Hi, My Name is Kia.

Can we get some kind of legislation that requires that Wikipedia pages for famous people list their ethnic make up?

I just want to know what gives Puck from Glee that vague mulatto vibe.

Coastal Carolina Cooking

My friend Andrew, who is of hearty southern stock, was passed down a cook book entitled Coastal Carolina Cooking. It was printed in 1959 and is collection of recipes from some ladies group at a hospital. Each page other than the index is a copy of a handwritten recipe. How quaint.

And you know what else is quaint? The blatant racism.

Just look at that mammie. Give her a page or two in “The Help,” okaaaay? That’s probably one of the worst mammies I’ve seen. And it was from 1959! My mother was born when something like this was still acceptable.

There are a few gems sprinkled throughout the book - any sort of ethnic dish features a drawing of the most over the top caricature of the culture (sombreros, jumping beans, random asian characters that probably spell out nonsense, absurdly slanted eyes).

And also these:

The mammie cooking for the attentive white child

She is probably saying “YOU IS SPECIAL. YOU IS KIND.” Actually I’m pretty sure Viola Davis used Coastal Carolina Cooking as inspiration for her role in The Help.

A recipe for Watermelon Pickle with some sad little drawing of a black boy IN A JAR eating watermelon

Something called Plantation Pie with a black as sin child enjoying a slice because it only makes sense that she would absolutely LOVE a pie that hails from the place where she was gainfully employed.

But I’m not going to lie to you guys, some of the recipes in the book sound phenomenal so I guess I have to give it up to esteemed ladies of whatever the fuck hospital and their cooking club. I’ll let you know how the plantation pie turns out.

Anyone reading this work in Social Media?

It still feels ridiculous to say “work in Social Media” but here we are in 2012 and it’s a thing. Did you know that there are some social media monitoring tools that cost $10,000 a month ?! Yes I said TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. Do you know how many $5 Taco Bell Boxes that could buy?

Anyway - I’m on the hunt for tools that track output as well as input. My main issue is that I have to manually, via copy and pasting to a spreadsheet, keep track of my SM output on a specific topic or campaign. I am sometimes asked for reports like “Kia, tell me about our social media efforts during tax season. How many tax tweets did we send? How many of those tweets got retweeted? Clicks? Engagement BLAH BLAH.” I can mash together these stats using this tool or that, but a way to scan my own tweets and mark them as related to this topic or that? - unpossible, it seems.

So, during the course of any specific campaign or season or whatever, I have to every so often search my own Twitter and Facebook feeds, find the posts that relate to the campaign or season and paste the URL into a spreadsheet. I DON’T FUCKING HAVE TIME FOR THIS or, more accurately, doing this makes me want to [fill in creative method of suicide here]. And let’s be real, I’m usually doing this retroactively and god knows the awfulness of the Twitter search and archive functionality is only second to that of Tumblr.

Soup mentioned he uses something called ThinkUp which is ALMOST what I need. It’s a database that crawls your social media feeds and archives all the info about the posts. That’s lovely and helps with the shitty archiving and search part but it’s not helping with the tagging or grouping posts part.

Am I doomed to the manual spreadsheet?

Haywire: A Review

Gina Carano is excellent at kicking ass, running and climbing things but terrible at emoting, reciting dialog or anything else that is usually required of an actor. The story is interesting and comes together well at the end, but lacks sufficient information during the course of the events to understand why the shit went down as it did. Like, I get that she was betrayed, but why? You can’t just say “She was betraaaaayed!” and expect me to be super hyped up about her revenge plans. I need at least a little morsel of motive.

Also, the music, which is done by the same guy that did all of the Ocean’s movies, is sometimes TOO Ocean’s-y - this is not a comedy so the music didn’t always match the tone.

But seriously though, she’s a beast at takedowns. I have never seen so many choke holds in one movie.

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You should join Letterbox’d and then be my friend on it because I write really great movie reviews.

EVERYONE SHUT UP. Stop working. We must take a moment of silence.

The founder of Cracker Barrel has passed away.

Swing low, sweet chariot.

Sometimes in our lives, there are things that we can’t live without - things that we never knew we needed until we had them. I often here this sentiment applied to significant others, children or Kitchenmaid stand mixers.

For me, that thing is a pair of slippers that can pass for shoes.

Never want to wear another thing on my feet. Soft and fluffy on the inside with a hard yet flexible sole? I’m seriously not understanding why this isn’t the standard shoe of life.

Chillin at home? Slipper shoes. Going to grab some food around the corner? Slipper shoes. Gotta run to CVS real quick? Slipper shoes. At home about to leave to go to dinner but don’t want to release your feet from the comfort of the slipper shoes? Slipper shoes.