Serena Williams lost in the Australian Open semifinal to Naomi Osaka. There will be one American in the AO final though: Jennifer Brady! Brady and Osaka will play in the final on Saturday, on ESPN for American viewers. [JustJared]
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is being justifiably criticized over his poor response to a huge water, food and electricity crisis. [Towleroad]
Goodbye NCIS: NOLA, I forgot you existed. [Seriously OMG]
Mindy Kaling in a sunny Dolce & Gabbana. [Tom & Lorenzo]
Human trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell claims she was abused by a guard. [Dlisted]
Markarian’s fall collection is rather lovely. [GFY]
A hateful, disgusting, racist, misogynist is dead. [Jezebel]
North American media is looking at British media like “you’re absolutely insane” for all of the crap they’re saying about Oprah Winfrey. [LaineyGossip]
Serena Williams cried after her semifinal loss and when she was asked about retirement, she said “I don’t know – if I ever say farewell, I wouldn’t tell anyone.” [Buzzfeed]
Boo hoo to GhisIane. I am sorry about NCIS Nola though. CBS made that hard to watch, always later on and moved it a lot. I don’t know why reporters have to ask such stupid questions sometimes. Should we be shocked that Selena has feelings?!
Ahhhh I feel so hard for serena. She has this career trajectory headed for a triumph, everyone is watching, and even though she’s already doing amazing work off the courts (let alone being a mother!), she’s got this looming goal on court that is just outside her reach as of now.
She’s so much more than a tennis pro – even coming back after life threatening complications and reaching the echelons of tennis is amazing…. But it obviously matters to her and I hope she reaches this dream, if only so newspapers stop talking about what she hasn’t done and focus on how fecking brilliant she is as an athlete, entrepreneur and woman.
Did anyone watch the match? I couldn’t as I really wanted Serena to win her 24th GS.
I just really love Mindy Kaling. Her fashion shows on that one patch of grass are so cheery and fun and perfect for lockdown misery.
I feel so bad for the talented and gutsy Serena. Wanted that win! Classy lady.
If someone has to beat Serena, I’m ok that it’s Naomi.
As a Texan who has learned quite a bit about our electricity grid in the past week…
It’s going to be very interesting to see Abbott try to deflect all the blame on to ERCOT (the grid council) and while they are definitely partially to blame, there is absolutely no question that the state absolutely dropped the ball. So did our local city/county governments and utilities. Abbott is planning an investigation into ERCOT’s wrongdoing. I’d like to know why Amazon was better prepared for this emergency than both my city and my state government, both at notifying me of the delay in services and of how the storm would impact my area. I read my local news daily, watch city council meetings, and subscribe to citywide text messages. We got NOTHING to prepare us. In theory, my city electricity utility sent out messages to every valid phone number in their system telling us to start conserving four days before the snow began. I didn’t get one and I’ve had the same number since I signed up for my account 14 years ago. Neither did anybody else I know.
This was a big time fail and it has been every bit as bad as the news is reporting. We are now on boil notices from pipes bursting both in homes and at plants, which lower the water pressure and risk contamination of potable water. I live near a fire station and have been pretty protected from power outages. The issue is, my neighbors are too. It’s snowing again, so while I am offering my home to anybody who needs power to charge their phones, warming, showering, or cooking food, they can’t get here. I made food deliveries when I could but that can’t happen now. When I was out, the few fast food places with power had lines 30 cars deep. Highways are closed across the state to all but emergency services. We are being asked to stay home of at all possible because people are crashing their cars and it is straining emergency resources even further and blocking their access. (My city had 1400 crashes between Sunday night and Wednesday afternoon.) Radio and cell service sucks. People have gone days without power because all the homes coming on at once are overloading the breakers and tripping the grids. People are literally burning furniture, fences, toys. It is insanity. Imagine having a boil notice but not being able to boil your water. Imagine having to get snow to flush your toilet…or drink. Imagine having a house with food but your can’t eat it because it is spoiled, or you can’t prepare it. My friend shared that she heard kids crying through the walls of her apartment because they can’t eat and are freezing. And there isn’t much we can do to help each other.
I don’t blame the government for the weather, or for not having equipment to deal with weather like this. I’ve lived in Texas almost 30 years and never seen this. But it didn’t have to be this bad.
And then Ted Cruz goes to Cancun because after he realized he could beat Beto by pretending to believe all the ridiculous stuff he says, people will vote for him, and they won’t care that he split even though they’re freezing from a preventable emergency. I do think it’s funny that if Obama or Clinton did it they’d be absolutely frothing at the mouth.
My heart goes out to you, your family, your neighbors, your community. It is so upsetting to hear how many people are endangered by this failure. It really is a tragedy.
Thank you. Today is better, thankfully. There have been no promises but it seems things are moving in the right direction, and it seems the biggest danger of the grid totally failing (which would cut off power to hospitals, emergency services, warming centers, etc) is unlikely.
Oh, they’re finding ways. My mother’s conservative coworkers are blaming it on the windmills of all things because that’s the story conservative media is selling. For Texas’s sake, I hope your blue days come sooner than later politically because the GOP is quite literally killing all of us at this point. Lot of people there suffering for a slim majority that refuses to learn from their mistakes and deflect blame constantly.
Yup, the windmill argmument is particularly bothersome because it’s so transparently stupid, but here we are in an oil and gas state, and our leadership would rather pretend the problem is related to 1/4 of the power source than a failure of a privatized grid and a failure of government to adequately prepare. It’s just a scheme to demonize renewable energy and blame something other than themselves for this disaster. This freeze affected all types of power in the state. Wind turbines did not shut down the nuclear tower, or freeze the gas pipes, or close the Port Arthur oil refinery. Windmills get used in places that freeze all the time without problems but what the hell do THEY know.
Thankfully, things are better today despite the snow, but the lies will keep coming, and people will keep believing them, and sometimes i get really tired of living in a state this gullible and short sighted.
the irony is that Texas is on it’s own grid because they didn’t want to deal with Federal Regulations; the Texas GOP didn’t even want to impose their own regulations and killed a bill that would have mandated weatherization of power plants that included preparation & maintenance for extreme inclement weather like this.
People are dying and, yet, there are still people in Texas (who still have power, of course) saying everything will be fine in a few days when the weather warms up – as if balmy weather will suddenly fix everything immediately
That’s right. As a public utility it is a non profit, but non profit doesn’t mean someone isn’t profiting. I haven’t had a chance to do my own investigative journalism on it yet but this is an oil and gas state…. follow the money and I bet it’ll lead to some very rich people. I’m guessing there will be a lot of articles on ERCOT in the next few weeks.
In some ways this event HAS been a big equalizer. The rich have not been spared. They lost their power and water too. Electricity has been so scarce, it has been prioritized to any grid with an emergency service such as a hospital, a fire station, or a police station on it. But their temporary inconvenience – moderated by their ability to leave and go to a warm hotel, or rent a generator – will be over when the power’s back. For people who lost their food and can’t afford to replace it, or the people with health conditions who suffered, it’s awful. I had to bring my father in law out of his apartment because it dropped to 52 degrees and he was wheezing from his COPD. I have had clients (I have been a medical social worker for ten years) who have not had enough spare dollars to buy extra blankets. These are real problems that a lot of us just don’t have to worry about.
Anyway, I appreciate the supportive comments from other celebitchies. I’ve felt in a bit of an echochamber shouting in the wind with other pissed off Texans. This seems like a cautionary tale people need to know about. And maybe, if my state government is capable of any shame, they will do SOMETHING better in thte future. But I won’t hold my breath.
Ha! That didn’t take long. ERCOT president made $883,000 in 2018, and board members who worked between 5 and 15 hours a week made six figures.
Can’t wait to see the oil and gas connections.
ERCOT had planned a rate hike during the outage, too, so we will get to pay extra for using power during the scarcity they caused.
Considering how cold it is I’m surprised people haven’t been exploiting the cold to preserve their food from going bad in the defunct refrigerators. That’s what I would do – I used to live in Alaska.
I suggested it to a few people (I used to do it when I lived in colder places and it was freezing out) but people are very hesitant to do it. It doesnt help that our local news ran a story about what a bad idea it is. Probably not as bad an idea as having no food. ugh.
Poor Ghislaine. Sounds like she’s getting a little karmic payback for all the vile things she did to underage girls. Tough cookies.