertson, the Portage native leading Freedom Indiana, said the poll shows the Republican legislative leaders pushing for the amendment are out of touch with their constituents.I am so angry and so frustrated to know that the majority of people in this state do not want to discriminate, and yet our state legislature is so dominated by hateful bigots that it doesn't even matter what we want. And I am desperately afraid that, if the legislature is successful, by the time it comes up on the ballot in November of next year allowing mob rule to determine minority rights, the state will have been flooded with so much outside cash to muddy the arguments and confuse voters that equality will lose.
"Hoosiers do not want our constitution amended, and we hope lawmakers will hear that message and make the right decision during the legislative session to either let this amendment die or vote it down," said Robertson, who has previously managed several Indiana Republican Congressional campaigns.
She said rewriting the constitution to remove protections for certain Hoosiers sends "the wrong message about our state."
"This is the opposite of Hoosier hospitality," Robertson said.
If you can spare it, Freedom Indiana (with which I have no affiliation, by way of full disclosure) could definitely use some donations. We've got a fight ahead of us here.
