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prismatic-bell · 11 minutes
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@ex-libris-craux I THINK it’s Synergy. I saw it mentioned in a couple of news articles day-of.
There is some pretty shocking footage out there of the Baltimore bridge collapse early this morning. I've already seen some incredibly wrong, incredibly insensitive Hot Takes about how shitty the bridge was to have fallen after being bonked by a boat, etc
Please don't be that person.
The facts will come out. Speculation is silly. In addition to loss of life, the Francis Scott Key bridge was a major arterial in that region's highway system. Its loss will be felt for years, and not just to daily commuters.
Baltimore harbor is closed. No shipping at all. This will impact supply chains in ways we cannot even assess yet.
It's pretty fucked up.
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prismatic-bell · 7 hours
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This is another great example, and it also highlights something important: there is no reliable way to say someone is/isn’t Jewish based on their looks. @lordadmiralfarsight was taken for Jewish even though he’s white because he’s got some curl and a beard. When I show people a picture of my family, they often think they’re looking at an all-white family even though I’m the only one who is (technically I’m ethnically part Jewish, but it’s four generations back). My sister is half-Native. My BIL is full Middle Eastern Jew. (One of his parents is Iranian Jewish, one is…Egyptian Jewish, I believe. I don’t remember for sure, but they’re both from the MENA region.) My niblings are only a quarter white and people say all the time they have lovely tans (spoiler: that’s not a tan, that’s their natural skin color). And of course, all of us are Jewish and carry Jewish blood even though only my BIL remotely approaches “looking” Jewish.
So I’ve seen a few posts going around lately about philosemitism, but mostly in the context of people being called out for it, and it’s occurring to me that if you don’t have a frame of reference for it, you probably don’t understand why it’s really a very bad thing.
So I’m going to share a story that happened to me a few years ago, when I was studying for my b’nei mitzvah.
This lady pulls into my drive thru at work. She’s wearing a MAGA hat, and before I can hide my Magen David necklace—this was not that long after Charlottesville—she absolutely GUSHES “oh, you’re Jewish?” and immediately starts going on about beautiful traditions, Jesus was Jewish, yadda yadda. (All the Jews reading this are currently nodding because they’ve all met this woman at least once.)
And then she gets to the part I want to highlight for the goyim, the learning part of this:
Her: And we need to stick together, because you know what’s right in the middle of Jerusalem, right?
Me: …..the Temple? (It’s not, it’s at the city’s edge, but I could see someone hearing “center of religious and cultural life” and making an assumption.)
Her: no!
Me: …….the Knesset?
Her: no! How do you spell Jerusalem?
Me, thinking she saw the Hebrew book next to me: yod-reish-shin-lamed—-
Her: no, no! U-S-A! J-E-R-U-S-A! The United States is part of Israel!
Y’all.
This woman.
Legitimately believed.
That “Jerusalem.”
Was the name.
Of a Jewish city.
In a language.
THAT DOES NOT HAVE A “J” SOUND.
She literally told me I was wrong when I pronounced it Yerushalayim, which is the Hebrew transliteration of the older “Urusalim,” which is the original name of the city in the Canaanite languages circa 1500 BCE. (An even older inscription has been found in Egyptian, but it’s a little wonky because the two languages didn’t have the exact same sounds—think of how an English word spoken by a Japanese person and then transliterated as they said it would look.) “Jerusalem” as a form literally cannot occur until after the word has filtered through Latin and into English—at the earliest, the 3rd or 4th century CE—because there’s no J in Latin, either.
THIS is philosemitism: this woman wanted so badly for Judaism to be her fun toy that she completely ignored Jewish reality. We weren’t actually people to her; we were a thing for her to exotify. When actual Jewish experience refuted her she ignored it, but many philosemites will get angry when they’re faced with reality.
If you’re thinking “wow, that sounds a lot like fetishization,” you’re right, because it is. It’s fetishization crossed with the kind of “support” a lot of people offer the queer community, where they love it when it’s waving rainbow flags and “oh my g-d, girl, slay,” but the moment it’s anger over the STD crisis or the underserving of homeless queer youth, they dip. They’re only around while it’s ~*~*~aesthetic.~*~*~
Philosemitism isn’t “loving Jews too much.” It’s loving a stereotyped ideal you put on a pedestal, and not allowing for diversity of Jewish experience.
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prismatic-bell · 10 hours
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As long as whatever they’re cooking in has been kashered and otherwise follows the laws of kashrut (e.g. no mixing of meat and milk, no unkosher meats), there’s no reason why not. My only concern is whether they’re preparing the food underwater, because that may put it in contact with unkosher fish or sea animals like eels.
I need answers. Are mermaids kosher? What did your rabbi say???
As per my rabbi, mermaids are NOT kosher, due to the following:
1) If mermaids are like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, then they have human intelligence and free will. This makes them human (whatever King Triton might have to say on the subject), and thus eating one is committing murder, which is against halacha. (She could convert to Judaism, though!)
2) If mermaids are like the original little mermaid, then they have intelligence (possibly of human levels), but no souls and thus no free will. This means they are not human, but they appear human, and thus eating one is in violation of lifnei iver, which means “before the blind” and comes from the verse “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” In other words: someone seeing you eat the mermaid may assume the mermaid is human, and thus that eating human is okay, and thus they may commit murder to eat human, which is against halacha.
3) Mermaids that do not fit the “human top, fish bottom” tradition of mermaids may not possess fins and/or scales, thus marking them as not kosher.
Thus: Mermaids are not kosher.
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prismatic-bell · 13 hours
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prismatic-bell · 13 hours
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it's always "you gnawed off your own leg to escape like an animal caught in a trap" and never "why didn't anyone try to help you out of the trap" or "why weren't you provided with any other resources to escape the trap with except for your own teeth"
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prismatic-bell · 14 hours
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my nephew, who is like 11 or 12, is playing “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and I have never been more terrified of the youth of today
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prismatic-bell · 21 hours
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I WAS LITERALLY JUST GETTING ICE CREAM AFTER GOING TO THE CHIROPRACTOR
There’s a splash pad and an ice cream place right there, but it’s in an outdoor mall, so I feel like a better question is how did THEY get there.
Aha. Ahaha. Ahahaha.
That moment you realize you wandered into an outing by a religious cult and oh would you just LOOK at the time, I have a thing I need to do, uh, somewhere. That isn’t here.
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prismatic-bell · 21 hours
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Good LORD you people are eager.
Okay, okay.
First off, the winner was Jekyll and Hyde! In this (deeply awesome but deeply not-true-to-the-original) gothic musical adaptation, Henry Jekyll is attempting to create a medicine to cure the criminally insane by “separating the good from evil”’so they can safely leave Bedlam and reenter society. He’s pushed on by the fact his father is among this number, and has regressed so much in Bedlam that he’s now catatonic. He goes before the Bedlam hospital board, made up of a bunch of rich assholes, and asks for a single test subject. Motivated by the knowledge that if his cure works they’ll lose a very posh source of income and status, they shout him down, citing ethics by which they themselves do not abide. Only one member of the board—Jekyll’s fiancée’s father—abstains from the vote. Jekyll chooses to test the cure on himself, reasoning that every man has lower impulses even if they’re not out and out evil, and therefore if he can rid himself of those impulses it will prove his theory correct. Alas—as in the novel, his source materials are contaminated, and Hyde is born: a manifestation of Jekyll’s rage at the Board and wider Victorian society. And then he does murder about it:
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(This is, alas, the only official version. I’ve seen this show live and I don’t understand how community theatres can choreograph it so much better than Broadway professionals.)
IN SECOND PLACE, we have the weirdly homoerotic Bible: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. Listen, I’m gonna be honest and you can hang me for it, I think JCSS 1973 is about as close as you can come to a perfect musical. Personally I significantly prefer the 1973 version (I think most people do), but if there’s one thing I know about Tumblr it’s that y’all absolutely love gays and blasphemy, so I’m going to use the 2000 version instead because where the 1973 sorta gently hints at Judas being extremely gay the 2000 one, uh. Turns the title song into Jesus having a BDSM hallucination about Judas in skintight latex while he’s carrying the cross, and you THINK that’s me badly describing it on purpose:
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It’s not. That’s really what happened.
I will tell you that other than Judas, this version fucking SUCKS. Jérôme Predon was acting his heart out and everything good about this version rests on his skinny gay shoulders, but good lord you have to give the man some credit for giving 1000% in a production where absolutely nobody else could act.
Incidentally, not the same song, but here’s Carl Anderson, the 1973 Judas, setting a bar basically nobody else will ever be able to leap for singing a love song while screaming and crying at the same time. Content warning: Christian tradition holds that Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus, and Carl Anderson is a Black man. The hanging is shown at the very end of the scene; if you need to bow out beforehand, click off at the line “my mind is in darkness now.”
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In THIRD PLACE, we have A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. There’s a pretty great movie of it from the sixties, but imma level with you, I’m partial to the Nathan Lane version. Content warning: around 6:50 there’s a joke that’s extremely transphobic if you don’t know the context of the show (“I’ve never seen a man in a dress before” refers to the end of the show, when they’re trying to pass off a 40something-year-old tall, stout slave man as a petite 17-year-old virgin girl). The show is from the 60s and the revival is from 1996, I’m not going to pretend it would pass the sniff test if it was written today, but this one is genuinely not as bad as it sounds if you have no context.
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AND THE REST:
The Torah, but make it camp: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. WARNING: flashing lights. CONTENT WARNING: while Dreamcoat is basically one giant walking anachronism, many of the dancers in this scene are wearing actual historically-accurate Egyptian faïence dresses, which means titties on display. (Technically they’ve got bodysuits on, but they definitely look nude.)
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Sex and Queerness. Rinse and repeat: The Rocky Horror Show. This video is from the movie specifically because while I’ve seen RHS live several times and been in it twice, recording at shows is EXTREMELY tightly controlled due to nudity and simulated sex acts onstage, and while I could probably find a slime tutorial if I looked, I feel like it’d be an invasion of the actors’ privacy due to the content (heaven knows I wouldn’t want my Floor Show all over YouTube, nobody needs to see me breasting boobily out of my corset). THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK AND POTENTIALLY ALSO NOT SAFE FOR BRAIN. THIS IS AN 18+ SHOW. Younger members of the queer community should also be aware this came out in 1975 and uses the language of the time period. I’d also like to point out the show’s writer, Richard O’Brien, retains he/him pronouns but is third-gender (a term as old as this show!) and in his 80s, so like, if you needed aspirations today, you too could write a queer cult classic with Tim Curry in it and get married and live happily.
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Everyone is way too invested in this game: the ABBA musical that sadly nobody ever talks about, my true favorite musical, the one and only CHESS. Set during the Cold War, it’s (extremely) loosely based on Bobby Fischer and the Match of the Century. It deals with Cold War politics as they actually happened: in sport, in love, on the battlefield, East vs. West was everywhere and in everything. Every song in this show is an absolute banger (do we expect less when Benny and Björn team up with Tim Rice?), so I’ll go with the one that has the honor of being considered the hardest song in all of Broadway: Pity the Child.
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Hobos rage against the system: I was surprised how many of y’all struggled with this one.
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Sadly, my cast isn’t on YT for this song, at least not that I can find. If anyone has the full recording from Summer of 2007, I’d be deeply grateful. (My big theatre brag: yes I saw it with Anthony and Adam BITE ME)
Good thing this guy never met a beauty influencer: I THOUGHT THIS WAS A GREAT JOKE. Nobody even TRIED, and I’m disappointed.
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Incidentally, if you’ve only ever heard Brightman or Rossum as Christine, PLEASE listen to this version. Brightman walked so Sierra Boggess could run, and unlike Rossum, she can actually act. I’m not pretending Phantom is some kind of high art (it is extremely basic actually), but a good cast makes such a difference.
Con man falls in love with a spinster and it’s NOT The Music Man: it’s 110 in the Shade!
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Unfortunately this one’s a bit harder to find, but I love it for one gigantic thing: the choice Lizzie makes at the end. No spoilers, but if you’ve seen it, you know. That’s not how the story GOES most of the time, and I love that the show picked that.
Toxic relationships and vice, but make it funny: if you’ve never seen Guys and Dolls, I CAN’T pick a song that best sums it up. It’s impossible. It’s just too good. It’s about illegal gambling in the 1920s, and also the Temperance movement, and what happens when those two worlds collide (what happens is Pure Shenanigans). Apparently I can’t embed any more, but I can link, so:
https://youtu.be/BmEwtWBte84?si=h6Oifv-tzEN7je-u
Murder is a real circus sometimes: the only musical I’ve ever seen where the movie is better, CHICAGO.
https://youtu.be/ByeXMGqapnU?si=NBHAugcwEik47ki7
And finally, a whole song and dance about song and dance, nobody protests with such flair as Footloose. Incidentally, I saw this one at the community theatre and they had an actor in a wheelchair who was up there popping tricks like it was nothing. He was easily the best dancer on the stage and his feet never actually touched the ground, so frankly I don’t want to hear about why we “can’t” cast disabled folks because if someone in a wheelchair can rip up FOOTLOOSE of all things, there’s no excuse.
https://youtu.be/OxtoKee_YRM?si=arF-yrDVGQhH_cax
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT. Maybe I’ll do another round sometime.
I want to do something fun. I am going to ask that while you’re free to guess what these are, if you know for sure, please don’t say so. I want to see the chaos in the notes. (I’ll confirm privately if you promise to keep it secret until the end of the poll, but vote first, it���s more fun that way.)
And as always, please reblog to enable further shenanigans.
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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Oh no, this was straight-up me looking around and realizing all these women were in long skirts and sleeves and flat shoes and identical hairstyles and most of them had children or baby bumps or both, and it suddenly hitting me that they were all looking at my black shirt and pants like I was going to eat their kids.
Aha. Ahaha. Ahahaha.
That moment you realize you wandered into an outing by a religious cult and oh would you just LOOK at the time, I have a thing I need to do, uh, somewhere. That isn’t here.
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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When you spend all day gentle parenting other people’s children and then watch their parents undo it :)
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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Why do they want us dead so badly
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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And don’t forget disabled people who still have to work!! Even if they have the money, it’s questionable if they have the energy.
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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I think it’s actually one of the better written portions, tbh. At least everything is spelled right.
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no writing workshop can help you improve your writing as much as this screenshot can
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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We had one years ago, look up sixpenceeeeee
What if we had a plagiarism scandal here on tumblr, kinda annoyed at the youtubies having all the fun
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prismatic-bell · 1 day
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