We’re starting right away with our Featured Pet of the Day, because that energy really fuels me. Please meet Bucky:
Bucky’s human companion, Deborah, has this to say: “The best guess from the very lovely shelter I adopted her from was that she’s a Boxer-Bull Dog mix, but I’m also open to the idea she’s an evolutionary step between puggles and Bull Mastiffs.”
“She’s named after Jennie Jerome, the first American called “buccaneer,” but doesn’t mind being mistaken for Captain America’s friend.”
“She enjoys peanut butter and Law & Order reruns, making new friends, and hates skateboards with a passion I don’t understand but respect her enough not to question.”
“I worry this is too many pictures, but I just love her face.”
Thank you, Bucky and Deborah! There are never too many pictures for Featured Pet of the Day.
I am so sorry if you are in the thick of the heatwave, I am hiding in the mountains and getting increasingly horrifying text messages from my loved ones. My dad and stepmom did the Very Ontarian Thing where you go to Boldt Castle (somehow I have never been?) and they almost died.
The story of Boldt Castle is fascinating, check it out:
George Boldt, general manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City and manager of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, and his family enjoyed an earlier frame cottage on Hart Island (the island's original name) for several summers, which they greatly expanded. In 1900, George Boldt launched an ambitious construction campaign to build a huge masonry structure, one of the largest private homes in the United States. He engaged the architectural firm G. W. & W. D. Hewitt and hundreds of workers for a six-story "castle" as a present to his wife. In addition, four other masonry structures on the island are architecturally notable. Equally distinctive is a huge yacht house on neighboring Wellesley Island, where the Boldts had another summer home and a vast estate, incorporating farms, canals, a golf course, tennis courts, stables, and a polo field.
The construction of Boldt Castle ceased abruptly in early 1904 after the death of Boldt's wife, Louise Kehrer Boldt. Boldt never returned to Heart Island, leaving this structure as a monument of his love. For 73 years, the castle and other stone structures were left exposed to the harsh winter weather and occasional vandals. The Thousand Islands Bridge Authority acquired Heart Island and the nearby yacht house in 1977, for one dollar, under the agreement that all revenues obtained from the castle operation would be applied towards restoration, so that the island would be preserved for the enjoyment of future generations. In the two decades after acquiring the property, the Thousand Islands Bridge Authority spent some $15 million for restoration and improvements here, and work continues annually. The initial goal of the restoration of Heart Island was not to finish what had not been completed, but to restore the island to the state it was in when construction was halted.
This sparked some great stories, read the whole thread:
So exciteddddd, never give up on your dreams, unless those dreams are playing in the NHL, never gonna happen:
Hinted at since the first MCU movie, Iron Man, Marvel is finally making Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The film will feature Kim’s Convenience star Simu Liu as the titular Shang-Chi, a half-Chinese, half-American superhero. He’s adept at multiple wushu fighting styles. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed to the Hall H crowd that Liu would get the role and that Destin Daniel Cretton will direct. Awkwafina will play an unspecified role, and the realMandarin will be played by Wong Kar-wai’s number one smoulderer, Tony Leung. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is slated for a February 12, 2021 release. Incidentally, this is a role Liu has been gunning for online since 2018.
Solid move:
When you live in the United States, your boss can insist on you calling yourself “Field Peasant #2” and there’s nothing you can do about it:
4. Can my boss make me go by my last name?
I am an elementary school teacher, and for the past year and a half I have worked at a private school in a supporting capacity, and have had students, faculty, and parents address me by my first name. Everyone at the school already knows me by my first name. For the upcoming school year, I will be back in a classroom full-time, and I would prefer to still be addressed by my first name. Some of my reasons relate to establishing a good relationship with my students more quickly, and other reasons are more personal. My principal, however, insists that I MUST be addressed by my last name as a classroom teacher despite the fact that I have told her how uncomfortable I am with the change. Can my boss force me to change my name at work?
RECIPE:
I shared this story with the weekend subscribers and now I’m sharing it again bc it’s so fucking terrifying? The town in Alaska where every single cop has been convicted of domestic violence, minimum:
STEBBINS, Alaska — When Nimeron Mike applied to be a city police officer here last New Year’s Eve, he didn’t really expect to get the job.
Mike was a registered sex offender and had served six years behind bars in Alaska jails and prisons. He’d been convicted of assault, domestic violence, vehicle theft, groping a woman, hindering prosecution, reckless driving, drunken driving and choking a woman unconscious in an attempted sexual assault. Among other crimes.
“My record, I thought I had no chance of being a cop,” Mike, 43, said on a recent weekday evening, standing at his doorway in this Bering Strait village of 646 people.
He was wrong.
No comment:
My dear friend Laura Ortberg Turner wrote this beautiful piece about the evangelical friends she made and lost in high school:
When I was young, I had certain ideas about how the world worked, how God worked. One story of youthful zeal is that it fades with age, as life gets harder and more complex; that the center of an uncompromising faith structure cannot hold in a complicated world. As my friends and I have aged, though, we’ve all developed wildly different relationships to our religion. We’ve grown up and apart and orbited each other like satellites. I am almost 34 now. I am a mother, a wife, a writer, a homeowner, and it is just beginning to dawn on me—a realization I’m sure is not unique to me—that I will never again be a teenager. I have also noticed something that psychologists and poets have been saying for centuries: We become what we dwell on. And what we dwelt on in high school, what we breathed, was God’s goodness. And what I dwell on now is God’s goodness still, but also the loss that has attended my life and the lives of those I love and how a good God could allow it all.
I set out to write this because I wanted to know what has happened to me and to my friends since high school; how we have navigated faith and doubt as life has dealt us more hardships than we could have anticipated were coming, including the suicide of one of our own. I wanted to know how, and if, the faith withstood the hardships. I wanted to know where we had all gone.We moved as one organism in those high school days, submerged in the heady waters of teenage faith in the middle of the cresting wave of American evangelicalism.
So I called my friends. I started writing this essay when I was pregnant, which means that I called them on various commutes between home and the hospital, or home and the doctor’s office, or home and therapy. My friend Jenna and I talked one gloomy afternoon as I drove over the Dumbarton Bridge at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay. Jenna was a year younger than me and attended Willow Creek Community Church most of her life. She lives with her girlfriend in Colorado now. We talked about Jess, who lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids, and then I hung up with Jenna and called Nick, who lives in Boston, and asked him so many questions that I was late for my next appointment. Kaitlin and I had two or three phone calls and could have had five more. I called Steve while I was waiting for the street sweeper to pass on our block. He lives in Guatemala now—has for years, working for a humanitarian organization and climbing mountains in his spare time. I forgot about Skype, so our phone call cost a hundred dollars, but I would pay it again for that hour.
Collecting these stories, piecing together our teenage years from our collective memories, was balm to me. Even the hard ones, the sad ones, the friends whose faith had entirely crumbled—there was something concretely satisfying about playing the role of friend again to the people I had once spent more time with than my family. We all fell easily back into conversation. We needed each other again. Well, I needed them.
The group expanded and contracted depending on the year, on who was away at college and who suddenly got close with friends at school, but mainly we were 15 or so teens living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, attending various high schools and all part of a big youth group at a big church. We spent Sunday nights at church together, and Sunday mornings at church with our parents, and most of us were there Wednesday nights for services too, and maybe once again during the week in one capacity or another. But we spent a lot of time together outside the church too, on other aimless pursuits—long drives down endless leafy roads cracked hot by Midwestern summers, high school dances, winter nights watching comedies in mildew-dank basements.
This was the heyday of evangelical purity culture, the baked-in teaching that sex was reserved for marriage between a man and a woman, and that we could trust God to deliver us from our sexual impulses until we were ready to express them in marriage. My friend Jess recalled a moment in the church balcony with a few other friends in which Steve told us he was never going to kiss anyone until his wedding day. (Steve definitely kissed someone before his wedding day.) Our youth group spoke often and regularly about sex, and in a very frank way: There were conversations about whether oral sex was sex (yes), if kissing and hand-holding were OK (only if they didn’t lead you to lust), and if it was OK to date someone who wasn’t a Christian (inconclusive).
Hubba:
(Maury voice) you are NOT the asshole:
I have a now 6-month-old male dog that I adopted. I was told by the people I got him from not to get him neutered until he was a year old, because of his breed. I always keep a watchful eye on him when I take him out and my yard is closed off, so there should be no reason for dogs to get back there, or so I thought.
Our next-door neighbor adopted a dog around the same time we did, female, from a different foster group. They are not great with this dog. She is constantly getting out, they’re always chasing her up and down the street, screaming her name. They haven’t made any attempts to train her (they admitted this to me) and they don’t even take her for walks, they just let her out into their backyard, which overlooks our yard.
I do take my dog for daily (Sometimes twice daily) walks but I do send him into the yard to do his business outside that. He can’t escape, because it’s completely fenced in. We have a doggy door so he can let himself out as well. Anyway, one day I look outside and realize the neighbor’s dog is back there with mine…doing the devil’s tango. I go out there and bring the dog home. The neighbor’s are intensely apologetic and I manage to build something to make sure that their dog can’t go into ours ever again.
A bit later, the neighbors come to me and tell me that their dog is pregnant. She didn’t do anything with any other dog and they’re sure it’s his puppies. I said that I will help find the puppies homes, but we’re not interested in more dogs at the moment.
I guess the foster home they adopted the dog from found out that the dog was pregnant and took her back due to breach of contract. I guess due to the pet population, they have to promise to make sure that she wasn’t getting pregnant and while they didn’t do it purposefully, they didn’t get her spayed when they were supposed to either.
Now my neighbors want us to pay them money for the dog that they lost, because they’re claiming it’s partially our fault. I told them to get lost and said they were irresponsible dog owners, plus the dog jumped into our yard. They’re angry and said it’s the least we could do, plus we got to keep our dog. They claim we should’ve lost ours too.
Am I being unreasonable here?
MUSIC VIDEOS:
Let’s start off with “Laurey’s Entrance” from Fucklahoma:
Rudie Can’t Fail
Tenderness on the Block (all covers of this song are equally amazing):
Teddy Pendergrass doing “I Don’t Love You Anymore” on Soul Train:
My second favourite Nick Cave song:
I really want CRJ to release a music video for “The Sound” and it’s not even on the tour list right now:
Stan Rogers on why elite sports are such a crapshoot (I have a lot of cousins who Almost made the NHL and it doesn’t feel great when it doesn’t happen, but this song is AMAZE):
Have a wonderful day, this is going to be a good week! I love you so much.
xoxoxo
n
*waves maniacally across the internet at Bucky and Deborah*
I want to share that I know Bucky, and seeing her sweet face first thing this week is the absolute beat way I could imagine to start a Monday! Nicole is one thousand percent right that there's no such thing as too many pictures of a featured pet, but honestly I feel like that guideline is extra-true for Bucky 🥰