The Lottery

Today's best joke is in the alt text for the crab image just fyi.

June 27th, 2022

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” Crash Barry remembered that it’s the day of The Lottery, and Shirley Jackson’s story of pointless small town cruelty dressed up as tradition lands harder today than it has in quite a while, now that we all live in the village.

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”

“Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs. Adams said.

“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools.”

“Of course our employees won’t be subject to the lottery,” said Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. But when Joseph Cox and Motherboard asked them exactly how that would work, the companies “refused to clarify whether they would fulfill or deny law enforcement requests for data that related to investigations involving those seeking or providing abortions.” In Popular Information Judd Legum reports that Match Group “established a fund to cover the costs of out-of-state abortions after Texas banned most abortions last year…”

But in 2021, Match Group also donated $137,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Why does that matter? RAGA, by its own admission, played a central role in Dobbs. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R), a member of RAGA, was in charge of the legal strategy to eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion. 

Does this seem contradictory? It shouldn’t—eliminating the right to abortion unless you work for a certain employer just brings abortion in line with the rest of our national health care policy, where only the submissive employee has a right to any health care at all. But don’t talk about the lottery if you work at Meta or Axios, and definitely don’t criticize Old Man Musk if you work at SpaceX. You can have free speech or you can have health insurance, but you can’t have both. That’s just how we’ve always done things, here in the village.

The Supreme Court has already moved on to ending the separation of church and state and will likely end the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 and possibly dismantle the entire federal regulatory apparatus this week. Seems like there’s no time at all between lotteries any more.

I know we’ve all already soaked in the bilious tide of Roe news, so I’ll just add two short pieces and then we can talk about animals for a while. First Adam Kotsko’s “When the worst people in the world keep winning:”

It’s a cliché to say that the worst people on earth have deep conviction while the good are wishy-washy — but they do not seem to have the courage of their convictions. Neither “courage” nor “conviction” comes to mind when we think of the typical evangelical, or the typical conservative. Someone who really believes, really knows that they are on the side of right isn’t so prickly, so irritable, so habitually dishonest and deflecting. They can’t take yes for an answer because they don’t know what they want, don’t know what their supposedly deeply-held beliefs even mean.

And retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse returned to write a eulogy for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as it stripped half the country of a civil right both granted and taken away in the course of her career:

But Justice Alito declined that call for restraint… “The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better — for this court and the country — to face up to the real issue without further delay.”

There will be turmoil now, for sure, as the country’s highways fill with women desperate to regain control over their lives and running out of time, perhaps followed by vigilantes across state lines. But the only turmoil that was caused by Roe and Casey was due to the refusal of activists, politicians and Republican-appointed judges to accept the validity of the precedents. Justice Alito’s reference to “turmoil” reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump’s invocation of “carnage” in his inaugural address. There was no carnage then, but there was carnage to come.

A family living in Western Australia discovered a new species of fluffy crab that wears a sponge as a hat, reports The Guardian’s Donna Lu.

Dr Andrew Hosie, a curator of crustacea and worms at the Western Australian Museum, said sponge crabs had hind legs that were specially adapted for holding their protective hats.

“The sponge or ascidian just keeps growing and will mould to the shape of the crab’s back,” he said. “It will never attach … it forms a nice cap that fits quite snugly to the top of the crab.”

And in Insider, Katie Boon reports that “New Hampshire distillery Tamworth Distilling has developed a green-crab-infused whiskey.” Green crabs are invasive and absolutely wrecking native New England crab populations so killing them is great, but I can’t think of a single reason that putting them in the whiskey is a better idea than just infusing them directly into the dumpster.

Yesterday a worker at a Staten Island ShopRite and role model to us all patted Rudy Giuliani on the back and told him: “You’re a f–king scumbag… You, you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women.” Giuliani, a fragile sack of decay and corruption, barely avoided clattering to the floor in a heap of dusty bones. It is not yet known whether the ex-New York mayor and fucking scumbag will press charges, but if he does he clearly won’t be able to press them very hard without splintering his moldering skeleton.

Scientists analyzed 2,792 human mouth samples and found “48,425 nonredundant viral genomes,” the majority of which were previously unknown. So smile! Your mouth statistically contains thousands of unknown viruses, and they’d like to see what’s going on outside.

The U.K. now owns equity in sex party planning company Killing Kittens, as well as a blimp company due to a pandemic loan program that socialized both the risks and the rewards. ”Crypto winter” is still howling as Celsius Network has remained on its “success hiatus” even longer than Today in Tabs. In The Coast, Kaija Jussinoja and Matt Stickland followed up on their landmark Nova Scotia “Titanic Experience” report, “which as it turns out…” don’t you dare, you monsters, don’t you d— ”was just the tip of the iceberg.” Argh. The Observer’s Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly reports that meal kit company Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles have caused “gastrointestinal issues, hospitalizations and in some cases, organ removals,” and not in a Phantom of the Opera sense, either.

And finally, even ayahuasca couldn’t make Mattathias Schwartz’s midlife crisis all that interesting, but well done to him for bringing home the content anyway.

Today’s Song: “Fuck You,” by Lily Allen, with Olivia Rodrigo live from Glastonbury. You know who it’s dedicated to.

~ Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of tabs, and the other boys soon followed his example ~

I left you all in charge while I was on vacation and look what you did. Smh dot com dot au. I continue to tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs because at this point why not. If you’d like, you can choose to pay me for these emails. Paid subscribers don’t have to pick a slip out of the box. But it’s up to you.

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