Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. I ate way too much delicious food.
I need a nap so I won’t be braving the stores. How about you?
In the top news of the day:
French Bulldog wins top prize at National Dog Show
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/24/us/national-dog-show-winner-winston-2022-cec/index.html
Blech!
Elon Musk offers general amnesty to suspended Twitter accounts
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/24/elon-musk-offers-general-amnesty-to-suspended-twitter-accounts
Sprots!
Richarlison makes the World Cup gasp with a wonder of a goal in Brazil’s win
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/24/richarlison-brazil-world-cup-win/
Stonks!
Binance deploys $1 billion to keep crypto industry afloat after FTX collapse
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/24/binance-creates-1-billion-crypto-industry-fund-after-ftx-collapse.html
Still the cutest:
Thanksgiving tradition started by mistaken text lives on for a seventh year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/24/jamal-hinton-wanda-dench-thanksgiving-tweet/
Have a good one!
I have something for you, Meg, although I’m sure this was extensively covered locally:
https://www.yahoo.com/now/uber-customer-banned-her-racist-211534593.html
This resonated with me because I have a white woman friend, more like a friend of a friend, who lives in the Cathedral Heights area, from her condo you can see the nearby National Cathedral, and she is the opposite of Kathedral Heights Karen. Many years ago she and her four cats (at the time) hosted a little cocktail party and boozily-woozily she pulled me aside and said, “Your boyfriend is Black. I wanna Black boyfriend. So many hot Black guys in DC. How’d you do it?”
[Long story redacted, here it is in summary] “We met through friends at a party. I said, ‘Hello, my name is Matt, do you know where the bar is because I’d like to get a drink…’ And then eventually we were off to the races.”
It sounds like a Hallmark Holiday Romance.
It was! What happened was we were on a blind double-date. My friend wanted to introduce me to his friend, and his friend wanted to introduce the man who’s now my Better Half to my friend. So imagine A, B, C, and D, where A and C and B and D are meant to live happily every after, but what happened was A and D live happily every after and B and C are left cold and forlorn in the cesspool that was the gay dating scene of the 1980s. B and C ultimately coupled off themselves, not with each other, they were frenemies, but it took a long while, especially for C, Better Half’s friend who unwittingly introduced us and the man I was intended for.
It happens. This happened to me. I ended up ruining a setup because the intended liked me more than my friend, the target. Was banned from other events by my other friend’s wife (the organizer) because she hates me and thanks to my ineptitude I never got her friend’s phone number….
Whomp whomp
Ugh I dunno man. Sounds a lot like she was fetishizing Black men. While seemingly “opposite” from the Kathedral Heights Karen, it’s a form of racism.
Absolutely, fetishizing Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color is dehumanizing. And her saying it to @MatthewCrawley is a great example of how white people assume all white people share their views on marginalized people.
Yeah…I mean it is ok to have preferences and only date certain people in accordance to said preferences but it is dehumanising to inquire about it like “how do I get me one of those?”
You’re basically insinuating that they aren’t just like the “regular” white people you’re used to meeting.
It is why my sisters never dated guys with “yellow fever”. They never wanted to be someone’s fetish. Can’t say I blame them.
Yeah it is really creepy and disturbing how many dudes are still fetishizing them.
It was the mid-90s and we were then all around 30, and DC at the time was majority Black. I said to her, “Do you have any Black friends? You could start there, maybe they have friends or relatives or something…?” “I just know the guy from the mailroom and he’s gay.”
“Oh. You like to read. How about joining a local book club. I have a friend who met his wife that way.” “There aren’t a lot of Black people in Cathedral Heights.”
“OK. How about animal rescue? You have four cats. Spend one Saturday a month cleaning litter boxes, maybe you’d meet a kind-hearted, animal-loving Black man that way.” “The big animal shelter is in one of the worst parts of DC and there’s no way I’m going in there.”
“Too many Black people?”
I feel bad for her. I’m very close friends with one of her very close friends so I keep up that way, and to our knowledge she’s never dated anyone, and we suspect she’s still a virgin. She’ll be 59 next month. She’s now down to two cats, having cycled through God knows how many overlapping cats over the years. The cats at least all lived very happy lives.
True enough. There is such a thing as “affirmative stereotyping” which is not as pernicious but still damaging. One of the most common examples is that Asian people work hard and are good at STEM. Well, what if you’re that Asian who works part-time at something meaningless and can’t balance a checkbook but you’re working away on the novel that will go on to win the Pulitzer in a couple of years? Better Half is tall (he’s 6’2″) and athletic and when people learn he got a private school athletic scholarship they assume it was for his basketball skills. It wasn’t; he played tennis in a semi-pro teen league. I also played tennis in high school and no one is surprised to learn that. He is a beautiful dancer though, another trait often ascribed to Black men, but so am (or was) I, which was its own source of astonishment when a hot dance hit came on and I showed the crowd what I was capable of.
You still owe me a dance lesson!
I can’t believe you remember that promise! That was before my leg started tingling, and my occasional use of a cane outside is starting to throw my spine off a little, but with a little rest I can still manage a simple box step.
Last weekend some jackass was blaring music out of his (no doubt stolen) Escalade and rather than sit and curse the darkness we decided to light a candle by throwing open the windows (it was a warm night for November) and dancing along. It wasn’t really mambo music but it was close enough, and it was slower so we did this but at half-pace.
PS: I took the female position, not out of subservience, but because I’m left-handed and it’s much easier for me to couple-dance that way than it is for Better Half, who is right-handed.
PPS: To tantalize you even further, one New Year’s Eve we went to this “fancy dress”/costume party. I dressed as a monk (great freedom of movement); Better Half went as Foxy Brown from the blaxploitation movies. For about a month beforehand we studied this video like medieval scholars translating fragments of the Bible out of Aramaic. Our hard work paid off once the host queued this song up, as we knew he would.
NOT ONLY THAT, our performance was video’d, and I had a copy, but my Mac Mini died and I never synched it up to the Cloud so I don’t have a copy anymore. I would post it and still remain anonymous because to complete our outfits I was going to wear a Mitt Romney mask and BH a Barack Obama mask, this was after the 2012 election, but at the last minute we decided to switch which made our outfits even more bewildering.
That would have been hilarious to see. I am now sad that it’s been lost to the ages!
That woman is adorable and I would watch her wash dishes, if that’s what she posted. Also, I love her sneakers.
@matthewcrawley I can’t believe you mentioned the female position! I responded, then quickly deleted out of fear that it was in poor taste, to your og offer a Freinds clip of Joey learning how to dance but as the female:
…and I just found the clip and remembered why I deleted it (it included fat-shaming)…
I am proud to say I have never in my life engaged in Black Friday shopping. I don’t believe there’s a deal that’s so good that it would convince me to stand in line for hours.
The one time I did it was to buy an $800 camera package for half price, for my son to take to Scotland the following semester. It was worth it.
Elmo seems to be establishing a pattern. When he says he won’t do something, that means he’s already decided to do it.
I read an interesting article about him that I can no longer find, but the thesis was that his other companies, Space X, et al., developed management layers as they grew that were devoted to keeping Elmo out of day-to-day operations. In contrast, he simply took over Twitter, and they never had a chance to develop those protective layers of management. His “management” of Twitter is unfettered Elmo, spewing out like a firehouse, and there’s nobody to intercede or protect the staff from his ignorance and stupidity. There’s also nobody to hide it from the general public.
That thesis resonated with me, since it’s such a common concept. How many times do you see it in actual companies? You’ve got an idiot who Peter Principled up to the top, and the idiot’s staff have to “manage up” to keep the moron from fucking things up?
I was that layer. I tried my best to keep the stupid off the production floor.
I’ve been that layer before too. I think that’s why I saw the article and thought, “Oh, yeah, makes total sense.”
I used to work at a company with a very strange management structure. There was a woman who was notionally in charge of everything and an absolute nutjob. On top of that, say that we did TV programming, which we didn’t. If we did, she would have been one of those people who didn’t watch TV, so divorced was she from the reality of what we were trying and needed to do. She was there for years, so we all assumed she had something on the CEO or something.
My boss didn’t report to her and therefore neither did I. My boss was about her equivalent and in a persuasively, brotherly way steered her away from the worst calamities, but we still suffered many. On occasion I would be deftly deployed to go directly to her boss, who we actually knew socially, or at least Better Half did, quite coincidentally. So I’d be taken out to a lavish lunch (I miss those expense accounts) and smoothly I’d discuss a list of talking points my boss and I had compiled to steer us away from the iceberg that this woman had created and was steering our little ship toward.
Finally the company was acquired and that woman was among the first to go. There was much rejoicing throughout Munchkinland.
That CNBC article about Binance — it’s another reminder that the business press is possibly even worse than the political press.
At the end it contains this little nugget “Crypto markets didn’t react significantly to the news. In the past hour, bitcoin
was up about 0.2%, while ether was trading flat for the session.”
Why didn’t market react? Because a billion dollar backstop is meaningless in the scale here, and the $50 million commitment from other players is even more piddling.
It’s just PR, and CNBC’s outsourced much of its reporting to just regurgitating corporate PR without bothering to apply any economic knowledge at all.
Pretty much. Worse than sports media because they actually affect so many people deeply as opposed to sports…
On top of that they hire failures or morons like Kevin O’Leary or Jim Cramer who are basically paid pitchmen who do it for “entertainment” purposes rather than educational.
As Cousin Matt has documented, the food media used to be really, really bad. Just a direct pipeline from Kraft and General Foods straight to print.
What’s interesting to me is in the past couple of decades there’s been a noticable move away, with people like Harold McGee, Anthony Bourdain, Alton Brown, America’s Test Kitchen and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt doing a deep dive on food. And not in a superficial contrarian Buzzfeed listicle way of top ten things you didn’t know about cheese, but making a good faith effort to report solid facts.
The demand is there for better coverage, but execs and management keep backsliding to serve up PR and old hacky tropes.
To be fair (to be fair) to those newspapers and magazines, the car and cigarette and food ads paid for the room that they gave to covering politics, sports, everything else. I dip into the Life magazine archive every so often
https://books.google.com/books/about/LIFE.html?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ
and keep in mind that Jell-O™ ad dollars were essentially paying for Henry Luce to warn my parents about the Soviet nuclear peril in the 1950s. Among other topics.
Better paying, easier (copy paste PR tropes) and less angry advertisers.
Instagram/YT/Ticktok Finance “influencers” have been getting bashed since FTX gave them millions to fluff that bomb which later exploded in their faces.
I know it is the kids trend these days but getting financial advise from TickTok or YT or Instagram does not sound like a good idea.