*this May Sound A Bit Strange* Can Y'all Sum Up Each House By Only Using ONE Gif From The Princess Bride?

*this may sound a bit strange* Can y'all sum up each house by only using ONE gif from The Princess Bride?

Gryffindor: 

Hufflepuff:

Ravenclaw: 

Slytherin:

Watch: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s UPenn commencement speech will move you to tears.

‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence

The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does.

On the stories we tell of ourselves. 

"Thirteen years ago, I spent the Fourth of July on the roof of a building in Baghdad that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Our command had suspended missions for the day, set up a grill and organized a “Star Wars” marathon — the three good ones — in an old auditorium. But George Lucas’s lasers couldn’t compete with the light show playing out across Baghdad, and watching a film about the warriors of an ancient religion rising up from the desert to fight a faceless empire seemed, under the circumstances, perverse.

“So instead of “A New Hope,” I watched scenes from Operation Iraqi Freedom: tracers, helicopters, distant explosions in a modern city under an increasingly senseless occupation. I could see the United Nations compound that would get bombed later that summer. I could see the memorial to the soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a giant turquoise teardrop sliced in two. I could see Sadr City, the wire-crossed slum that would give birth to Shiite death squads, and the Green Zone, where American proconsuls forged a new Iraq.

“I was a Bicentennial baby, born in 1976; “Star Wars” was the first movie I saw, strapped in a car seat at the drive-in. The film must have implanted deep in my infant subconscious a worldview, an idea of justice and the desire to wield a light saber, all entangling as I grew older with the Bicentennial celebrating the American Revolution, another story of scrappy rebels fighting a mighty empire.

““Star Wars” managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war, Mr. Lucas’s Wagnerian space opera recast for Americans the mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation.

“In this story, war is a terrible thing we do only because we have to. In this story, the violence of war has a power that unifies and enlightens. In this story, war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it might renew the body politic....

"The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts....

"There is another version of America beyond the noise our fireworks make: not military strength, but the deliberate commitment to collective self-determination. Perhaps this Fourth of July we could commemorate that. Instead of celebrating American violence, we might celebrate our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the ideals those documents invoke of an educated citizenry deciding its fate not through war but through civil disagreement. Instead of honoring our troops, whose chief virtues are obedience and aggressiveness, we could honor our great dissenters and conscientious objectors. And instead of blowing things up, maybe we could try building something.

"It’s our choice. We make our myths. We show by our actions what our holy days mean. Forty years after the American Bicentennial, 13 years after I stood on a rooftop in Baghdad, and 10 years after getting out of the Army, I won’t be out under the fire, cheering our explosions. I won’t be watching “Star Wars” either. My America isn’t an empire or a rebellion, but an ideal; it’s not a conquest, nor a liberation, but a commitment."

I started out running with my dad, a lifelong runner, as my companion/coach. He and I were training for a 10 Miler a few years back, and he kept spitting snot onto the grass strip next to the sidewalk. I was grossed out and grumbled something like “you’d better not do that during the race, what if you hit a spectator??”

He just looked over and was like: “well, then they’d be an EX-SPECTATOR, wouldn’t they?”

...I have been waiting YEARS to share this story in an appropriate context. :D

foxish49 reblogged your photoset: Baby’s first street run!  I did 1.72 miles in…

re: Snot - if there weren’t bored doormen watching, I’d recommend learning the fine art of the snot rocket. But then again, maybe not something you want to do in front of people or onto a sidewalk. (I mostly run on trails, so it’s not as big of an issue.)

Yeah, I get irrationally angry when people sit or hock loogies on the sidewalk, that’s gross and unnecessary. But I think above and beyond that the issue is that it wasn’t congestion, it was a steady drip. I could have stopped and blown once and been fine if that was the case, but I just dripped the entire time like a gross snot monster. :D

I love seeing the faces of these people as they sing this song together. I love that with just one sheet of paper, a few minutes' practice, and some experience with choral singing, the person standing in the far back of that room can be united with the person in the front row in co-producing this sound together. I love that this version of a beloved song - different, relatively simple arrangement - will only ever exist once, because those people chose to come together in that room to make it. 

Ms. Marvel Vol. 4: Last Days (2015) // Marvel Comics

“I’m so proud of you, beta”

Story: G. Willow Wilson, art: Adrian Alphona

Get it now here

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