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He shakes my ashes
Greases my griddle
Churns my butter
And he strokes my fiddle
My man, is such a handy man

Alberta Hunter - My Handy Man

Euphemisms in the blues. NSFW. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 11:19 PM PST - 51 comments

Do I have boobs now? "Dear Facebook and Instagram, I'm a trans woman starting hormones. Are you going to censor me?" [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 9:15 PM PST - 22 comments

Violet Blue, a technology journalist and sex blogger, describes how she has been locked out of her Facebook account and cannot access it without providing a government ID.

Last weekend, as I sat locked out of my Facebook account ‘for security reasons’ (and you tagged me in something, not knowing I can’t respond), my friend’s boss Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the United Nations. He talked about plans to expand Facebook use into refugee camps, and made no pretensions about how this would be used to benefit his company. I personally know what this will do. [...] De-anonymizing refugees usually precedes murder on a grand scale.

[more inside]
posted by Rangi at 8:17 PM PST - 132 comments

National Magazine Award Finalist Katy Butler describes a heartfelt experience attending the Art and Science of Love, a Gottman workshop, with her "almost husband". "I remember the cautionary words of Wendell Berry in an essay on marriage...'Some wishes cannot succeed. . . . Because the condition of marriage is worldly and it's meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. . . . When you unite yourself with another, you unite yourselves with the unknown.'" John Gottman's well-known research on successful marriages.
posted by storybored at 6:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Late for work [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 4:24 PM PST - 20 comments

The story of Anabolic Frolic, the DJ name for Chris Samojlenko, tracks closely to the history of Happy Hardcore in Canada, if not North America at large, from the very first Happy 2b Hardcore mix released in the beginning of 1997, to the final Hullabaloo to mark the anniversary of the first Hullabaloo rave. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:52 PM PST - 22 comments

Self-aware cartoons [Imgur gallery] [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:31 PM PST - 30 comments

Gephyrophobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by a fear of bridges. No not those bridges. If you suffer from this disorder (as I do) you may not want to read this list of bridge collapses. You may also not want to read that the US Department of Transportation rates 1 out of 9 bridges in the country as deficient. Even worse, here's an awesome interactive map showing your local bridge evaluation scores from the USDOT.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:18 AM PST - 56 comments

A 1972 missed connection, as written up more than 40 years later on Craigslist. [internet archive link]
posted by ChrisR at 8:09 AM PST - 105 comments

Why are little kids in Japan so independent? - 'If we had a nonviolent society, kids could walk around on their own, unafraid, like they do in Japan'. (via)
posted by kliuless at 8:08 AM PST - 84 comments

Can You Survive A Week As Jeremy Corbyn? The press hates you, lots of your party hates you – can you make it through a week without resigning? (NSFW, Buzzfeed, Choose Your Own Adventure format)
posted by Wordshore at 6:57 AM PST - 33 comments

Lasqueti Island in British Colombia is home to about 350 year-round human residents and a whole bunch of Saint Bernards. [more inside]
posted by minsies at 5:57 AM PST - 29 comments

What's really important in our lives is not how we appear. Beauty will vanish, but what we have inside, it will never change.

Welcome to the capital of ugly
posted by KirkpatrickMac at 5:13 AM PST - 7 comments

It was not until 1971, 65 years after Finland became the first European country to grant women the vote, that Switzerland became the last, not only in Europe but in much of the world.
posted by infini at 3:36 AM PST - 14 comments

Why Has India's 'Beef' Lynching Sparked No Remorse? Ravish Kumar writes for NDTV about the killing of Mohammad Akhlaq: We are not understanding what is happening around us. We are not being able to make others understand. The sparks have been spread across our villages. Young men with their half-baked sense of history want me to pose with them for selfies, but are not willing to even consider my appeal that they give up their violent ideals. [more inside]
posted by frumiousb at 12:59 AM PST - 47 comments