Keith Chaffee

My family’s in northern Vermont.

father’s side: worked at the Ethan Allen furniture factory; mother’s: lots of different manual labor, including many years as a distiller of cedar oil

If I'm toasting the bagel, I aim for A; B sometimes leaves one half too fat to fit easily into the toaster.

Skipping over the obvious things that will surely make the list. I'm hoping that Hedda, Grand Theft Hamlet, Companion, and Black Bag won't be forgotten (and that Hamnet and Marty Supreme will).

Been a while since I’ve seen some of them, but Punch-Drunk needs to be near the top and Phantom Thread at the bottom.

It’s a hive mind; there’s no “individual” anything in there. And any definition of humanity that doesn’t include individuality is fatally flawed.

What makes her right is that the hive is no longer people; it’s an alien invasion force that has almost entirely destroyed humanity.

A crocheted twin-size blanket of bright multi-colored pinwheels on a white background.

Close-up of a single pinwheel square from the same blanket. It's got a blue center edged in red and pink stripes, centered on a white square.

Finished another crochet blanket, made of the Pinwheels square (designed by Soledad Iglesias Silva), from the book THE ULTIMATE GRANNY SQUARE SOURCEBOOK, which collects 100 square. They're all one of two specific sizes, providing lots of mix-and-match opportunities.

He feels to me like the Scott Walker of the '28 cycle: The media will try to convince us that he's the inevitable nominee, but he'll bomb with the public so badly that he's out of the race before the primaries even begin.

Robert Goulet as Sweeney Todd

Roughly 80 inches square. My own bed is a twin, and I live in a small apartment, so I don't have anyplace big enough to lay it out flat.

A large afghan is draped over a chair so that you can see everything from the center to the edge. The design ("Something Different," designed by Ineke Mooijenkind) is mostly made up of square corners and sharp angles, with a zigzag edge. Colors are white, medium gray, and two shades of muted blue.

A closer view of the center motif of the same afghan.

First crochet project I've finished in more than a year of experiments, stops and starts, and abandoned plans. The pattern is "Something Different," designed by Ineke Mooijenkind. Xmas gift for a nephew who's just moved into his own home for the first time. Photo #2 shows the center motif.

When you’re a weaver, you do a lot of loomscrolling.

Hadn’t read through the entire thread before posting that, but I see that several folks have said essentially the same thing, so maybe it’s not that unhinged after all.

“Literary fiction” is a genre with unspoken rules, tropes, and expectations, and just as much predictably and gatekeeping as any form of what is condescendingly dismissed as “genre fiction.”

Well, that's a nice surprise! I expected that if I was coming up with that, you surely had in mind something older and more obscure.

Cole Porter's "Farming"?

1. The smell of lilacs
2. Bacon
3. An unexpected random compliment
4. "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes," Edison Lighthouse
5. When your favorite author's new book is as good as you hoped it would be

Enlisted (Fox, 2014).

And here we have an excellent demonstration of why so few are willing to take position #3. Do so, and you’ll be equated with the fascists, which seems to me a far more fascist position than #3. In almost every case, “You must not say X” will get us to autocracy far faster than X itself will.

There might be a way to be respectful, but I can't see any reason to. The corpse is biodegradable, and that's the most positive thing to be said for the man.

I do think the experiment has failed, and I see no point in pretending otherwise. We had a good long run, though.

Just watched RIVER, thanks to this draft, and adored it!

A "100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" Reader's Choice ballot, listing Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Hundreds of Beavers, I Saw the TV Glow, Inside Out, Melancholia, Mysterious Skin, Parasite, Tears of the Black Tiger, and Up.

Well, since we're all sharing... 🎥

Delightful news!

Wonderfalls
Enlisted

<Neutrality helps the opresor>

Librarians are the best.

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Shit’s so bleak that Shirley Jackson has been put in charge of the Powerball