If you think that Donald “Orange Julius Caesar” Trump is the first person to turn politics in the United States into a farce featuring fifth-grade insults, bullying, and all-round terrible behavior, you’re wrong. Here’s Adam Conover to run over a quick list of history’s Trumps and forever change the way you say “LBJ”:
Click the screenshot to see it at full size.
The undeserved court victory of Ammon Bundy and his thugs has been parodied in a Craiglist ad with the headline 3br – 1600ft2 – Malheur Wildlife Refuge for Rent – $0/month, no deposit!
The Bundys, a.k.a. yet another case of white people getting away with crazy shit.
I think the ad will get taken down soon, so I’m reproducing its for posterity:
Quaint, stone cottage in beautiful, country setting! 3 bed, 1 bath (3 if you count 2 latrines dug out by our last tenants) with spacious patio and breathtaking views!
Comes fully furnished with some chairs and maps, and over 4,000 sacred Native-American artifacts! No deposit necessary so don’t worry about the artifacts (our last tenants didn’t)!
Tenants recently moved – Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is AVAILABLE NOW!
Call FBI to schedule viewing! If no one is there for the open house you can probably just stay.
Rent is $0/month!
No deposit!All races welcome to apply! But can only guarantee safety for you-know-which-one (wink-wink).
cats – ok
dogs – ok
standoffs w/ FBI – you’re an adult
If you’d like some amusing background noise to help you finish off the final hours of the Friday workday, you might want to play this 3.5 hour ad featuring Andy Daly reading all insults directed toward Laphroaig single malt whiskey from its #OpinionsWelcome campaign on Twitter. I’m amazed it even got green-lighted:
For more on how the ad got made, there’s a story about it on AdWeek.
Laphroaig isn’t for everyone. If all your preference is for Glenlivet, Laphroaig is on the other end of the whisky flavor map, which is probably why a number of people liken it to tasting like “a burning hospital”:
Click the flavor map to see it at full size.
Looking at Nate Gowdy’s photo from the Trump rally in Loveland, Colorado, I feel the need to point out a couple of quotes:
“Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities.”
— Khan Shoieb, How Trumpism Threatens Silicon Valley, October 20, 2016
Of course, the practice of appropriating or big footing an identity slogan like “Black Lives Matter,” especially to trash it, is an automatic fuck you. What makes a phrase like this so scintillating to the haters, and so toxic to everyone else, however, has to do with every other meaning it dredges up. The first and most inflammatory one that comes up for me is the most literal one. That’s the reference to (or “the matter of”) guns out there in the hands of blacks. Along those lines, it incorporates the racist stereotype of violent black dudes and how the white man, with his family to protect, can’t just sit there idle. … As if “WHITE GUNS DON’T.”
— Reading the Pictures, Trump Rally Wear Update: Black Guns Matter, October 27, 2016
Pete Burns in the mid-1980s.
Another artist who provided the soundtrack from my wonderfully misspent youth is no longer with us: Pete Burns, lead vocalist of the ’80s synthpop band Dead or Alive, died at age 57 from a cardiac arrest on Sunday.
He’s probably best known for Dead or Alive’s biggest hit, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), from the album Youthquake, which was released in 1985…
…and covered to great effect in the opening sequence of Adam Sandler’s 1998 film, The Wedding Singer:
Dead or Alive tunes found their way onto many a mixtape that got played in the Deathmoble — my car of that era, a Volvo 245 DL station wagon, named after the car in Animal House — like the one pictured below:
This isn’t my car from the ’80s, but it could be its stunt double.
Again, not my car’s interior, but very, very close.
I’ll close this Pete Burns tribute with another favorite from Youthquake — In Too Deep. Requiescat in pace, Pete, and thanks for all the tunes.
For those of you who think that Jell-O brand gelatin doesn’t taste overly sugary and artificial enough, Jolly Rancher has you covered.
For the curious, here’s a review of Jolly Rancher gelatin on the Food Junk blog.
My second-last text was “Landed in Tampa!”. What was yours?