At Least It's Friday

What an uninspiring week. Outside it’s drizzling wet snow and inside my brief joy at the final electoral humiliation of Ron DeSantis (“a tissue-skinned tinpot Scott Walker, an asocial pissbaby with the charisma of a dog tick” wrote Albert Burneko, getting a few last shots in) has given way to the depressing certainty of another year of Trump vs. Biden, which will probably end in January Sixth II: “Once More, With Guns.” So far this week I’ve listened to Heather Cox Richardson talk about the rise of American fascism, and read Rick Perlstein talk to John Ganz about the rise of American fascism: “As Ganz puts it, ‘Everything kind of looks farcical until it doesn’t.’”

At least “The Daily Show” finally found a new host, and it’s Jon Stewart. This spunky young comic promises to hold up a sharp satirical mirror to our politics, and perhaps even puncture a few hypocrisies along the way. EBay only made $1.3 billion in profit between July and September 2023, so now it must shovel one thousand jobs into the furnace just to keep the cash silo warm. These are the realities of business. One point three billion dollars of profit is very hungry, and a thousand salaries will only keep it sated for little while. Have the tech bros at least stopped telling laid-off journalists to learn to code? No? Ah, well, nevertheless. Garbage Ryan captured the utter despair that pervades journalism right now, and I don’t really have anything to add.

There’s a new Green Day album? And it’s good, according to The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich:

Or it’s mid, according to Pitchfork’s Arielle Gordon:

All the members of Green Day are fifty one years old and I’m forty eight so I guess we’re all old enough to get our punk rock album reviews from The New Yorker, but having listened to it I think Gordon is probably right.

There’s a Stanley Cup for babies, reports Business Kapie. I initially thought Business Insider’s trademark Blodget-friendly bullet points were the entire article:

They’re not, but also, they kind of are.

Disclaimer: Neither Tonx nor Sumi approved this deranged ad copy. I’m out here operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable promotional conduct. Don’t you dare reward this kind of thing by ordering some coffee immediately.

There’s a road trip movie with Will Ferrell and his transgender longtime writer/collaborator Harper Steele that Sundance loved. I imagine when it gets general distribution everyone will be incredibly normal about it. But meanwhile here’s Ten Queer Newsletters (that aren’t on Substack). At long last, someone has invented a Game Boy Advance that takes less than thirty seconds to tell you how to eat Lunchables. M. Scott Brauer offers us a picture of the frog with an eyeball on its back¹ from last week’s Science Gentleman’s Friday. …Thanks? The wheels are coming off at Boeing; here’s an uncorroborated but very plausible explanation of what happened with that 737 Max door plug. And the saga of Kala the Tiktok suburban tunnel girl is a musical now, I guess.

Finally: Morning Brew’s Matty Merritt wrote an epic oral history of Disney Channel Original Movies, and while I personally am more X Files aged than DCOM aged (see Green Day, supra) the younger millennials and zoomers among us will probably enjoy this.

Today’s Song: Sunlotus, “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (The Smiths Cover)” via Luke O’Neil whose newsletter is also a bummer today, but what can you do.

Look I’m sorry about that Hillary tweet, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

1. Ass. The eyeball is on its ass. There’s simply no way around this fact. Scientists!