Little Frog Man Turgle Steals the Show

Sufficient unto the day is the content thereof, and today is the day that butter got a Wall St. Journal stipple portrait. Kristina Peterson spreads out all the facts of a churning controversy: does butter require refrigeration? The answer is no, but many people believe the answer is, in fact, no. Not the Woke Deep State: “The FDA, which oversees butter safety, has largely stood pat.” I see you, Kristina Peterson.

The live-action “Little Mermaid” (why????) character posters just dropped, and all the CGI animals look like they are being kept alive against their will by a cruel and capricious god. The Vulture staff collected some good recipes “to Prepare and Eat The Little Mermaid Cast” and it would be an act of mercy. This guy is already in line for tickets, though. In other animal character news: Bronx peacock bites man, signs development deal with The Kid Mero, “Star Wars Jedi Survivor’s Little Frog Man Turgle Steals The Show,” and scientists are at it again, those freaky little goblins, this time attaching a Raspberry Pi to a goldfish’s brain to see if they can use it to steal login credentials from people who think they’re connecting to a free Starbucks wifi.

You really gotta hand it to Tucker Carlson for being a fearless populist truth teller, wrote Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein in the ostensibly left-wing American Prospect. Issuing correction on previous story of ours, clarified TAP executive editor David Dayen, we are currently at work on a follow-up story about how you do not, in fact, gotta hand it to him. But why did Tuckles get the axe? Gabe Sherman heard from Lachlan’s ex-hairdresser’s wife’s cousin’s landscape designer’s friend that it was because Rupert found his religious stuff creepy and/or to annoy his ex-fiancé whose religious stuff Rupert also found creepy. According to Jim Rutenberg, Jeremy W. Peters and Michael S. Schmidt it was because it took Fox’s senior execs several weeks to look up the c-word and realize he was actually being quite rude in those texts, a theory echoed in the Wall St. Journal who also noted that Carlson’s show was toxic to any advertiser to the left of Pillow Guy and “wasn’t providing a financial windfall to the network.” It seems like a better question is: were there any reasons left not to fire him? Yesterday Tucker himself posted a video from his wood-paneled home grievance chamber strongly implying that he’s about to go to RT, and the blaues Häkchenkorps in his Twitter replies are very excited about it.

Director Kevin Smith, also famous for his scholarly work on the CBTA, had a grippy sock vacation and is ready to share his mental health journey.

Today in Media: Vice cancelled Vice News Tonight, laid off 100 more staff. Paper Magazine fired everyone, apparently you can’t survive on 1.3 million pageviews a month now? The only successful form of media is sludge content. Jo Livingstone and Danny Lavery are launching a blog called The Stopgap, and I’m excited to read it but not sure why they seem so mad at me already. I’m sure there’s a good reason though.

Today in Tech: The cloud is underwater. Facebook is still losing more than a billion dollars a month on a metaverse no one wants, while over on Instagram child sex trafficking runs virtually unchecked, according to this harrowing Guardian story by Katie McQue and Mei-Ling McNamara.

Today’s Chotining: “I don’t recall people saying that [Strom Thurmond] should step down,” says Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow both incorrectly and irrelevantly, while claiming that it’s sexist to call for Dianne Feinstein to resign just because she is unable to do her job in a one-seat Democratic Senate majority.

“National politics should be done via private conversations, for decorum” is pretty much everything that’s wrong with the American government right now, so I guess thanks for capturing it so succinctly.

Today’s Song: Shit Present, “What Still Gets Me”

This new Sleeper EP is sick, thanks Music Intern Sam! We made it through another week, and that’s not nothing. Hey did you know I sell paid subscriptions to this newsletter? Not gonna lie, mostly you get the same content, but it hits different when you’re funding it. Don’t just take my word for it, take someone else’s. Plus you get into the Discord! Press the button:

See you tomorrow (subscribers) or Monday (Gay Sunday). Today in Tabs is registered at the Post Office as “newslettery bullshit.”