They Were Put There By a Man

Yesterday Jessica Ellis tweeted:

By this morning:

What does it mean? Nothing, it’s a fun song and it’s fun for everyone to remember it at the same time. Here’s David Buck in Tedium on The Presidents of the United States of America, who were both a stranger and less strange band than people thought. Sometimes what’s trending is just a lot of people remembering when we weren’t quite so old.

The Linda Lindas are currently not old at all, and I’ve unlocked Friday’s open thread about them because as I said I love them, and also because today The Guardian’s LA correspondent Sam Levin has a profile of them, which notes a fact we all kind of suspected, right?

What does that mean? Can you become a famous teen musician without industry-connected parents? Probably not. But does it imply they’re any less talented? Also probably not!

Emily Wilder, a brand new Stanford grad and journalist of barely a year is currently running public relations rings around the 175 year old Associated Press, briefly her employer. The AP first defended, then suddenly fired her last week, possibly for writing when she was in college that Sheldon Adelson looks like a naked mole rat. But where is the lie?

Wilder appears willing to talk to anyone, has nothing to lose by telling the truth, and is extremely well-spoken. She also seems like a natural reporter, who broke a number of stories in less than a year at the Arizona Republic. Over 100 AP reporters signed an open letter calling for “more clarity from the company about why Wilder was fired,” and for the organization to find itself a spine rather than invite bad-faith smear campaigns against the rest of its reporters. Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein also pointed out that:

The AP has so far declined to clarify exactly what posts Wilder was fired for. Perhaps it was this one:

Which is to say, the words we use aren’t objective natural phenomena. They were put there by a man.

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I was sitting at a child’s birthday party yesterday, having no social anxiety whatsoever while drinking my daughter’s discarded grape juice box and micromanaging the tie-dye station, when I stumbled upon the TikToks of Adrian’s kickback, a very different birthday party in Huntington Beach, where the vibe was more “fireworks in the street and stomping on cop cars” and less “juice boxes and piñatas.” Oh, sorry, were you not invited to Adrian’s kickback? It’s okay, maybe that was for the best, I almost texted to see if you wanted to go but I know you like to get to bed early so I figured you were in for the night. It’s not that you’re unpopular. You’re actually super popular and everyone else thinks so too. In fact we were all talking about how cool you are while we were at Adrian’s kickback without you.

There are bound to be missteps as we reënter society after so much time Zooming from bed, evolving our secret new flesh shapes and nurturing fantasies of human interaction. Like, for instance, documenting a cross-country expedition to profess your love to someone who doesn’t even trust you with futon privileges. Or maybe this wasn’t even a real shot at human connection, but rather an attempt at connecting with the Modern Love pitch desk? I guess that’s human enough -- for the sad people who weren’t at Adrian’s kickback, at least. 

At one point during this kid’s birthday a nine-year-old started screaming at the piñata line “BEAT IT, GOD DAMN IT!” and then someone finally beat the crap out of the giant paper strawberry until it spewed candy and everyone was clawing frantically for Nerds. Not so much “nature is healing,” more Antichrist’s “chaos reigns.” Maybe it wasn’t so different from Adrian’s kickback after all.

I can’t find the link but I’m pretty sure I saw a TikTok of Intern Tess holding an entire bottle of vanilla Stoli and doing a burnout in a Honda Accord at Adrian’s kickback.

Today in Animals That Are Not a Metaphor: This Katherine J. Wu story about a tapeworm that keeps infected ants youthful for a long time and tricks the rest of the colony into serving them is definitely not a metaphor for anything. Australia’s cannibal mouse plague, also a very straightforward face-value type situation. “Breaching Orca Slams Into Dolphin In Mid-Air.” Just animals doing normal animal stuff. “Corpse Flower Shows Up at Abandoned Gas Station In Alameda,” not technically an animal but still. And John Steinbeck apparently wrote a werewolf murder mystery? The werewolf stands for the inherent nobility of humankind in the face of injustice and want, and says things like: “Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff werewolves do. I figger I oughter eat’chyer up! Rowr, growl ‘n so forth.’”

Today’s Song: The Presidents of the United States of America, “Peaches”

~ Mud flowed up into tab’s pajamas ~

I was offline yesterday stomping around in the woods with a compass. It’s ok, I checked in with everyone first and they all agreed to just chill for a day so nothing important would happen. It was really nice of them. If you’re old enough to tweet you can reminisce about the 90s with me @fka_tabs or Intern Tess Lynch @mrtesslynch.