Whatever the last joke is going to be
Now the entire thing is built out of highway sharks
You ever go dinking around in your spam folder feeling that nervous little rush that you could very easily ruin your life with one false move if you wanted to? Like when the subway comes screaming into the station.
For the next three people who subscribe for a year at full price I'll send out a signed copy of A Creature Wanting Form. Reply to let me know if you want to do that. Or if you're already a subscriber and want a signed copy let me know and I'll sort it out. I've got some WTHW stickers and pins I'll throw in as well.
As thousands flee the wildfires ravaging Canada national and local leaders have said they are having trouble sharing links to news outlets on Facebook and Instagram because of the company's new ban on showing journalism content in the country. A similar situation played out during the fires in Australia in 2019. Like Australia Canada recently passed a law that would require rent-seeking middlemen like Facebook and Google – who decimated the news industry in the first place – to compensate news publishers for profiting off of their work by swallowing up all the remaining advertising dollars. Toll booth motherfuckers. As a result Facebook said fuck it no one in Canada can see news on their platforms any more. Good luck with the whole fire thing though.
Actually I don't think they even said the good luck part.
Meanwhile on Twitter yesterday I was trying to get an accurate picture of what was going on in California with the storms and nearly every post it showed me was some unfunny dickhead posting videos from disaster movies or from old storms elsewhere or digitally altering images. It used to be we'd get a handful of shark swimming down the highway hoaxes during a big storm but now the entire thing is built out of highway sharks. I suppose every person doing that kind of thing having a blue check made it easier to figure out who was not to be trusted but it all just fucking sucks man. This was one of the truly good things Twitter was ever useful for. Enabling people everywhere to describe the world as they see it as it is happening to them. A fucking empathy generator. I still don't even really have a good grasp on how bad the storm ended up being. I tried putting on MSNBC and CNN for the first time in a while last night and they were talking about Trump the whole time. Oh well none of my business I guess.
Apparently there was an earthquake in the middle of the storm though. I did hear that. Mostly because of the hundreds of people I saw doing a combination Pizza Hutt and Taco Bell joke. (Have you gone back and listened to Das Racist in years by the way? I did recently and some of it surprisingly holds up!)
I'm not trying to police how people react during their own life threatening situation but let me ask you something do you find it demoralizing or heartening that apparently we're all going to keep getting off our little bits all the way up until the end whatever the end ends up being? Maybe the trope in horror movies where the character does a quip seconds before getting their head ripped off isn't as unrealistic as I've always thought.
What was that I wrote a couple years ago at the beginning of Covid?
I just read an article that said maybe the reason a lot of people seem to generally not give much of a fuck about the over 200,000 Americans that have died from the virus in the past seven months is because we’ve been so successfully conditioned to ignore the deaths caused by our endless wars around the globe. Remember how it was a whole thing when George Bush made it so we couldn’t look at the coffins com- ing back from the Middle East?
They say that infants develop object permanence by about the age of two meaning that they come to understand that objects and people continue to have a separate and permanent existence even when they’re outside the bounds of their immediate sensory experience but I don’t know that we necessarily always hold onto that ability when we get older. Sometimes I look at my wife sitting over there on the couch eating cereal like she is right now and I remember that she is an entirely separate entity with her own internal life and all her own fucking things going on.
Something I think about a lot and I’m not projecting this will be the time is the idea of the final joke. Like we’ll all obviously joke online through almost everything no matter how bad but someday there might be a thing where we don’t want to anymore. Whatever the last joke is going to be it won’t be funny.
Maybe I was wrong there. Maybe the last joke will be all the rich and powerful climate deniers being consumed by a flaming tornado. That would be pretty funny I suppose. A joke needs an audience though. Does God count?
Speaking of God and laughing wow what a song this one was. Hoo boy.
Last week I reported on a ruling by the 5th Circuit that would roll back access to the abortion drug mifepristone.
In particular I talked about big time dog fucker James Ho who dissented in part saying that their ruling didn’t go far enough and that the FDA was wrong to approve mifepristone in the first place. He said doctors who delighted in delivering babies and beholding pregnant women suffered an "aesthetic injury" when abortions anywhere were allowed to take place and likened it to how harming a bird habitat harms bird watchers.
“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them," he wrote.
You're never going to believe this next part. Turns out Ho's wife was being paid by the anti-abortion group that brought the suit according to The Lever.
James Ho did not recuse himself from the case even though his wife, Allyson Ho, has regularly participated in events with and accepted speaking fees from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal group whose lawyers argued the mifepristone case before his court, according to the judge’s financial disclosures. ...
James Ho’s financial disclosures show that Allyson Ho, a top appellate lawyer at the multinational law firm Gibson Dunn, participated in events with the Alliance Defending Freedom and accepted honoraria, or speaking fees, every year between 2018 and 2021. The group also paid her travel expenses for some of the events. (The judge’s 2022 financial disclosure is not yet available.)
Q: Are you allowed to do that?
A: Yes. There are no rules. Well for us there are but not these guys.
I just saw someone say that it is national Poet's Day today and I don't know what that is or if it is even anything but I wanted to share my favorite poem I've read in some time with you anyway.
God I love that so much. Not the many generations of spiders that have in fact lived in the side mirror and hood of my car for decades now mind you. Practically speaking they can get fucked but thematically? Beautiful stuff.
This is a poem of sorts as well.
Thanks to Ceej for this beautiful tableau. I highly recommend reading the Ride the Lightning bass tabs before starting my book though or you’ll miss key plot elements.
You should read this thread about a city council meeting in Millbrae, California last week. Only if you want to pissed off that is. Up for discussion was a plan to turn a local hotel into housing for low income and unhoused people. Nothing terribly unique was said by the residents who oppose the plan – you can and will hear this exact same type of shit everywhere such housing is proposed – but that's kind of the point. (Here's an article from KTVU about the meeting as well).
A couple of highlights from the thread:
That last question man. We covered that concept in here a while back. It's called a concentration camp and you'd be surprised how popular they are to both conservatives and liberals alike!
The discomfort of seeing the unhoused living in squalor leads many to a crisis of conscience. Most don’t have the language to recognize the fact that the people on the streets are purposeful victims of capitalism. And none of us “regular folk” want to think about how close each of us really are to finding ourselves out on the street, struggling to survive. So we end up telling each other that it's their own fault, or that these people live on the streets by their own choice. We end up concluding that the unhoused are bad people who purposely shun the plentiful help available. That we have so generously offered. In this alternate reality, recreated daily by city leaders looking to avoid accountability for the ballooning of the unhoused populace, it is the homeless themselves who must be fixed. No further analysis of our economic system or societal values needed. It’s a comfortable and conscience-easing conclusion. And when you come to believe it, then you can be reconciled to the idea that your unhoused neighbors are not part of your community at all. They are threats to society rather than victims of its fundamental structures.
NIMBY is too cute a term for these people by the way. Sounds like a fluffy little magical creature instead of a demon who eats pain for their supper.
The thing these people always crying about the homeless are mad about is a result of a very simple thing: there are people without homes. But the real issue is that they think not having a home for some time is an immutable characteristic of the person and not simply a current lack of a home. Giving them a home will solve your big problem which is noticing them existing within the temporary condition of not having a home.
People get weird about the effectiveness of shifting terminology but the idea behind “homeless” versus “an unhoused person” is solid and I wish more people understood it. What we are talking about is a human being no different than you or I who – again – currently does not have a home. It is not an enduring and invariable characteristic like the color of one's eyes or blood type or whatever it means they have no home at this time. Once they have a home they are no longer "a homeless person" and therefore cannot "harm" you. That sounds really obvious right but so many people do not believe this. They think it is a stain that will follow a person around forever.
Oh but they're addicts and so forth? I promise I have done as much drugs and drank as much as many of the "degenerate homeless" that are "tearing your cities apart." So have many of you and many of your friends! The difference is we did it inside of a house.
Usually.
Do these people want to solve the problem they're twisting themselves up over (seeing homeless people on the street sometimes) or do they want to adhere to their carceral puritanical punishment brains?
Don't answer that. It's rhetorical.
Meanwhile in other countries the radical idea of giving people without a place to live a home seems to be working very well. Who would've thought?
Linda McQuaig Contributing Columnist
This gave me the chills. Apparently Swell Season had members of Songs: Ohia come up at their stop in Chicago the other day to play Cabwaylingo and Hold On Magnolia. Can't find the full video anywhere so if you see it let me know please.
Now “Hold On Magnolia” pic.twitter.com/gGBEyVgoVj
— Anders Lindall (@alindall) August 19, 2023
Searching around did lead me to this gorgeous rendition from 2006 however.
Here's another song I want you to hear. It's from the new album by the Boston band Old Soul. Check them out buddy.