Remember when the rap part of 90s smash TLC hit “Waterfalls” used to get cut out of the radio edit?! Blasphemous! Also, remember when rap was edgy? Now it’s a shitty haircut away from being synthy euro trash. This decade is fun!
Yesterday marked the ten year anniversary of Left Eye’s untimely death. She died in a car crash in Honduras, where she was staying at the time on a spiritual and physical pilgrimage. The VH1 documentary shows the last days of her life, and even the crash itself as her friend in the passenger seat was filming at the time of the accident. It’s a really interesting doc, because during her stay in Honduras, she believed a spirit was following her and trying to kill her. It’s a good watch.
RIP Lisa. It does not feel like she died 10 years ago. On her casket, some lyrics from her part of “Waterfalls” were engraved: “Dreams are hopeless aspirations, in hopes of coming true, believe in yourself, the rest is up to me and you.” Damn right, girl.
I LOVE me some New Girl. And I really, really don’t want to pick favorites because I love all the characters. But Schmidt is so fucking great. He’s a pest, but a lovable, beautiful, big-hearted pest.
Favorite comeback of all-time: “You’ve got some Schmidt on your face!”
Farewell, Newt! He’s officially out of the race to be our dear leader.
He liked the moon and hated everyone else. But to be honest, the moon shit woulda been awesome. But there are real problems earthbound my friend, that we must attend to first. Like energy, food and what to do with the Kardashians.
May you find solace in reruns of Parks and Recreation and takeout from Noodles & Company, like the rest of us.
Watching genocide unravel is never an easy movie to pick up. Angelina Jolie wrote, directed and produced In the Land of Blood and Honeybased on the Bosnian war in the 90s. In an interview, Jolie explained the intrigue that brought her to write a film on what happened in Bosnia. “This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe … What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?”
Image via wikipedia
The movie, as it was rumored to be, is not about a woman falling in love with her rapist. It is a startling love story between two people on different sides of the war. The man is a soldier who fights for the Bosnian Serbs, and the woman is Bosnian Muslim. Their love story begins before the war and continues through countless atrocious moments throughout the film. The dynamic between the two is so strange that at times you don’t know whether she is his prisoner or girlfriend.
At any moment throughout the film you feel like someone is going to get raped or murdered. It’s shocking to see society unravel so quickly to the point where soldiers who were civilly taking women on dates are now raping them in front of an audience of women and men. As terrible as it is to watch these things, it’s even more terrible to know that worse things happen everyday throughout the world. How many genocidal conflicts are happening right now? How many women are being raped and beaten? How many men are being killed because of their religion? The film raises these questions in the ever-present absence of the UN and the US during this conflict that ended so many lives in Bosnia.
The point of this film was to inform us about a gruesome war that many people in our country, and maybe worldwide don’t know much about. It’s not everyday that genocide is as popular as what happened in Nazi Germany, as many genocides throughout the past century have gone unnoticed by popular culture.
If you’re in the mood for a good, heart-breaking film that focuses on genocide and war, this is the film for you.
Check out the trailer for In the Land of Blood and Honey
We are just doomed to worship the dollar, aren’t we?!
If you find yourself with 5 dollars left in your bank account for a whole week until payday, then you are just like me. Thankfully I’ve already done my grocery shopping for the week, and unfortunately that means I have to eat at home EVERY DAY (chinese food just ain’t the same at home).
This week, I’ve made a delectable lemon vegetable soup, partly because it’s inexpensive to make and partly because I binged on carbs all weekend and can’t look at another piece of bread for at least another week.
Lemon Vegetable Soup
The real beauty of soup is that when making something like a garden-variety mix, you can change the ingredients up a bit to your liking. Democracy! Maybe.
I meandered using this recipe as a guide. If you don’t like onions, you can throw in potatoes, or if you really like peas feel free to have a pea party in that pot. Or, like me, you used what you had because it’s allllllmost payday. (But I didn’t just have a shit ton of kale on hand, I’m not a freak)
Ingredients
Veggies are the new black. Image via eattheweeds.com
32 ounces of vegetable or chicken stock
3 whole carrots
1 onion
Two stalks of celery
1 green zucchini
1 yellow zucchini
1 tomato
Bunch of kale
1/2 teaspoon of oregano
1/2 teaspoon of thyme
salt, pepper and garlic to taste
1/4 cup of lemon juice, or one whole lemon squeezed
Steps
Pour the 32-ounce vegetable/chicken stock into a pot and place on medium heat.
Clean all of your vegetables. Begin chopping the carrots and onion into bite-sized pieces. Once the stock begins to simmer, turn the heat down to low and throw the onion and carrots into the pot. Let them simmer for 4-5 minutes.
While the carrots and onions are simmering, chop the zucchini, celery and tomato. Wash the kale and tear off the leaves from the stalk into bite-sized pieces.
Throw the celery, zucchini, oregano, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper into the pot and let simmer for 4-5 minutes. Then throw in the tomato and kale. The kale will need a minute or two to wilt into the pot and quit being so darn leafy. The tomato will get piece-y and that’s cool too.
Lastly, add the lemon juice and you’re basically finished. I like my vegetables to be softer in soup, so I let my pot simmer on the stove for about 10 minutes after I added the tomato and kale.
Also, all the ingredients are affordable. When making something of this size, it’s good to have tupperware and a strong will to eat the same meal a couple of times throughout the week. FUCK Yay budgets!
Instead of living disgustingly bleak lives ourselves, we get a beautiful chance to live vicariously through other 20 somethings going through similar/worse problems that us. These are the days of Girls. (And we get to wait to find the new episodes on the internet, or a friend living with parents who have HBO! Exciting!)
It is going to take a while to get it out of our heads that this show is not fabulous-fabulous like Sex and the City was. Sure, they both share uncomfortable looking shoes, sex and relationships warbles, but unlike SATC it is not glamorized in the least. Girls is less high baller fashionista and more like “holy shit, I need to make rent/I’m unemployed/I’m thinking about doing softcore porn to pay my cell phone bill/Who’s free to take me to my abortion appointment?”
SPOILERS!
Episode 2 of Girls is just as bleak as the pilot. Jessa needs to get an abortion, but flakes because it’s either scary, she doesn’t care, or she can feel the impending miscarriage happening. White russians + boys who call their mom are apparently the new coat hanger. The boy she’s making out with is directed to her underpants when the aforementioned miscarriage luckily appears.
And to those who haven’t vaginas, let me tell you that they can indeed be panicky. The episode has a panicked feel that is unsettling, but vagina worries are no laughing matter, especially when one of those matters could turn into a child.
While Jessa is buggin’ about abortion shit, her friends all wait at the abortion parlor (I’ve always wanted to call them that. They should serve ice cream there). Marnie is annoying because she hates her nice boyfriend and likes to be on time, while Hannah is having weird, plot-ty sex with her less-than-amazing sexual partner. Who, by the way, is the embodiment of the boyfriend or fuck-buddy of at least one of your girlfriends who could totally do better.
Lastly, Shoshanna, the chatty, perky one, reveals that she’s a virgin and shocks absolutely no one.
The episode, steeped with mediocre sex and abortion kerfuffles seemed like it ended an hour too soon. Maybe it’s a symptom of watching Tiny Furniturea couple of times, but I just expect to watch Lena Dunham for more than 30 minutes. I’m seriously considering not watching this show until I can watch all of them in one, amazing, Panera Bread-coma filled day.
Remixes are so fucking hot. They have the ability to open up songs to new dimensions. They change the energy, the feeling, the mood, the everything of the song. If you’re a Little Boots fan, check out these remixes of her song “Every Night I Say a Prayer” here. I don’t know if it’s the lyrics, the melody or the combination, but this is very reminiscent of early Madonna.
Tensnake Remix
Little Boots “Every Night I Say a Prayer” remix playlist
So this exists now: Pizza Hut in the good ol’ Middle East has conjured up a pizza crust of either chicken fillets or cheeseburgers. If you guys didn’t know the American apocalypse was coming, this is a sign of it. How could this have NOT been made for mass circulation in the states?! This is like every Liz Lemon and stoner’s DREAM FOOD.
But seriously, can you imagine your toilet bowl after eating one of these suckers? Complete and total devastation. Havoc. Chaos. Toilet paper resources drained. You’re dazed, you’re confused, and you’ve just dropped the most futile bomb of your life. The only way out now is a hop in the shower to take over where the TP left off and wait out the cold sweats.
Also seriously, this is like the best PR move EVER to get the “normal, everyday American” to like the Middle East. Well played, Pizza Hut, combiner of cuisines, cultures and nations.
“This ain’t no fetish, ain’t objectifying no one
I reject your deconstruction of my taste
But ignoramus always look in my direction
They’re so frustrated I don’t keep it in the race
Like they’ve never seen this before
Like it’s 1954 But the whole world’s turning brown and who cares
I’ve got a thing for black girls
La, la la la la, la la, la la la la la
Yeah, my mom says
I’ve got a thing for black girls
La, la la la la, la la, la la la la la
You know I got some love for black girls
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Well I have tried to taste the rainbow in my life
I’ve sampled many different flavors I enjoy
It’s not to say I wouldn’t settle down with Sally
Dilly dally with her heart like it’s my toy
I’ve been to England a few times
And it’s common over there
Plus the whole world’s turning brown and who cares
[Hook x2]
(I’m ? so what)
(And I need to know, where’s all the love for black girls)
(No the girl don’t need no tan)
(I keep on ballin’ hard for black girls)”
If you dig like I dig, get the song for free at their website.
Shit boy, is that faux fur?! I'm already in luv. Image via theneptunes.org
If you’ve found yourself graduated from college and wanting to keep learning without paying a ridiculous amount of money, check out Coursera.
A very informed friend sent me a link to a website where you can take a very limited amount of courses from schools like Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania and U of Michigan FO FREE.
An excerpt from their website explains what the driving force is behind the site and free online classes from some of the top universities in the world:
“We are a social entrepeneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.”
Read more on the background of Coursera from the New York Times here.
Image via simplerna.com
There’s also another website, Udacity, that offers limited computer science and cs-related courses for free. Their twitter account simply states “Democratizing higher education.”
This is simply amazing and a really cool step into free education through the power of the internet and interconnectedness. The internet was invented to share pictures of cats for the sharing of information, and making education available to all through the seemingly limitless power of the net is a strangely progressive step, especially in a world that is obsessed with high profit margins and the Kardashians.
The basic format of the online classes are taped lectures and some homework assignments. So it’s like Youtube, but without all the bat-shit crazy commenters and with a little more elbow grease.
The course selection on both websites is highly limited and centered upon computer science and technology, which is useful in an every-growing technological world both personally and professionally. This is an amazing first step into the world of open source, free online education that does not discriminate, unless of course you don’t have an email address and refuse to register for free things. It’s nice to know that there are people in the world working hard to provide education and information to the people regardless of the personal economics of the masses. Right on.
Right now there are a bunch of computer science related courses that start today (April 23rd) on Coursera and more that start at different times throughout the year. Udacity allows you to sign up for their courses at any time, which is beyond convenient to manage in between everyone’s 2-3 part time jobs. Computer Science 101 anyone?! We can share notes!
2PF 