The Sea Shanty Explainer Explainer Explainer

In its increasingly weird final hours, the Trump administration announced a list of statues to include in the National Garden of American Randos including, (let’s just grab three arbitrarily) Steve Jobs, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Hannah Arendt. Today in Tabs would like to propose that section 3(c)(i) of Executive Order 13934 is further amended to read as follows: 

The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of Jar-jar Binks, The black spot from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", Racism, Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, Shirley Temple, Erik Wemple, Arthur Kent (from the 1991 Gulf War), Baby Yoda, Mr. Ed, Deep Throat (not the porn one), A 2001 Chevy Silverado, Game Theory guy, The Betsy Ross Museum dril tweet, The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Joker (Jack Nicholson), The Joker (Heath Ledger), The Joker (Jared Leto), Not Joaquin Phoenix though, Scoobert "Scooby Doo" Doobert, Fred the Baker, A gun, and Fred Rogers.

Vox’s Rebecca Jennings ushers in the next stage in the shanty content cycle with an explainer of all the sea shanty explainers. “The thing about viral sea shanties is that there is literally nothing to explain at all,” she writes, which is true, and also why the discourse has managed to achieve its second meta-level: the explainer explainer. The internet is optimized to use a single delightful text as pre-text for mixes, mashups, duets, takes, explainers, formal references, and explainers of explainers. The emptier the original content is of meaning, the more adaptable it is to the content cycle. White light through a clear prism makes all the colors in the spectrum. So here above, is the ultraviolet of the content spectrum: the sea shanty explainer explainer explainer, which I can write because I have a whole newsletter to fill every day, and I am totally shameless.

Yesterday was Bad People Praising MLK on Twitter Day, and the tally this year included ICE (this you ICE?), Trump administration Lie-bot Kayleigh McEnany, racist Lego minifig Matt Gaetz, and fully 127 of the 147 Republican congresspeople who voted to overturn the 2020 election and who would also have gladly voted to assassinate MLK when the FBI did it in 1968. Also Yesterday: the new idiot dropped.

 Ben Affleck is the luckiest person alive. I’m not going to judge the causes and circumstances of his breakup with Ana de Armas because I know nothing about it except for these incredible images:

Think of every breakup you’ve ever had, and then imagine if you could have taken a life-sized cardboard cutout of the other person and literally thrown it away in the literal trash. This should be a requirement from now on.

“Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘vagina’ candle reportedly explodes in UK woman’s home.” Things Found. Parler is a static website pretending to be a social media network now. Speaking of: Alec MacGillis watched way too many Parler videos of the Capitol riot and wrote a very good story about it. Take the car, leave the baby. Lubchansky’s “Antifa Super Soldier Cookbook” is available for pre-order! Octavia Butler for everyone. Caitlin Dewey asks: what will become of the Reply Guys?

Today’s Song: “You Get What You Give,” by The New Radicals. Get ready for tomorrow!

~ Wake up kids, we got the content disease ~

What if I pivoted to workout inspiration and renamed this Today in Abs? Thanks to Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day for the exploration of the loss.jpg Math Lady meme. Thanks to Becca Laurie and Jessie Guy-Ryan for other things. Thanks to you for reading.