Sumer Tyme and ye Moone Be As Blud

We’ve just survived another lunar eclipse, and I assume you all banged your pots and pans sufficiently to scare away the demons, because here we are. But tonight is still a super blood moon, so I’m going to let Intern Tess Lynch start us off today with:

Sumer is icumen in. Although summer traditionally icumes in on June 20th, the rescheduling of the LA County Fair—held in September for a century, now moved to May for climate change reasons—might mean rethinking the concept of summer as a whole, as Alissa Walker points out. Can you even imagine suckin on a chili dog when it’s 118 degrees? Those temps’ll make you unsuck that chili right quick.

It felt like summer a couple of nights ago here in LA, when the temperature hovered around 78 degrees deep into the evening and there was a nail-biter of a car chase going on. The driver even got away! That’s a very ~summer~ thing to happen. Hot nights and car chases occur year-round, but I always associate them with LA summers anyway: the glowing laptop propped on a dirty patio table or the floor of a balcony, the passive thrill of a too-hot, too-dry breeze and the vertigo you get when your eyes follow a fugitive driver looping back onto the 118 freeway for the third time. 

More evidence that summer is already here: Helen Rosner’s ode to pellet ice for The New Yorker was dispensed back into the condensation-sweating tumbler of the timeline six months after it was originally published. While there is no such thing as a summer body, there is definitely a seasonal taxonomy when it comes to ice. Those big boy block cubes would seem to be a better match for July than December, but they are really intended for winter cocktails, not giant fountain sodas. The giant fountain soda is best paired with pellet ice, and as the scripture foretold, summer is the only acceptable time to drink from the fount. Spring and fall are for bottles, winter’s the can. 

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Lemonade Inc.’s “we do not use phrenology to deny insurance claims” Twitter thread is raising a lot of questions that are already answered by its extensive blog post about how it does not use phrenology to deny insurance claims. I would also like to take this opportunity to state for the record that contrary to malicious rumors, Today in Tabs does not use any form of hypnosis or mind control in our fundraising efforts.

Less “funny ha-ha” and more “funny oh-shit-no-that’s-actually-deeply-disturbing” is Jane Wakefield’s BBC News report that “a camera system that uses AI and facial recognition intended to reveal states of emotion has been tested on Uyghurs in [China’s] Xinjiang [Province]” to develop software “intended for ‘pre-judgement without any credible evidence’” according to Wakefield’s unnamed software developer source. Grim.

Oops, now I have to transition awkwardly back to jokes because: Andrew Yang. Also today in NYC’s Mayor Maynot ‘21 is this high-minded yet vague statement from the Morales campaign that throbs with “we caught our DSA co-chair sexually harassing all the female members at the Tuesday after-meeting drinks” energy.

The full moon hasn’t spared anyone: Richard Blumenthal, senior Senator from the state of Botox, punched in his phone’s passcode live on C-SPAN yesterday, leading to the world-historical first time Ted Cruz and Liz Lopatto agreed about anything. Jeff Bezos raised the bar for extremely divorced behavior, as Jason O. Gilbert observed, by buying all of James Bond. And in what has to be a full blood moon prompted frenzy, Zuck showed feet:

The Netflix show High on the Hog is out today, here’s Helen Rosner talking to Jessica B. Harris who wrote the book that inspired it, which makes this newsletter a rare double-Rosner. Johnny Knoxville is suddenly old. Guest-tabber Daisy Alioto dropped another spectacular chapter in her ongoing aesthetic exploration of the suburbs, in Dirt. The for all I know still boatless Michael Arrington, tech media jerk turned crypto jerk, is selling a one bedroom apartment in Ukraine as an NFT. I once wrote that “Arrington's presence defines the wrong side of any argument,” so that still checks out. Alden Global Capital has set out to ruin whatever remains of the Chicago Tribune that Sam Zell already ruined.

Keep your heads down and don’t make any important decisions today, my friends.

Today’s Song: El-P, “$4 Vic”

~ See the blood moon, hunters moon, hear the tabbing ~

Real Wicker Man hours, whom up?