Spoonula is a horrifying word. But I admit to considering the possibility that it might be kind of an amazing tool for cake batter. I'm sorry.

I'm glad someone else brought up the Bothwell issue... it seems gratuitous to invent MORE terrible things to happen to Mary, Queen of Scots (to say nothing of the problem of plotting this to be about how men feel about it...)

This. I am a Lucy, and I know more dogs than people who share my name.

Winnie, a.k.a. Edward Bear, doesn't wear any clothes in most of the E.H. Shepard illustrations. And that story of the hacked-off genitals... weirdest apocryphal origin story for a children's story character ever.

Ooh, I do love nineteenth-century developments in divorce law. And I'm delighted by the new turn towards history on Jezebel.

I admit it: I was excited at the idea of the trashy 19th-century extravagance that is Leroux' novel being turned into a TV show or two, but time-shifting? No, and also why?

Yeah... I'll tell subway preachers I don't agree with them if they address me directly/try to hand me hate-filled pamphlets, but I fear being stabbed... or, if I'm honest, also being turned into an object lesson on something (it was Sexual Immorality once, not observing the correct holy days (???) one other time.)

Yes! I will be disappointed if this brilliant action does not inspire further such retaliation against annoying subway preachers.

If you'll forgive the self-promotion, it seems as though you might be interested in this podcast: http://www.footnotinghistory.com

Good grief. As a Female Academic, I suddenly want to buy a power suit to spite this dude and his ilk. For the record (and the comfort of Jezzies,) I've always experienced my corner of the Twilight Zone as a happy place where people let each other finish sentences because it's polite, dammit.

I'm going to be a pro-potluck voice of dissent. I love planning/executing dinner parties, but I'm a Ph.D. candidate. [Insert grad student joke here.] So my late-twenties/early-thirties crowd has well-developed tastebuds and underdeveloped savings accounts. I usually throw a couple of "full" parties a year, but…

My Apple Master! It sounds like the kind of thing one would get from an infomercial, but it slices/peels/cores apples so that I can make pies, crisps, and crumbles all through the autumn: http://wholesale.norpro.com/index.php/appl…

Terrified. Also, irresistibly reminded of Shakespeare's poor Clarence drowning in a vat of Malmsey.

The End of the Affair (read stealthily in the library stacks, first semester of college) opened my eyes to the joys of hot, complicated, literary sex. From D.H. Lawrence to Jeanette Winterson, I like my sex in books to be transgressive, entangled with lots of Big Ideas, and written about in stimulating (!) prose.…