Black Hole Fun

It’s the fourth of July and in America that can only mean one thing: Gru has risen. (Congregation: “He has risen, indeed.”) Polygon went hard on the Minion beat, with Liz Anderson rating Minion meme Facebook pages and Zack Kotzer making an interesting but historically questionable argument that Minions have taken over the culture because Universal treats them like yellow public-domain garbage blobs anyone can slap onto anything. I mostly can’t stop thinking about the post in 2015 where Vice established that Minions canonically do have an anus but probably don’t have a spine. This weekend was also the rise of the irl Gentleminions, which Ryan wrote about today with context including the Rick & Morty Szechuan sauce incident and Adrian’s kickback.1 

I’m kidding of course, the fourth of July is the day we celebrate Jesus bringing the recipe for Pepsi to humanity. But in the early days of Pepsi legalization, many young people struggled with dependency and complications like “Pepseizures” and “the combustive fizzums” (RIP Mikey). We’ve found a cultural equilibrium with Pepsi, but The Daily Mail’s Eve Simmons braved the modern weed-ravaged hellscape of Beverly Hills boutiques to document today’s greatest cannabis risk: “scromiting.”

This scrupulously balanced piece quotes Dr Roneet Lev, “an emergency doctor at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego” who is too modest to also mention her stint as Chief Medical Officer for the Trump administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, as well as the chairman of a group called Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana, one actual drugs researcher from UCLA, another “former White House drugs policy adviser who runs the anti-cannabis legalisation group, SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana),” yet a third anti-marijuana campaigner, and finally the mother of a kid who died of a fentanyl overdose. But before that? You guessed it: he smoked weed sometimes.

Business Insider reported that “scromiting” is real, as reported previously by Business Insider in 2018 and Business Insider in 2019. But it seems to affect a very small percentage of heavy long-term cannabis users, and the effective treatment is to stop using cannabis. Meanwhile, back in Simmons’ beloved Knifecrime Island, people are furious about postage stamps.

New Physics Season Just Dropped: As it spins up the Large Hadron Collider for Season 3, CERN once again assured us that it absolutely won’t create black holes, and if even it did they would be extremely exciting but useless, like a Democratic Presidential victory. It will also probably not open portals to other dimensions which would allow demons and spirits to enter the bodies of drunk people due to their higher atomic frequency. “It’s not like we’re meddling in forces humanity was not meant to tamper with and accidentally derailing our reality into horrific new timelines,” insisted a black-hooded spokes-Acolyte of the Cursèd Ring. “After all, the LHC ran in 2010 and 2016, and nothing bad happened in those years, right?”

Today in Crime: Runaway murder suspect apprehended in Costa Rica due to her insatiable yoga habit. And next week crooked Trumpy dentist Larry Rudolph and his hygienist paramour Lori Milliron go on trial, accused of killing Rudolph’s wife for a variety of reasons which are mostly “money.” Matt Sullivan turned in several thousand words of reported backstory on this trial for Rolling Stone, which includes leopard hunting, allegations of embezzlement and unnecessary root-canals, a possibly staged crocodile attack turned disability fraud scheme, and Rudolph “tweet[ing], incessantly, at [Trump’s] sons… in a plea for their father to nominate him as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.” Also a likely shotgun murder and an extremely incriminating argument at a pub.

Happy Birthday America! 

Today’s Song: The Mountain Goats, “Training Montage”

~ I'm doing this for tabs ~

Sorry about Friday’s lack of a subscriber post. I spent the whole day making a podcast and it didn’t come out good enough to send, but I did quietly leak it in the Discord so if you want to check that out, be a paid subscriber and look in the pinned messages in #tabs. My Lite ‘n Easy™ summer schedule continues this month, with new Tabs tomorrow and Thursday, a Tabs Classic on Wednesday, and then I’m off starting Friday the 8th and back Monday the 18th. It was difficult not to make this an entire issue of Minions memes so let me just say: