ratgirlagogo

He was the winner of season 3 of Top Chef Masters.

Yes, it is "survival" money since otherwise many will not be able to pay their rent, their mortgage, or buy food. IMO of course. I live in the most infected state (New York - 45, 934 cases), in the most infected city (NYC - 26, 697 cases) and in NYC's most infected borough (Queens - 8529 cases). Those statistics all as of about 4 PM today. It is weird. There is not the slightest possibility that I have NOT been exposed to the virus, from many people, along with everyone else I know and love here. Yet, I don't feel anything close to the raw constant fear I felt for months after 9/11, when I was so afraid the subways would be blown up, or worst of all, the Indian Point nuclear power plant (which would have wiped out this whole area of the country). I have the same tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I'm just not as physically fearful as I was then, even though I understand COVID 19 is a pretty horrifically painful death - and one I'd be likely to have alone. In fact I felt more dread during the AIDS crisis in the 80's when I was going to three funerals a month. It's irrational because I should be much more scared. Intellectually I know this. Maybe part of it is that the weirdest thing about NYC social distancing is that we're now doing the opposite of the kind of social distancing New Yorkers always do. We're REALLY good at being crushed into a subway car and yet ignoring all the people we're crushed against. All of us (women especially) are experts at walking down a crowded street and not making eye contact. But you're always friendly to the folks at the pizzeria and the bodega and the bar and the laundromat (and despite what you might have heard, your closer neighbors). And it's also the case that in big emergencies, like 9/11, or Hurricane Sandy, or the ridiculous two week blackout we had in my end of Queens a few years back - that there's this immediate kind of camaraderie and mutual aid that comes to the fore. I remember walking across the 59th Street Bridge back to Queens on the morning of 9/11 and the way people were hugging strangers who started to cry, people letting other people use their phones, people singing and praying, playing the radio. And now we have this terror among us and we're supposed to be interacting with our neighbors on the block the way we interact with people in other states and other countries - virtually. I make a point of getting outside and walking a bit every day, and I'm still buying groceries from stores and not online, six feet apart from everybody else of course blah blah blah. And I talk to people, again from a safe distance, and not for long since, you know. I guess I feel weirdly trapped. All Mr Rat and I can do is wait and see, Like everybody else.

Here's a video of some of the NY1 on-air people working at home, along with their not always helpful pets: https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/03/26/distraction-or-a-delight--pet-parents-navigate-working-from-home

***RECORD SCRATCH***** What??????? You don't like comedy of any kind????? Please explain.

Basically I agree with this. I think they're willing to come back, but maybe not to worry about winning as much. Especially with this bunch of old schoolers - hell, they ALREADY won before.

Hey, greetings to my fellow true crime addicts! Haven't posted on this board for quite a while, but I just wanted to alert you all that the second season of Vice TV's The Dark Side of the Ring premieres tomorrow night, March 24th. It covers crimes and scandals in the world of professional wrestling. If, unlike me, you don't love professional wrestling, you may not have much interest in the whole series. But I think all of you will be interested in this season's first two episodes, which cover the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide case. Part one is already available online through the vice.com website, as is all of season one.

Aside from anything else, the fucking POSTER for the movie gave away a crucial plot point.

A lot of people feel that way it seems. I don't know, even when he does things I agree with (like most of what he's been doing on the Coronavirus) he has such a vibe of a supervillain in a comic book or a Bond movie - his tone of voice reads 'why-am-I-always-surrounded-by-IDIOTS!!??????"

Gee, and of course people in service jobs NEVER had to put up with jerks before. 😁 Sorry, not trying to be snide to you for displaying empathy, just had to giggle a little.

I also thought first of that one and Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town (a Vietnam war era classic):

I feel like my cat Nadji hangs on every word I say like I was the most loveable, but dumbest, person in the world.

I have it on DVD and I watched it anyway. It's really a mesmerizing film for me - Shirley Stoler is not just scary but unexpectedly sensually beautiful, and vulnerable, which makes her even scarier. The black and white cinematography makes it seem like a documentary, or even an Investigation Discovery show. Frightening in the same way as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Man Bites Dog. It also reminded me of Female Trouble, esp. since TCM Underground ran that recently, and I'd think it must be a favorite of John Waters. As somebody with a long love-hate relationship with John Ford, I feel you. Wyatt Earp's story, in general, was kind of bullshit. He lived long enough to write his autobiography in the 20's, IIRC, and to hang out and become friends with John Ford, Raoul Walsh etc. in Hollywood because he remained a handsome charismatic man even late in life, and obviously a tremendous storyteller. But sheriffs then as now are hired to do the same thing the Sheriff of Nottingham was hired to do - collect debts for the county, not to drive thugs and gunslingers out of town. Earp pocketed a percentage of all the tax debts etc. that he collected - thus his need for a gun and also the reason sheriffs are generally elected officials rather than appointees - because otherwise it's a plum job where you get to collect cash on every encounter. I'd recommend Jeff Guinn's great book The Last Gunfight on this subject, or Casey Tefertiller's Wyatt Earp. Ford's cavalry Westerns are interesting to me for several reasons. One, they are part of his attempt to work out his World War II experiences (even as part of the film unit, he experienced shots fired, as they say, in anger). Also, as I have said before, probably in this thread somewhere, Westerns always, always attempt to explore/explain American history in a way that no other American film genre does. They always ask and answer the two questions, how did we become the United States? and do we DESERVE to be the United States? The really fascinating thing about the cavalry films, is that they are about, you know, the cavalry. Wagon trains and homesteaders and cowboys and gunmen were not enough to claim the West as part of the USA. It required the force of the military and yet most Westerns don't deal with this. (More recent spaghetti-inspired bullshit Westerns focus entirely on individual grudges and rivalries and revenge - which is why I can barely consider them Westerns.) I prefer Stagecoach to any of the cavalry Westerns myself - but I'm so interested in what he's trying to do.

Since there has been some discussion of the idea of medical triage on A Certain Thread, here's some info that some of you know very well and some of you may not. When the Nazis carried out their euthanasia (of people deemed mentally or physically unfit) and genocide (of the racially unfit, i.e. Jews, Gypsies; as well as socially unfit, i.e. homosexuals, sex workers, communists, anarchists) programs, the live or die decisions were in every case made by medical doctors based on the concept of TRIAGE. This is a great book on this very disturbing subject: https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052 You may wonder why doctors, who have all sworn an oath to do no harm, could come to the point of standing in the death camps and doing the selections of those who would die (very young and very old people, physically unfit of middle age) and those who would live (old enough and strong enough to work) and the answer is obviously complicated - but very simple in another way. The murder was always carried out in a relatively clean, bloodless, "medical" way. The mentally and physically disabled were killed via injections, rather than, say, being shot in the head. The camp inmates were sent into gas chambers to be mass euthanized like puppies and kittens, as opposed again to being shot or something. In every case the idea of triage was used to justify murder since there was, of course, a war on, and Professional Experts needed to make decisions about whose lives were worth spending scarce resources on preserving. This is one of the most disturbing but crucial books I've ever read in my life. You ought to be able to get it from your library system, probably in e-book form as far as that goes. If not it's available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/nazidoctorsmedic0000lift/page/n5

White-throated Sea Porcupine.

Boo fucking hoo. Lots of people work 12+ hour days without a break because they have a family to support or even just themselves. All while making minimum wage, and without someone watching out for their well-being. Cry me a river. Aside from just, nobody should have to work 12 hour+ days for minimum wage w/o anyone watching out for their well-being (I mean for christ's sake!), one of the reasons people do it (as I did in struggling times when I was younger) is because people who work jobs like that are instantly replaceable by other equally desperate people, so you just put up with it since for the moment you need the money and the boss has no need to negotiate. Actors and actresses in hit shows are CARRYING the show and ensuring its success, meaning the jobs of all the other people who work on it. It's stupid not to make sure the star doesn't break down from exhaustion. It's not just her/him, it's everybody else that the show employs that will be affected.