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My favorite thing about “Scream” is how much of a collaboration it is. The harmonies in the pre-chorus are clearly in the style of Janet’s best stuff with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, but the chorus is how Michael lays his backgrounds, with that close-to-the-mic sound. They really got each other’s sound.

Also interesting: “Scream” was the first time Michael had ever worked with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Considering they all were operating within the sound of New Jack Swing in the early 90s, I think MJ probably avoided them because of how closely they were tied to Janet’s career. Not in a shady way, obviously, because they loved each other’s music and MJ especially liked dancing to Rhythm Nation, but if your baby sister is building her own career with specific producers, you don’t really wanna “borrow” them until she’s a superstar too. Once Janet had her 3rd blockbuster album in a row, Michael probably felt comfortable enough to be like “okay, I can check out these producers I’ve admired now since there’s no shadow of me on Janet’s career anymore.”

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Good cat

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Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” as a Toddler’s Bedtime Story

Very accidentally, the main and indeed only bedtime story my toddlers want to hear at night is one about Gaiman’s Sandman.

Please believe me, I didn’t plan this deliberately. I don’t think I could have.

There’s a kind of delirium state parents enter when they reach exhaustion and will say anything to make their kids lie down quietly. You say anything, hoping it’ll have a calming effect. I’d be unsurprised to hear footage of myself reciting Chinese restaurant combo meals.

At some point, I must have started rambling about the Sandman. It’s on my mind enough; I teach it to middle schoolers. 

My kids had me in the endless loop of, “Daddy, I want a kiss. And a hug. And a high five. And a fist bump. Put my blanket on!” So I mentioned the Endless.

I rambled out something about Morpheus and kept going. It was made in an impaired state of consciousness and never intended to be repeated.

Until the next night.

Eager eyes. Blankets clutched.

“Daddy. Tell me the Sandman.”

A bedtime story is a ritual, and children will inform you when you are doing it wrong. Through a state of narrative natural selection, our family has settled on an orthodox telling of Gaiman’s Sandman for Toddlers.

To whit:

“If you close your eyes and lie still-”

This is the Very Important Part for the parent side of the equation.

“…then the Sandman, Morpheus, the Prince of Stories, the Lord Shaper, the King of Dreams will come…”

One must take care not to get the order wrong. 

“…He’ll come with his bone helmet, and black robe, and glowing red necklace, and bag of magic sand…”

Yesterday, my two-and-a-half-year-old son politely informed me that I had forgotten the necklace, but no recriminations would be made if I immediately made a correction.

“… and he’ll put his magic sand on your eyelids…”

The children have reasoned out for themselves that “magic” sand doesn’t hurt your eyes the way normal sand does. They’re familiar with the anarchy of the daycare playground.

“…and he’ll send you to the Dreaming and give you amazing dreams.”

There is wiggle room in the descriptive word. Awesome dreams. Incredible dreams. Fantastic dreams.

Never “good dreams.”

I don’t believe Morpheus would approve of that promise.

If one cares, one can mention meeting Matthew the raven, Merv Pumpkinhead the scarecrow, or Lucien the librarian of all the Books That Never Were.

This is generally just garnish.

The ritual is complete. The children are appeased.

Sometimes, I will have to do it twice.

Even if they’ve both in the same room, six feet apart.

Separate performances will be demanded.

My greatest hope in this is that one day they’ll be rebellious gothy teenagers, deep in the epoch wherein Dad Is Not Cool.

They’ll approach me with the family copy of Preludes and Nocturnes in hand and eyes overflowing with questions.

And I’ll only smile.

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how is trump alive?? like hes rlly gone thru his whole life like That …. and no one has ever just fuckin decked him?? gave him the ole one two? knocked his lights out??? incredible

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I did an early work by the Master... Cameron Diaz.

tell me why this budgetless gay youtube series made for fun by a group of friends has the best editing and writing of anything i’ve watched in a year.

also tell me how this single scene can contain every single one of the top three most iconic lines in history.

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tumblr: on cats

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Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine. Photo: Bill Roorbach

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Cats also purr when the are: stressed, scared, or just upset and need cuddles. Cats also learn what meow is the most depressing meow possible to get us to do what they want. Science is also out on whether or not they injected us with a parasite to further control our behavior. Legitametely I am convinced that they are lovely tiny versions of apex predators that we serve as totems in case they were to ever evolve beyond a need for us to keep and feed them.

tumblr: on cats

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There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”

Ursula K Le Guin, “It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is” from No Time to Spare (via surroundedbyselcouth)

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Charlie Day is a treasure.

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Prisons should not be able to profit. Instead the money made by inmates should go to the communities their crime affected.

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The tendency of Americans to overestimate what they have accomplished on their own and deny how much they owe to others has been codified in the myth that the colonists came on an “errand into the wilderness” and built a land of plenty out of nothing. In reality, however, the abundant concentrations of game, plants, and berries that so astonished Eastern colonists were not “natural”; they had been produced by the cooperative husbandry and collective land-use patterns of Native Americans. In the Northwest, the valuable Douglas fir forests and plentiful herds of deer and elk found by early settlers existed only because Native American burning practices had created sustained-yield succession forests that maximized use of these resources without exhausting them

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap Stephanie Coontz (via class-struggle-anarchism)

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Now i understand why Black Mirror upsets @aichu-chu-chu so much.

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Is this a normal part of hockey? Like the goalie can catch and hide the puck and if they skate around the full edge of the rink 2.5 times without the ref catching him then the ref has to wash the team’s moose?

Flower used EVADE.  It’s super effective! (x)

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Reblogging for that soecial someone.

Hey you know that really disturbing thing where you yawn and your salivary gland shoots a concentrated spray of saliva out of one of its horrid nozzles like you’re a venom spitting snake for some godawful reason