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Author: JennyTrout

Merlin Club S01E08 “The Beginning of The End” or “Damien.”

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Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.

Guest blog: Lisa Orchard on behalf of VolunTEEN Nation

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Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you! I’m Lisa Orchard the author of the bestselling Super Spies series. I’m here today to share with you an exciting project that I’ve been working on; it’s called “Books on Base.” Books on Base Logo

The purpose of “Books on Base” is to gather children’s books and donate them to our military bases. I’m working in conjunction with VolunTEEN Nation on this project. VolunTEEN Nation is an organization that encourages teens to volunteer. They have volunteer opportunities throughout the United States. To learn more about this wonderful organization click this link http://www.volunteennation.org/

We’re hoping to improve the selection of books for the young people whose parents are serving our country. As we all know by improving the libraries, we’ll improve the literacy levels of those bases. Check out this blog post for the proof: Improving our libraries will improve our literacy levels.

What a wonderful way to show our support of our troops by donating books to their
libraries. I’m going to be making a donation. How about you?

If you’d like to make a donation, you can send your children’s paperbacks to this address:

VolunTEEN Nation
500 South Meramec Ave
St. Louis, MO 63105

The covers, blurbs, and buy links from my own books are below. They’re great reads for the tweens and teens in your life!

Merlin Club S01E07 “The Gates of Avalon” or “That Time Joss Stone Tried To Murder Arthur”

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merlinbanner2

Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.

Merlin Club S01E06, “A Remedy to Cure All Ills,” or, “A Remedy to Cure All Ills Except for This Thing Going on with My Face.”

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merlinbanner2

Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.

The night Cinna ascended

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My cousin Desiree– known to the citizens of Trout Nation as D-Rock, destroyer of worlds– had a gerbil. Its name was Cinna. D-Rock bought this poor creature when she saw it in a tank all by itself at the pet store and an employee remarked, “He has to stay in there because he’s a bully.”

The bully part was the selling point, I’m pretty sure.

From the moment it was purchased, D-Rock devoted as much time and energy as possible to make sure this gerbil had a rad life. In a huge glass tank, she assembled a veritable city of cardboard boxes and wood shavings suitable for burrowing. Cinna was king of a deserted city, master of all it surveyed.

While D-Rock was recently on vacation in Mexico, Cinna lived with me. It was, without doubt, the most ill-tempered rodent I have ever seen. As I sat at my desk working, Cinna would come out of its little box houses and challenge me, standing on its hind legs and chattering, then dropped down beneath the lip of the cage and popping its head up for surveillance. When I fed it, it ate its bowl. When I gave it water, it flipped the dish. And ate it.

Last night, when D-Rock went home from my house (we watch TV together nearly every night) she found that Cinna had passed from the realm of her cardboard kingdom, into the universal consciousness.

So she tweeted it.

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Falcons are a recurring theme with D-Rock. It has been foretold that purchase of a falcon will be the final straw in her marriage, but we all know that bird is coming someday.

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Yes. She constructed a funeral pyre, whereupon she cremated the body of the Gerbil.

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Rest in peace, Cinna. You gave no fucks and lived life by your own rules.

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My Hair

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I’ve received a lot of comments on the last 50 Shades recaps in which people are like, “Your hair is awesome, how did you do it?” So I thought I would share the mysteries of my hair with you.

First of all, it’s pretty faded looking, now. When I started out with it, it looked like this:

hair 2 hair

 

But I actually like that it’s faded a bit, because I think now you can see more of a difference between the blue, green, and purple than you could at the beginning. However, the orange and pink got way muddy.

This is what it looks like now, two weeks after the initial coloring:

Photo on 2-21-14 at 4.31 PM Photo on 2-21-14 at 4.32 PM

 

So, how did I do this? Well, I didn’t. Jen, the salon manager at Ulta on 28th Street in Grand Rapids, MI, did it. The colors she used were by Pravana, in orange, pink, green, blue and wild orchid. She lifted it first (I have naturally dishwater blonde hair), then applied the colors in sections with foil. When it was done, she rinsed each color separately– in ice cold water. I’m not kidding, you guys, it was suuuuuuuuper painful. I had a headache for the rest of the day. But it was really the only way she could do it and keep the colors from bleeding into each other too badly, and I knew what I was getting into.

I also knew the colors wouldn’t last super long, so I wasn’t disappointed when they started to fade. In fact, I like the way the green fades so much, when I go in to get my color redone, I’m going to have her lift the rest out and just go full on green, with blonde highlights.

Thanks for all the nice comments about my hair, you guys! I would have answered them all individually, but I figured this was way faster. 😀

Merlin Club S01E05, “Lancelot,” or “The one where Merlin is way more concerned with the bro-code than with the outlawing of magic.”

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merlinbanner2

Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.

50 Shades Freed recap, Epilogue or, “This is what E.L. James has wrought. And we all have to live with it.”

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So, here we are. I think this is going to be the last recap. I know there’s “bonus” material, like the first chapter written from Christian’s POV and a story with him as a child, but after this epilogue, I’m honestly defeated. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I fear for women. I fear for the women who embrace this book. I fear for the women who will raise their Greybies to be “gentlemen” like Christian and “strong women” like Ana. I fear for the lives of domestic violence victims to be, the woman who seek out their own Christian Grey and find him. I fear for the women who see their abuse experience reflected in this book, and who find no solace from people they used to trust, because they know that they’ll never be understood so long as 50 Shades is the greatest romance of our time. I fear for the children who will be born to dangerously flawed fathers because their mothers believe, from the example set in these books, that abusive men can change through the shared miracle of unwanted pregnancy.

I’ve seen comments from people out there on the internet saying that they felt the tone of my recaps moved from funny to tragic, and that they could tell that the subject matter had begun to depress me. That assessment couldn’t be more on point. I used to find it fun to mock this book, thinking that surely, at some point in its meteoric rise, people would begin to see how ridiculous it is. But that hasn’t happened. To every person who staunchly believes it is going to happen, that movie will flop, that people will suddenly get what we’ve been saying all along: I understand why you’re clinging to that delusion. It’s easier to live in a world with hope. But there is no hope here. The movie will be a box office success. More fans will be introduced. The cycle will start all over again.

I’ve tried to refrain from too many vicious personal attacks on E.L. James. I’ve said some snarky stuff and left it there. But I’m done with that. This woman is a danger to women and to society in general. She is an ignorant, arrogant, self-important wannabe who accidentally made it, and now believes her own hype. She will never acknowledge that her book is a piece of abuse glorifying trash. She will never do anything to set right the horrible things she’s put into motion. She is, if not the literal devil, certainly a very close approximation of that kind of evil. She is Sarah Palin. She is Michelle  Bachman. She is every woman who betrays other women, on a bloated, disgusting scale. Maybe I would have pitied her once, but I have no doubt that she knows what she is doing, and that it will sell and line her already swollen bank account. Perhaps whatever book she is crafting out of unsubtle plagiarism for her next release won’t reach such an impressive height. I can only hope that comes true. But there will never be any consequence for the way she’s endangered the lives of women who want to live this “fantasy” she finds so romantic, or portrayed sexual ignorance, lack of consent, and outright abuse as not only desirable, but utterly necessary for a woman to be worthy of love. No matter how much you want to believe there will be, there never will be and justice .

Now, onto the shit show that is the epilogue.