Videos of Kumail’s Life
Urvasi Urvasi from the movie Humse Hai Muqabla- 1994
90s Bollywood movies in the houuuuuuuse!
Field Trip!!!
I was lucky enough to get to see The Nutcracker Ballet in North Carolina every year since I was about 2 years old. My family is not crazy rich, but my parents put a high value on us going to culturey stuff, and by the time I was 16 I had the entire thing memorized. No matter how rebellious and ridiculous I looked as a teenager, I still tried to clean up for our annual trip to the ballet, and missing it is one of the things I hate most about living outside of NC now. The North Carolina School of the Arts’ version is just fantastic, and as time went on, our childlike wonder gave way to very grownup appreciation of dance, sprinkled with giggling at the male dancers’ packages and trying to pick out which ones were straight.
Big time digression. If you don’t know the story of The Nutcracker, here it is: a young girl named Clara gets a nutcracker doll from her weird uncle on Christmas Eve, and when she wakes up in the middle of the night to bring him to bed with her, she finds him embroiled in a battle with a bunch of rats. Clara throws her shoe to help the Nutcracker defeat the Rat King, and in gratitude, he changes into his human prince form and takes her to the Land of Sweets. There all the inhabitants of the Land of Sweets- chocolate, tea, marzipan, etc, do dances for her to celebrate how awesome she is. The end.
Doesn’t sound very cinematic? It’s not. It’s a ballet. But that didn’t stop some idiot from making a movie version of it, and holy shit is it bizarre looking.
This is the sun.
That dark spot in the lower right corner is the size of Earth, BTW. From Dvice!
“Love that is dying concerns scarcity, whereas genuine love involves abundance.”
What does it mean to say that you can’t get enough of another person? Psychology Today decided to break it down, and rather than make love sound lame and intellectual, I thought it was kinda beautiful.
It sets up enjoying one’s lover as an experience that is intrinsically (rather than extrinsically) valuable. Painting, listening to music, playing video games- these are all things we do for the experience of doing them rather than for the end result. Such is spending time with someone you love. It doesn’t mean you can do nothing else while experiencing it, it doesn’t mean you only want to do that, it just means that you spend time with the person because it is its own reward. And I love it. Listen:
Just as we can never finish listening to music or engaging in intellectual thought, and hence we can never get enough of such activities, so we cannot exhaust all the various possibilities of being with our beloved, and hence we can never have enough of her.
Go read it!
A tip for freelance writers looking to get published- just say something nasty and fake about the President.
Check this out- this past week the Fox Nation blog reposted a scathing article about Obama in their “culture” section, but never bothered to mention that it was an Onion story, and therefore not real. They’ve since taken down the article, but Mediaite got a screengrab of both the article and the first few comments, which are sad and hilarious. Three cheers for professorbrown for being the only person who seems to understand that it’s a fake news story.
Just in case you forgot that this was a thing we did….
Here are two very racist and very similar ads from way back in the day.
Lessons learned from National Lampoon’s Vacation.
Remember that scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation, the first one, when Clark Griswold finally gets to talk to Christie Brinkley after drooling over her for half the movie, and he tells her all those lies about himself and they end up in the pool together, near-naked? And when Clark goes back up to his hotel room, Ellen is very upset with him and says that she wants to be fun too, and the proceeds to take off her own clothes and run down to the pool herself, inviting Clark to join her?
Even as a kid watching that, it struck me that Ellen Griswold was the coolest woman on earth. She took something that she could have been furious and upset about for years, something that she could have held over Clark’s head forever and kept a grudge in her heart for even longer than forever- she took it and she turned it into a positive thing. She trusted her husband, knew he wasn’t a bad guy, and figured out a way to make them both feel better about things.
I strive to be like that my whole life. I hope I never prefer to hold grudges over being happy.
Gynomite’s Reading Room
This makes me love Hugh Grant a bit more.
Ladies, does your boyfriend consider kissing another girl to be cheating? I look into the research at Lemondrop.
Listen to Sarah Palin confuse North Korea and South Korea!
Did you know the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb was largely responsible for how we celebrate Thanksgiving? Interesting Thanksgiving facts!
Gorgeous and hilarious musician cameos in movies throughout the ages!
Who can we trust when it comes to nutrition? Certainly not the government…
I interviewed the lady who coined the term “toxic” when it comes to people, about her new book on toxic men.
Soap operas are hard up and have resorted to very unironic product placement.
This is why I love The Meltdown
Last night I brought a whole bunch of pies to feed our wonderful audience, and not only did another audience member chime in by bringing cookies for everyone, but this is how one enterprising audience member chose to inform others about the pie.
Just like Mom used to curse.
