Five by Five by Five
Hello, You Sweet Summer Children!
This week, your Dames are living their best summer lives-- Dame Margaret at Banjo Christmas, the highlight of her year, and Dame Sophie will be lounging poolside & documenting her fellow loungers' #poolsidereads, like the Queen of New Jersey Summers we all know her to be.
As a result, the newsletter is a bit abbreviated this week: five essential LOLS, five essential links from Dame M., five essential links from Dame S., and one brief side project bulletin. ENJOY, preferably while lolling in the sun, cocktail in hand.
5 Essential LOLs
You never knew what a perfect Onion headline-writer Jane Austen would be, but now you can’t stop thinking about it, can you? (h/t to beloved Friend of the Dames Megan for the link!)
By contrast, you probably don’t think much about your state flag. (Though if you do, please do tweet us all your thoughts!) It doesn’t matter, though, because they are all terrible, and here’s a full, laugh-until-you-cry accounting of why. (Bonus Track: Mid-Atlantic accent expert Sean Monahan on his ideas for a redesigned Delaware Valley regional flag!)
After watching the three-hour (!!!!) Eagles documentary on Netflix, Dame Sophie remarked to her sweet consort, Marcus, about Don Henley, “there’s a guy who’s never laughed at himself even once in his entire life.” You know how she knows she’s right? Because the Duluth Trading Company was forced to apologize to Don Henley after taking his holier-than-thou name in some catalog copy about their henley shirts. This is really more of a hahahahboohoo (™ Dame Sophie’s friend Joanne) than a row of laugh-til-you-cry-emoji. It’s also mixed up with Dame S.’s many, very complicated Eagles feelings. We’ll talk about those another time.
What does your friend Keith Love have to do with The Supremes, The Four Tops, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas? Let Amy Collier explain that and more with her classic-but-not-known-to-Your-Dames-till-this-week piece “Motown's Law: For Every Occasion There is an Equal and Corresponding Motown Song” in The Toast. (Bonus Collier, from her great side project Undercovered Classics: [1] the challenges of shelving books by color, [2] the many MANY prairies of My Antonia.)
And finally, there’s TWEE-Q, a website that, on finding that we retweet 90% women & 10% men, recommends we repent of our overly-feminized ways & find more men to retweet. Official Dames response:
And further let us add:
(That said, Swedes, give us a call when you come to your senses and transform TWEE-Q into a twee-analysis machine. It's a guaranteed improvement plan!!)
Margaret’s 5 Essentials:
The marvelous Ester Bloom of The Billfold has in her sights the DREAD FALLACY that mom’s salary alone pays for childcare and she is here to dismantle it with glorious efficiency. Read! And cheer!
Dame Sophie's editorial opinion of Said Fallacy
Lindy West got married last week and looked like an absolute, utter goddess. And, as is her wont, she wrote something fascinating, insightful, and moving as shit about the whole thing. But seriously can we talk about the utter perfection of her dress??????
Cosmopolitan Magazine did GOD'S WORK/interviewed five extras from Magic Mike XXL's phenomenal crowd scenes at DOMINA and the fictional stripper convention. The result? Essential anecdotes like this:
[At the end], Channing was talking and saying thanks to everyone, how they couldn't have done it without us, that we made it so much easier for them. He said, 'Can we get a little bit of music?' Then 'Anaconda' came on and everyone went crazy. They had a mini dance-off.”
I JUST MEAN!!!!!! And then also!!!! THIS:
Jada Pinkett Smith is one of the sexiest women alive. You just feel her energy when she steps into the room. She was so kind, respectful, and positive. She spoke so many nice things to us, like, 'Ladies, how are you feeling? How are you doing? Thank you for being here, thank you for your energy.' She made your self-esteem go up by just being in the same room as her. I tried to make a lot of eye contact. I just wanted to feel her power.
{Swoons away in dead faint.}
Scottish synth gods CHVRCHES released a #DOPE new single. Listening to it precipitated Dame Margaret into a fathomless k-hole built exclusively of CHVRCHES YouTube videos, the best of which was their BBC Radio 1 cover of that Justin Timberlake classic “Cry Me a River ”. Be prepared to chair dance.
Dame M. knows that you’re proooobably tired of her raving about The JV Club with Janet Varney with her every waking breath but YOU GUYS her interview with Rhett Miller (lead singer of The Old 97s/formidable solo artist in his own right) is just so good! Learn what Rhett said when he appeared in Seventeen Magazine as an actual teenager! Hear him adorably correct “who” to “whom” at the end of an especially choice sentence! Listen to his stories about falling in love with his high school French teachers and librarians and ponder, along with Dame M., whether these women helped inspire his adorable song “Four Eyed Girl”!
Dame Sophie's 5 Essentials:
Vintage crush: Rupert Graves as Freddie Honeychurch.
The way that he flips his hair gets me overwhelmed.
Your Dames do love an occasion to share favorite thirst traps. Fortunately, our friends Anna & Carolyn, hosts of Bellwether Friends, have furnished us all with an opportunity to revel in celebrity crushes of then & now with their current episode on Magic Mike & Celebrity Crushes, including an open call for GIFs of your faves. Chime in! It's for crush science!
The juicy headline for this story about two of the five surviving Sisters of The Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s attempts to fend off the sale of their convent to Katy Perry story turned out to be deeply sad, and Dame Sophie can't stop thinking about the power, gender & spirituality dynamics in play.
Hip-Hop and Old School R&B are the new oldies. #ThisIs40, friends:
The Beat, and stations like it, target listeners in their mid-20s to mid-40s: people who grew up during rap’s golden era. This is a subset of the population that is outgrowing contemporary hip-hop radio (which targets the 18-34 demographic) but is mostly too young to be nostalgic for ’70s and ’80s stations and too hip for adult contemporary. [Ed note: I have never been too young nor too hip for those formats.]
Longtime readers may have an inkling of how much time we spend thinking about language & accents. If you read this piece on how American English is basically stolen or made-up from other languages our ancestors encountered, read it aloud for maximum enjoyableness - it’s filled with delicious words like rubber-neck, alarmist, shyster, alright, and goof, and though the conclusion of this piece takes a turn towards American exceptionalism that I can’t get fully on board with, it’s generally very worthwhile.
Service Journalism Corner: Gail Carriger, author of a variety of delightful steampunk series about proper young Victorian ladies who learn to be badass spies & enjoy dalliances with all manner of supernaturals, has written a handy guide to button-down tops for busty ladies. Button gap, be gone!
And finally! Dames Side Project Note!!
Dame Margaret is now 1/3 of Appointment Television, a new podcast about the television you care enough about to sit down and watch, to be released every other Thursday.The first episodecame out last week, you should check it out. But!! Dame M. makes this announcement now because, to fully enjoy the second episode, you'll need to watch the pilot episode of Terriers, an astoundingly great buddy cop* (*private detective) show that ran for one season on FX and now lives on forever on Netflix streaming/in Dame M.'s heart. 
Even if you don't intend to check out the podcast, you should watch the show, because it's only 13 episodes long and it's PERFECT. But if you are interested in the podcast, you should super watch it, because the second half of the next four episodes will be devoted to dissecting it-- starting with the pilot! So give it a try! There's a great bulldog!