Bean Bad

Let's talk about 2021 energy. We spent last year alone and sad and scared. This year we may still be alone, but starting right now, the 309th day of March, we must replace "sad and scared" with "maximum chaos energy at all times." For example: charismatic moral vacuum Joe Rogan is embarking on a month of explosive diarrhea. OG Gawker fameball Julia Allison is using frog venom to trigger "projectile vomiting... for 15 to 40 minutes." Should you do these things? No! These people are experts, you have to walk before you can projectile vomit for the entire run time of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. 

But look at this UK gentleman, who got drunk and changed his name online to Mr. Céline Dion. Previously he: 

Did you even know you could go online and change your name? Anything is possible! Or you could go on a blind date for a newspaper and eat a steak with your bare hands! Right this second Mr Céline Dion is scouring the dark web for a chimpanzee he can train to mix fancy cocktails. Emily and Andrea are mapping a motorcycle route from Novisibirsk to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. Chaos is the new hustle economy folks, and I need you all to rise and grind. Anything is possible! 

Today in Tabs: Last week ‌Omar Rizwan announced TabFS, a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a local filesystem. Anil wrote about why that's so cool and also mentioned the return of Tabs, making this a perfect ouroboros of Tabs self-referentiality. 

Today in Jabs: Israel has reportedly vaccinated over a million residents, or 11.5% of its population so far (not Palestinians though). So how's America's immunization going? Not great! In West Virgina, 42 people were somehow given Covid antibodies instead of the vaccine (while elsewhere antibodies sit unused). A Tennessee clinic turned away potential vaccine recipients before "contacts" of the vaccinators were told to come receive "extra doses." Oklahoma apparently doesn't even have a statewide plan, and counties are using SignUpGenius to organize vaccination. Florida, the "new Silicon Valley," scoffs at such amateurism, turning instead to… EventBrite. New York Governor and large adult son Andrew Cuomo imposed fines of a million dollars and loss of state licenses for anyone vaccinating the "wrong" people. And in Wisconsin, a pharmacist was arrested for deliberately spoiling enough doses for over 500 people, possibly in an effort to convince Americans that the vaccine doesn't work. Buddy, Americans believe that 5G causes coronavirus and that the metal strip in the nose of face masks is a 5G antenna, we don't need your stinking cause and effect. In general, we're way behind. If you're unsure whether this is good or bad: the Times is on it.

The Discourse is like a waterslide in Escher-space. You go in one end, it's very confusing inside, and there's no telling where you'll come out. For example: Anna Merlan called out Kaitlyn Phillips for these blurry solo cup photos, supposedly allegedly rumored to be from a Christmas party which ostensibly according to anonymous accounts was the source of a batch of new Covid cases. All the weaseling here is because no one will actually report out what happened. Joe Bernstein wants Ben Smith to do it, Ben wants Delia or Foster Kamer to do it, and I don't know anyone involved so this is probably all you're gonna get. There was a lot of backchanneling and subtweeting, but when L.A. looks like the footage Sam Neill found on the Event Horizon and in Mar-A-Lago they're playing that funky music till they literally die, it's hard to sustain much discourse over what amounts to an ill-advised midwestern potluck.

Instead, the weekend's real Discourse was Bean Dad. Bean Dad is middling musician and terrible tweeter John Roderick, who posted this 23-tweet thread describing how he spent six hours refusing to either show his nine year old daughter how to open a can of beans, or let her eat anything else. This earned him a ratio closing in on 12x at press time, but he initially committed to Tweeting Through It. By Sunday afternoon it had generated enough heat that many people believed this AOC parody account was actually AOC weighing in on Bean Dad. There were many good dunks, but if you want to read more just do a Twitter search for "bean dad," it'll work better than me embedding twelve thousand tweets here. Dionne Warwick declined comment. 

Then McElroy brothers flagship podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me announced it was dropping Roderick's song "It's a Departure," which has been the show's theme song for a decade or so. The excavation of bad old tweets commenced. Bean Dad realized that tweeting through it was not going to work this time and abruptly deleted his account. And here we reach the point in the Discourse's Wild Ride where some entirely random c-list celeb gets wrapped up in it all, which this time was Ken Jennings, who apparently co-hosts a podcast with Bean Dad and has himself has been known to drop a real stinky tweet. At press time, the Bean Dad/Ken Jennings discourse has reached as far as E.T. Canada, and posters everywhere still wait to find out which meme folder to open.

We interrupt this Discourse for the following important announcement:

Starting soon, Today in Tabs will offer four classified ad slots in our Wednesday newsletter. The ads will also run in the media newsletters Study Hall and Deez Links, reaching a grand total of 38,000 obsessive subscribers. Promote your own newsletter, launch a podcast, or advertise a job listing with Media Classifieds™.

A new study in arXiv claims that the Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations. In other words: moon's haunted. Blackbird Spyplane on Blessed GORP vs. Cursed GORP. Criterion has a 28 film series on Afrofuturism. The guy who invented the CueCat is back and pushing voter fraud nonsense. Bitcoin is booming again, and you can smell the fraud in the air.

Maria Bustillos at Brick House and everyone at Defector are creating journalist-owned media companies, you should check them out. Or I guess you could check out the new $300 a year Politico spinoff newsletter, Punchbowl, which is funded by a "longtime fund-raiser for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris [who] is also close to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner" (according to Ben Smith's "Ben Smith Ruins Your Newsletter" column in the Times), and is "presented by Facebook and the National Retail Federation" if you like your political news expensive and thoroughly cursed.

Today’s Song: “Jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam,” by original Bean Dad Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana

~Jesus, don’t choose me for The Discourse~

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