Patio Friday is an Accordion City institution, but Lee Dale, its spiritual leader, is out of the country all summer. I think he’s gone off to buy a cowboy hat:
In the meantime, Lady Miss “Lake Louise” Verna has taken the reins, and Patio Friday continues in Lee’s absence. It’s happening today, and it’s happening on the rooftop at Remy’s in Yorkville (115 Yorkville Avenue, about a block east of Avenue Road)! Drop by after work — we’ll all be there!
Steve’s attempt to be funny in front of his Facebook friends backfired completely:
Got some decent seats to Rush, with no rows in front of us, right by the aisle:
…and I didn’t have to kidnap Alex Lifeson, either:
I’ve talked about Caroline’s Kickstarter campaign before, and she’s so close to her goal that I think it’s worth mentioning again. She’s starting a blog called Taste Bluebook, and she needs a little funding to get it off the ground.
Is there anything Caroline hasn’t done? She went to Vanderbilt, where she did a double major with honours, joined the Peace Corps and volunteered in Niger and Madagascar, went into the publishing business in Austin and is now pursuing a JD-MBA in Denver. This sort of ambition means that she’s always figuring out how to match professional goals and personal life. “I’ll be damned if I can’t have my (homemade, of course) cake and eat it too”, she writes, and she’d like to help other professional women do the same.
Time to let Caroline do the talking:
I have long been a firm believer that you CAN have what you want, you can DO what you want, if you just make smart choices and are educated about the necessary skills. You can kill it at the office and throw a great dinner party. You can know how to fix that excel formula and know how to make jam. You can discuss hot-button legal issues and the basics of investing and this season’s fashion trends. You can pursue the path to partner and out-bake your (future) mother-in-law.
There are plenty of fashion blogs out there. There are plenty of finance blogs out there. There are plenty of DIY blogs out there. But the fashion blogs fail to provide much content that can be adopted by readers who work in conservative offices or favor sandals with their shorts instead of heels. The finance blogs can feel daunting and intimidating to dive into for those who just want to learn SOMETHING about investing. The DIY blogs are full of amazing projects, but those renting apartments can’t squeeze that cleverly converted palette garden on their patio, or take up knitting just to have that cute coffee cozy.
Taste Bluebook is the answer. It will offer a a little bit of everything for the young women who are interested in a little bit of everything. With posts ranging from style and cooking, to health and finance, Taste Bluebook will provide ideas and advice for tackling just about any project. The content will be as practical as it is entertaining.
Caroline is soooo close to her goal: she’s raised $820 out of $1000 (and yes, I chipped in), and as of this writing, there are 10 days left to go in her Kickstarter campaign. If you’d like to help Caroline create a useful resource for women who are “leaning in”, could you throw a little money — even five or ten bucks will help — her way?
Tonight’s the night! If you’ve been following what the maggots have been saying about His Worship the Mayor of Toronto, this is your chance to put all those things those LIEberals have been filling your head with to good use. It’s Rob Ford Trivia Night at The Ossington (61 Ossington, two blocks north of Queen), and it starts at 7:30. The event’s organizers say this on the event’s Facebook page:
Come early to grab a seat, and feel free to bring along your buckets of KFC or sandwiches from Subway Subway Subway (my way of saying the bar allows outside food).
I’ll be there. Who’s with me?
It’s June 19th, a.k.a. Juneteenth — the holiday that celebrates the liberation of people who had been held as slaves in the United States. Even centuries later, it’s still downplayed by too many people, but not here on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. I’m marking the day with an article that shows that we’ve still got some distance to travel before things are well and truly set right.
Back in March, I wrote about Scott Terry, who made a name for himself at the CPAC conference by suggesting that slavery wasn’t that bad and that Frederick Douglass should’ve thanked his former slave master for feeding and clothing him, wondered aloud why segregation couldn’t come back and told ThinkProgress that he’d be fine with a situation where African-Americans were subservient to whites. Here’s the charming fella, caught on video:
Terry was reported to be a member of the Towson University White Student Union, a group whose raison d’etre is to fight back against “inherent anti-white bias in academia and mainstream society”.
Vice recently went to Towson University, located near Baltimore, Maryland, to find out more about the White Student Union. One of the end results is a fascinating article titled Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol, in which they profile founder Matthew Heimbach and follow the “night patrol” he founded. The patrol is made up of Matthew and other members of the White Student Union who walk the campus at night looking for “black predators” whom he says come to the campus to attack the disadvantaged white people.
The other end result is a 22-minute documentary of Heimbach, the White Student Union and his safety patrol. Here’s a very telling moment, in which they note that it’s the 148th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Among reasonable people, including Captain Kirk, Lincoln is a hero. Among the White Student Union campus patrol, he’s something else entirely:
(Oddly enough, this isn’t a “race mixing is communism” fable that racists tell themselves — Karl Marx did write a letter to Lincoln congratulating him on his re-election, sending it via a U.S. Ambassador. Getting one single letter from Marx doesn’t make one a communist, but considering that these guys consider him to be a traitor to both the nation and the race, I don’t think any amount of working through the logic will ever make them see Honest Abe in a non-negative light.)
The nightly patrols were purportedly organized to counter a wave of black-on-white violence on campus and likely meant to engender Fear of the Other in white students, intimidate the students of colour, and provide a “community service” cover to their new-school racism. Heimbach wrote that one such case was when an African man waved both a knife and his penis at a white couple who were engaged in sex in a parking garage. While white people are supposedly being threatened when doing the nasty in public, the local police tell a different story: they say that Towson is the safest public university in the state of Maryland. At a rate of 6 crimes per 1,000 students, they report that the crime rate is at a 17-year low.
Heimback is always careful not to use racial epithets or say “Heil Hitler”. He is, as the author of the article observes, the face of a possible future of organized racism in America. He doesn’t wear a white sheet or a hood, nor does he wear Nazi imagery. In fact, he looks down on the KKK and neo-Nazis, thinking of them as “low-rent thugs” and “an embarrassment”. However, for all the care they put into their image, the truth does come out late in the video:
Here’s an excerpt from the article, in which the author asks “Paddy” about the ethno-state that he was talking about:
“What would the criteria of citizenship be for this ethno-state?” I asked.
“I’m just going to come out and say it,” Paddy said. “The criteria of citizenship would be based on race. It would be based on [being] white. Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
I turned to Matthew. In the spiritedness of the moment, the group seemed to be dropping its restrained tone. And Matthew was worked up, too.
“If there are white people… who want to remain in this multicultural cesspool,” he said, “let them. We don’t want them. Let us mind our own business. Let us stand up for our own people, and create our own nation and new homeland for Europeans around the entire globe. So give us a homeland, and if you want to sell yourself and your children down the river of multiculturalism, you can do so.”
At the conclusion of the patrol, the group finally encountered a crime in progress: a drug deal in which all the participants were white. The author noted that while Heimbach shook his head and observed that a crime was in progress, not a single person in the group intervened.
Here’s the documentary. Watch, and be appalled:
Thanks to Ashe Dryden, from whom I found out about the article and documentary!
