Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[A.P. Hill]

I hope the kid completely abandons his family when he grows up and becomes a Successful Straight White Man. I hope he doesn't go Gypsy Rose, but I could see it.

 

[Potatis Salad]

Buggery was tradition for English school boys anyway, so I’m sure more powerful or assertive gay men used Joe for convenient sex sometimes from adolescence onwards.

I'm with you except for this bit. No way. We would definitely have heard about it, either via Joe crowing about how he has always been kweer, or crying about how he's an abuse survivor like so many women before him #metoo. He practically gave himself a hernia straining to pretend that gay stuff might've gone down when he was in college, there's no way he would have resisted wringing every last nanodrop of gay cred out of actual gay sex if he'd ever experienced it.

 

[Aunt Carol]

The magic of the throuple is that each one of them is arguably the worst.

This is a fun discussion topic!

I'm not sure where I stand on it, but I do think Joe probably smells the worst. Fermentation experiments, plus being a middle-aged troon wearing designer clothing that he's likely afraid to wash but too cheap to dry clean.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

I'm with you except for this bit. No way. We would definitely have heard about it, either via Joe crowing about how he has always been kweer, or crying about how he's an abuse survivor like so many women before him #metoo. He practically gave himself a hernia straining to pretend that gay stuff might've gone down when he was in college, there's no way he would have resisted wringing every last nanodrop of gay cred out of actual gay sex if he'd ever experienced it.

Oh see I assumed all this #abuse survivor stuff probably related to a bit of buggering he “endured” for recommends and better grades from older gays in the dept. Maybe some unattractive fat old 70 something professor kept forcing himself on poor Joe to green light his thesis or some shit.

 

[Constellationzero]

She selfishly and thoughtlessly created a life with that degenerate Sideshow and plunked an innocent baby right into the center of that vile cesspool. She sacrificed a child, her child, to the falsest gods going, and bound it to Sideshow. For life.

Besides the fact she lied to her lesbian partner and cheated on her, treating her like shit and unpersoning her for this ugly Poundland Virginia Woolf wannabe.

If you're straight, you're straight. Be HONEST. Stop lying and dragging others into your lies.

 

[Anasa Tristis]

Besides the fact she lied to her lesbian partner and cheated on her, treating her like shit and unpersoning her for this ugly Poundland Virginia Woolf wannabe.

If you're straight, you're straight. Be HONEST. Stop lying and dragging others into your lies.

Thanks, fren. That too.

When you look at all her doings, it's pretty easy to see LaLa as a restless and thirsty middle class NLOG. It's taken decades to get there, but finally she has found the most perfect niche as favored and fertile concubine to Revolutionary Joe. (Right before her bio clock ran completely out! A close one, that!)

If Sideshow ever mused out loud about divorcing Mal or detransitioning, I could see her immediately talking him out of it.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Besides the fact she lied to her lesbian partner and cheated on her, treating her like shit and unpersoning her for this ugly Poundland Virginia Woolf wannabe.

If you're straight, you're straight. Be HONEST. Stop lying and dragging others into your lies.

It is really jaw dropping how far Lilly downgraded with Joe.

Lilly’s sexual preference seems dependent upon social trends and what the art world fetishizes at the moment.

I can’t say if her hooking up with Joe means she’s straight or gay, because Joe is not appealing to straight women nor lesbians. It only indicates an attraction towards fart huffing, narcissistic, gender blobs

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

New Joe post. (ignoring all his ugly baby stuff )

I presume this is irony since Joe lives in a small world and has never demonstrated anything but contempt for the idea of more working class male (or female for that matter) outreach, and because irony is usually an all purpose fertilizer for these people, shoveled onto any occasion regardless of appropriateness.

Speaking of small world I noticed Eli Erlick, a regular feature in the tranny sideshow thread, in his comments.

 

[Zemblan Physics]

I believe that ”a Joe Rogan of the left will save the Democrats” is a bit of a meme, so Joe is just being derivative. As per usual.

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

I believe that ”a Joe Rogan of the left will save the Democrats” is a bit of a meme, so Joe is just being derivative. As per usual.

Have not kept up with lefty screeching since the election. #blessed

 

[Law]

Oh see I assumed all this #abuse survivor stuff probably related to a bit of buggering he “endured” for recommends and better grades from older gays in the dept. Maybe some unattractive fat old 70 something professor kept forcing himself on poor Joe to green light his thesis or some shit.

Knowing what we now know of Joe, he probably offered up his sphincter to anyone he thought might be able to give him something, and was rejected everytime.

When you look at all her doings, it's pretty easy to see LaLa as a restless and thirsty middle class NLOG. It's taken decades to get there, but finally she has found the most perfect niche as favored and fertile concubine to Revolutionary Joe.

Still centering a man. Good job, Lol-lol.

I presume this is irony since Joe lives in a small world and has never demonstrated anything but contempt for the idea of more working class male (or female for that matter) outreach

Working class females don't exist, women only exist in front of middle-to-upper class boudoir mirrors, endlessly trying on clothes that they don't purchase themselves, and if working-class females do exist then they're scary mean awful wrongthinkers like that dang dirty Julie Bindel.

 

[IglyUglyOh]

I believe that ”a Joe Rogan of the left will save the Democrats” is a bit of a meme, so Joe is just being derivative. As per usual.

Wasn’t Maron the number one podcast at some point about 10 years ago? Lefties don’t really respond to podcasts the way Trump voters do.

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

Working class females

Working, classy and female.
All things Joe isn't.


Speaking of:

Okay, here we go. FUCK YES. Tonight the senior faculty of my department voted unanimously to promote me to full professor. The process has several more steps, but this is the big one, and it’s the one that matters most to me. Those who know me offline will know this has been a STRESSFUL-ass process, that has at different moments left me feeling dejected, furious, banjaxed, and exhausted. So this feels like a fucking joy—and more than I expected, since unanimity is a rare commodity in my shop, and I assumed that one or two codgers would want to register their particular rankle. This is it—my last promotion, and I am so, so grateful to all of the brilliant people who have nurtured me over the years. Robert Young, Ankhi Mukherjee, Nicholas Royle, Paul Saint-Amour, Jed Esty, Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Susan Stryker, Kent Puckett, and Steve Justice: these names stir in me a great, abiding gratitude. And for the solidarity of those beloved friends and colleagues, sisters and companions, who have helped me survive the darker times, and brought me into the light: Jack Halberstam, Virginia Jackson, Wendy Lee, Joe Litvak, Meredith Martin, Rei Terada, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and our beloved and missed femme folle Beth Freeman. There is so much to loathe in our profession, but even more to fight for, and it is the gift of a life to be able to merge my labor into the broader fight for public higher education, a collective achievement of humanity on the scale of the NHS, and even of the UDHR. Thank you to my colleagues; I pledge to be less precocious and annoying, and more responsive and collaborative. Thank you to my students, who constantly propel the spirit-of-the-time forward at a pace that dazzles even my hard-to-dazzle mind. Thank you to my brilliant family, and its central Rocc, around which we build our life. And thank you to you, instagram public, who share space in this compromised medium with me, and who make me smile. Truly grateful for everything, and lastly for my sobriety—which remains a gift, not an exertion—and which keeps me alive and working. xoxo

Academia really is one of the few professions where you can threaten to accuse your superiors of transphobia and rape and still get a promotion. Still i like that you can feel him gloating over the 'codgers' and the haters, who apparently live rent free in his hard-to-dazzle mind.
Good on him.

 

[Pube Dandruff]

"... these names stir in me a great, abiding gratitude"

Hold up. I hear, "abiding" and I interpret its synonym, "tolerating". Is Joe's use of "abiding" a stand-in for "begrudging"?

With righteous vigour I DESPISE you all for not recognising my genuis sooner, but I will begrudgingly acknowledge this validation of my own grandiosity,

Does he accept this gift with an upturned nose? Explain yourself, Joe! We here cannot possibly dissect your prose without the knowing hand of your effortless instruction.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

Hold up. I hear, "abiding" and I interpret its synonym, "tolerating". Is Joe's use of "abiding" a stand-in for "begrudging"?

Nah, it means “enduring” in this context.

“Banjaxed” is a new one. Apparently it’s 30’s slang meaning ruined or broken. Sure, Joe.

Naturally, the only member of his household that he can thank by name is the male one.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Trapped in bed with plague, I read Christmas at the Women's Hotel and liked it more than the original but please can someone teach Mal how to plot.

The endless digressions are gone, thankfully - the advantage of writing a novella [shorter than a novel by a lot] perhaps - but the three main plots are:

Lucianne sets up an escort service, drawing on her network of bachelor society men to be safe dates for single society gals. One of the guys suddenly turns out to be a fraud. It comes out of nowhere and there's no reason to care about it and there are no consequences or repercussions. Then they decide to get married.

Katherine, the alcoholic, is contacted by a member of her estranged family (a much younger sister), and they fall out because Katherine won't lie to their mother about what the sister will be doing in New York, because she lied so much to her mother during her alcoholic years that she just can't do so again. Sister gets peeved (because Katherine's bad behaviour meant all the other siblings were kept on a tight leash). Katherine's AA sponsor, the best character in both books hands down, tells her to stop whinging and go help other people. There is no resolution to the sister issue.

Josephine, old lady pickpocket, is tailed back to the hotel by a beat cop but then a few residents band together to help her, which requires the cop to be stupid enough that he cannot distinguish one woman from another. He then drinks two egg creams to recover.

There are some nice moments and period details, and I like to think an editor looked it over.

I try not to assume that fiction is biography but between the estranged family thing and some Christianity shoehorned in, it's hard not to draw some connections.

tl;dr better than the first, still not that good.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

“Banjaxed” is a new one. Apparently it’s 30’s slang meaning ruined or broken. Sure, Joe.

If I can't get discursive about this stuff here, then where??:

First thought: I honestly can't hate him for it (the use of a term no longer used, especially one from that era, bc of personal enjoyment of it.

Quick research-based revision: well, shit, nevermind. Apparently it's had a resurgence in the last 7 or 8 years (chart not found in easily portable form...but last point below probably explains the increase, and it does make me hate him). It's apparently Irish quasi-slang, with various versions of origination dates:

• Per the OED, first use was 50s, by Samuel Beckett (this is different to most other sources, most of which said 30s/1939, chiefly Irish, sometimes cited as Anglo-Irish).
• This site has a cite to 1939, by Flann O'Brien.
• Oh, oop, here's a use of banjax (noun) from 1925:

The first recording of ‘banjax’ in Sean O’Casey’s 1925 play Juno and the Paycock shows it being used in this way:

– “I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ the Will.” (Act 3)

Beckett also used ‘banjaxed’ in a similar way in Waiting for Godot. However, in later versions of the play it was changed to ‘ballocksed’:

– “That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed ballocksed.” (Act 2)

A summary:

Banjax is first recorded in 1925 as a noun in Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock, The character Jack Boyle says about an inheritance he is supposed to get from a first cousin:
I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ the Will; instead o’ sayin’, “th’ rest o’ me property to be divided between me first cousin, Jack Boyle, an’ me second cousin, Mick Finnegan, o’ Santhry,” he writ down only, “me first an’ second cousins,” an’ the world an’ his wife are afther th’ property now.
The word seems to have been a favorite of writer Flann O’Brien. The adjective appears in his 1939 At Swim-Two-Birds:
And a very good idea as you say, Mr. Shanahan. But when the roller passes over his dead corpse, be damned but there’s one thing there that it can’t crush, one thing that lifts it high off the road—a ten ton roller, mind! . . .

Indeed, said Orlick, eye-brow for question.

One thing, said Furriskey, sole finger for true counting. They drive away the roller and here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse. They couldn’t crush his heart!
And O’Brien uses it as a verb again the next year in The Third Policeman, one of my favorite novels:
“Michael Gilhaney,” said the Sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

“It would astonish me unconditionally,” I said.

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the Sergeant, “is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches where the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than half-way now.”

“Half-way to where?”

“Half-way to being a bicycle himself,” said the Serjeant.
And he would use it yet again in his 1961 Hard Life in a passage discussing the Jesuits:
—The Fathers are all over the world, they speak and write in all languages, they have built a wonderful apparatus for the propagation of the faith.

—Some people at one time thought they were trying to banjax and bewilder the One, Holy and Apostolic. Oh and there are good people who are alive today and think the Church had a very narrow escape from the boyos of yesteryear.
Samuel Beckett also used it in the 1954 typescript of Waiting for Godot:
That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.
It was subsequently changed to ballocksed, which is the word that appears in most print editions of the play.

So as slang terms go, banjax has a rather literary pedigree.

The OED gives its origin as “unknown; perhaps originally Dublin slang.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang is more helpful, saying it’s a semi-euphemistic variation of ballocks. Green’s speculation makes a lot of sense when we look at the development of ballocks. It of course started out as a noun meaning testicles, but by 1919 it was being used to mean rubbish, nonsense. There’s also a 1901 use of bollocks as a verb, but that’s in an American context. E. P. Alexander, who had commanded the Confederate artillery barrage that supported Pickett’s Charge on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg wrote in a 1901 letter:
Never, never, never did Gen. Lee himself bollox a fight as he did this.
So it’s a short leap from ballocks meaning a mess, to make a mess to banjax, essentially meaning the same thing.

And huh:

A "banjax" usage over time chart is likely referring to the
Deflect Banjax ban log visualization, which shows the number of bans over time during a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. These charts are typically grouped bar charts that compare the number of Banjax bans (red) to other metrics, like Baskerville anomalies (green), to show how the system responded to different attacks. The Deflect.ca website has examples of these visualizations for specific attacks.

 

[Bookwork]

• Per the OED, first use was 50s, by Samuel Beckett (this is different to most other sources, most of which said 30s/1939, chiefly Irish, sometimes cited as Anglo-Irish).
• This site has a cite to 1939, by Flann O'Brien.
• Oh, oop, here's a use of banjax (noun) from 1925:

Elucidation much appreciated. The people I've heard use it have been from/in Northern Ireland, where slang tends to go to die and where books are often still read for the hellayit.

Like "fubar," I assumed the word's meaning from the context, not always the safest bet. Personal tragedies therefrom not disclosed herein.

@Wonderland foster child, thank you. You are courageous and thoughtful even in sickness. I hope the plague leaves you unscathed.

@Official University of California Berkeley Account, lol. You deserve all the shit he's going to fling and all the embarrassments he's going to cause because, to him, "gratitude" means vengeance and "duty" means privilege. You asked for it and now you're gonna get it.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Trapped in bed with plague

tl;dr better than the first, still not that good.

The users of Goodreads seem to concur: 2.87 for the first one, and 3.46 for the follow-up. I suspect however that this will slip, as the early readers have been sent the audiobook version for advance reviews, and presumably were selected on the basis they would be more likely to enjoy Tard Baby’s oeuvre.

 

[Trianon]

The users of Goodreads seem to concur: 2.87 for the first one, and 3.46 for the follow-up. I suspect however that this will slip, as the early readers have been sent the audiobook version for advance reviews, and presumably were selected on the basis they would be more likely to enjoy Tard Baby’s oeuvre.

There also tends to be some self-selection in general for sequels. Fewer readers, but the scores are higher.

Academia really is one of the few professions where you can threaten to accuse your superiors of transphobia and rape and still get a promotion. Still i like that you can feel him gloating over the 'codgers' and the haters, who apparently live rent free in his hard-to-dazzle mind.
Good on him.

He got what he wants good and hard, I suppose. I'm peeved because he took a dumb swipe at C.S. Lewis the other day, who is a clearer thinker and writer than Joe will ever be. Congratulations to Berkeley for missing their chance to rid themselves of the trouble he'll be.