50 Million Unique Visitors Look Upon Our Works Monthly, Insists Ozy Media

Ozy Media was named after the main lesson of the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias“ which is of course: “dream big!” It’s the home of literally nothing you’ve ever read, watched, or subscribed to, and recently its COO impersonated a YouTube executive on a conference call with Goldman Sachs as part of the due diligence for a proposed $40 million investment, according to Ben “yt” Smith. Ozy CEO Carlos Watson thinks that, like his investors, we are all stupid infants who will believe that his pretend media company has more than 26 million newsletter subscribers (compared to the New York Times’s 15 million, or the thriving 100-employee Morning Brew’s three million), and that he can post through it with a HIPAA themed responsibility avoidance playbook. “Just a bad (but momentary) attack of griftophrenia, folks, a course of antibifraudics cleared it right up!” The company’s board accepted Watson’s initial whoopsie-daisy without even investigating, but Matt Levine wonders:

I’m sure this was the only time that the company, which is flagrantly lying about its audience and traffic, misled investors in any way, that there will be no further developments, and that Ozy will continue to be hugely popular in some parallel dimension that never leaks into this one.

The story is basically the tweet, but longer, and fails to explain either boudoir photography (tasteful sexy-time pictures) or barrel racing (horsies going zigzag). This has been: “Here’s a Tweet.”

Everything is a Grift: Arizona’s CyberNinjas election audit, of “Chinese bamboo ballots” fame, finds that Biden won Arizona by more votes than the official tally. David Roth on crypto: “Fatuous rich people making themselves into oracles and even saviors simply by finding some new words and a sleek modern shape for their old greed.” The Bitcoin rollout in El Salvador was a complete fiasco on launch day according to Foreign Policy’s David Gerard, and hasn’t “gotten better since then.” And inexplicably popular dumbass Joe Rogan posted a video “comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust,” reports Tim Marchman in Vice. Thanks Spotify!

Angela Merkel has come to the end of her 16 years as German chancellor and been ritually fed to parrots in the European nation’s quaint tradition of “von Papageien gefressen.” She was a towering figure in German politics who once told George W. Bush to “werde gefickt,” and she will be missed.

Across the Maginot Line, French President Emmanuel Macron was hit by an egg at a food fair in Lyon, which “glanced off Macron’s shoulder without breaking” according to Bloomberg’s Geraldine Amiel and Ania Nussbaum. Why only one egg? Because in France, one egg is un oeuf.

And in Fortress Britain, Boris Johnson has proposed calling in the army to drive petrol lorries to the nation’s dry forecourts1 as citizens of the blasted post-Brexit hellscape have been shocked to discover they can’t power their cars solely with knifecrime.

Andrew Beaujon found out who was behind the Washington Post Peloton account, and it was “Ryan Kellett, the Post‘s… outgoing senior director of audience,” which is just about the most disappointing answer possible.

Instagram pauses “Instagram for Kids” development in order to move quickly on an opportunity to make fat baby bears feel bad about themselves instead.

Future Wife: Party in a Spreadsheet is a play in a spreadsheet, I guess? According to Ian Carlos Campbell in The Verge, “[t]here are communist goats, alien activists, several themed islands, and an anonymous audience masquerading as a variety of exotic animals.” Sounds like a normal day for Matt Matthews2.

And finally: R. Kelly is guilty.

Today’s Song: (new!) Sleigh Bells, “True Seekers”

~ two vast and tabless legs of stone ~

Hey this Sunday, October 3rd, I am walking (let me repeat: walking) the 26.2 miles of the Maine Marathon to help raise money for Through These Doors, our local domestic violence resource center here in Cumberland County, Maine. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and the pandemic has not improved things for DV survivors at all, particularly housing costs which are completely out of control right now. I’d be thrilled if you donated at https://runsignup.com/tabs and made Today in Tabs the newest philanthropic powerhouse in Southern Maine. And if you’re in Portland on Sunday for the race, watch for me! I’ll be the giant pink flower.