So… Jerry (Jim O’Heir) met Newt Gingrich today during a filming of Parks & Rec in Indianapolis. And then I found out there’s a blog combining Jerry’s lines with pictures of Newt. Craaaazy.
For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall-Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.
(
If someone’s idea of fun is laughing at the prospect of a random girl next to them being raped, then I’m totally fine ruining that.”Everyone else’s fun”? Consider that in virtually every audience, there will be a rape victim. Probably several. (Rape is extremely common. Even a guy like Daniel Tosh ought to know that.) For those survivors, and even for people who haven’t been raped, hearing a comedian not only make a rape joke, but make several and smugly, aggressively talk about how rape jokes are always funny, has already ruined their night. Yep, it sucks to be pushing back memories of being raped or assaulted, to be trying to recapture the fun you were just having, while everyone around you is laughing at a comment that put you back at the moment of trauma. And for what purpose? So the comedian can feel edgy? Oooooh, how subversive, a man talking about rape casually and flippantly.
I’m glad this girl spoke up. I would have been relieved to see her do so. I go to comedy clubs a lot and fit in as much as anyone else in the audience. Many hecklers are either jerks or they think they’re funny. This is different. A good comedian teases his audience and responds to hecklers creatively. When it’s clear he or she has really hit a nerve with an audience member and it’s not a joke to them, they switch topics. A night at the comedy club should be fun, and even edgy and possibly uncomfortable. It shouldn’t be deeply upsetting. (Rape is frequently dismissed- a joke about a lot of other “bad” topics is different because those problems are generally taken seriously by society.) It shouldn’t be a scenario where someone who rarely if ever has to worry about rape (i.e., a man) personally ridicules someone who regularly has to worry about it (i.e., a woman.)
I’m not trying to say Tosh can’t say whatever he wants. But I’m saying what he said was horrible, clueless, and frankly, unimaginative. I certainly won’t go see him now.
Bringing up murder is derailing, by the way. Murder isn’t the discussion here. And everyone cares about “their own personal issues,” especially when they perceive that others don’t.
This is something that happened to a friend of mine in her own words.
“So, on Friday night my friend and I were at her house and wanted to get out and do something for the evening. We brainstormed ideas and she brought up the idea of seeing a show at the Laugh Factory. I’d never been, I thought…
I think everyone needs to know about this. How is rape funny? It fucking RUINED my life.
Some people think murder is funny, in context, when it’s objectively worse than rape. Why don’t you go attack that, instead of caring about your own personal issues. Rape is bad, sure, but don’t go dragging it out in public and ruining other peoples fun.
Tibetan foxes are nonplussed.
I’m not sure how to describe an entire photoset of an animal with an inscrutable expression, but… suffice it to say that it is a greyish-reddish fox on a scrubby Tibetan plateau (according to my researchings on Wikipedia). But it also has a round, deadpan face with perpetually narrowed eyes. Unlike the Pallas cat, it seems more unamused than grarrly. The Tibetan sand fox is the Daria of foxes.
This fox is just continually unimpressed with everything you have to offer.
what is the evolutionary perk to having a face like that god damn
Bigger predators leave you alone because they can’t stand the mockery and non-verbal put-downs
omg Tibetan foxes are the best
i feel like @cleolinda should see this
*cough* Heatherbad, Lepus, Nehirose, Postmodsexgeek, oh…just all of you.
Yeah…I think all of you recognize this look as you have given it at least once…in the past 24 hours…to someone.
i am assuming calling me “heatherbad” was freudian, yes? ::amused grin::
When I was in preschool there was this really weird system of time-out where they’d put you in this giant plastic bucket sort of like this one:
And the rule was you couldn’t leave the bucket for ten minutes.
In case you didn’t know, I was what the teachers referred to as a…
There goes Bo, eating grass again. I wonder if he knows I’m the president.
(Pete Souza/White House Photo)
