#49 I'm not a celebrity, get me out of here

Actual updates

The first and most important thing is that I have to move off this platform.

The founder and CEO wants it to be a haven for Nazis - he’s happy to host them (and take their money!) and when people object, he says that he doesn’t care for their views but taking their platform away would in some way make them worse. This is an asinine argument and nobody with any sense puts any stock in it; they don’t allow sex workers to post adult content on here, after all, so does deplatforming someone only work for some people but not for others? Of course not. They just don’t mind at all if hate is promulgated here1.

The thing is, this isn’t the thin edge of the wedge with these guys. They already floated their test balloon, and it was platforming people who posted anti-trans hate2. They used the same excuses - oh, but free speech, oh, but if you shut them down they get worse - but I haven’t noticed anti-trans hate speech decreasing because of the platforming of TERFs by this website, have you?

At that time, some people left; other people, including some trans folks whose opinions I respect a great deal, tried to stick it out and a) pressure Substack to take their terms of service seriously while also b) getting paid3. So I figured, well, I couldn’t act like I was holier than people directly impacted by this4, and if it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for me; that was an error then, and it’s still one now.

The one thing that’s hampering me is that everyone else wants to either charge me, or make me charge you. I don’t want to do either of those things! If I was operating on a subscription model and made money on this newsletter (lol, can you imagine?) I could see my way to paying for a service for it, but I’m not and I won’t. Once I’ve got a spot that will let me charge no money and in turn charge me no money, I’ll transfer the whole works over, including your subscriptions, and you won’t have to resubscribe or pay any attention5 to the machine that’s making it work.

With that out of the way, do you want to know what’s going on and what’s been going on?

So, in mid-December, my dad came to visit. The day after he went home, I tested positive for Covid; I let him know, and he tested and found himself to be positive too (and my mom came down with it shortly afterwards). Whether he brought it to me, or I gave it to him, or we both got it together from someone else, I have no idea, but I felt terrible. I had barely seen him this trip, and I had dragooned him into babysitting while Matt and I went out and stayed out super late one night, and then he went home sick. At least it wasn’t too bad, either for me or for them. I definitely felt worse the first time I had it, a year and a half ago, even though this time I actually accomplished having a fever (if only a slight one).

But what’s really something is that neither Matt or Hap caught it from me. We were careful; we masked up around each other; I slept in the spare room and we didn’t eat together. I would take off my mask behind closed doors or when everyone else was out of the house. I waited until Matt was putting Hap to bed to fix myself something to eat, and bolt it down like a rodent, hoping he wouldn’t come down early. It was hard, but it worked.

The day before Christmas, I tested negative. That evening, Hap came down with a fever.

Despite testing negative throughout, he kept that fever, on and off, and eventually accompanied by cold symptoms, for about a week. Was it Covid? Was it something else? Who knows. This is a kid who loves a fever, so he could have gotten one for any little illness, but the timing is awfully suspect for it to be totally unrelated. Besides, once I was well, he spent a large proportion of his sick time on me, and I haven’t caught a thing. Seems like the kind of thing that would happen if I had already had what he had. But he’s getting better - the fever’s been gone for a couple of days, and he’s just got a lingering runny nose. So whatever it was, it’s on its way out, I guess.

It’s also January now, and that means people are making resolutions. I don’t really do that, or not in any major way, but I’ve made an internet-handshake deal with a dear pal (hello, dear pal!) that we will both submit more of our writing to contests or publications or what have you this year. I’ve done that exactly once, if you don’t count the poem I got published6 in some brochure-looking maglet back in high school, and even then I think a teacher submitted it for me.

But I actually already heard about one magazine that’s taking submissions right now, and what’s more, every other month (so, January, March, May, etc) they restrict submissions to only people of color and/or LGBTQ+ folks, which is great even if I didn’t live in one of those categories. I’ve also read their latest issue and it’s full of really cool stories, so I would be pretty impressed with myself if I succeeded on this one. Check it out here! I’m not done writing the story I’m going to send in yet, but if you’d be interested in reading it once I am done, let me know. Of course, if it gets accepted, I’m going to push it into your face nonstop, so… keep that under consideration, I guess.

What am I reading right now

I’m reading the possibly-controversial(?)7 Anthony Bourdain biography by longtime director on his shows, Tom Vitale. The book is called In the Weeds, and I’m only far enough in as yet to see it discuss Bourdain’s death and their first episode of Parts Unknown for CNN, in which they went to Burma.

I’m guessing the controversiality is in terms of talking about him as someone who was kind of shitty sometimes - which doesn’t seem out of line with the things he used to write about his own self, but may have been out of line with the person fans had constructed for themselves in their heads. The Cool Bad Boy Chef might swear a lot and have hot takes about restaurants, but he wouldn’t slam a door in a PA’s face, or pitch a fit because something wasn’t the way he wanted it, surely? But of course he could, and did. Also I hear he got way into tanning and fitness at some point in his life, which is kind of embarrassing, and I don’t know if this book is going to mention that.

I suspect one thing that’s going to come up, possibly in a controversial way, is Asia Argento - her relationship with Bourdain was not universally beloved, and so far she has been mentioned only by someone else, blaming her for his death, in a bar while they were mourning. I feel like she was mentioned as a kind of Chekhov’s Girlfriend - it seems unlikely to make a point of mentioning that someone in the bar blamed her and then never talk about her, or why they would blame her, again. So we’ll see what comes up later in the book.

Some links

I had no idea the Boston Light was manned by a woman who dressed in old-timey clothes! Well, not anymore, I guess. A Lighthouse Keeper Hangs Up Her Bonnet

Believe it or not, yet another white guy who thought it was his business to go and try to influence another country’s politics! And yet another good reason not to adorn your home with this particular flower. The Thorny History of the Poinsettia’s Namesake

The funny thing to me is that this vase is hideous. Woman Gets Over $100K for Vase Bought at Goodwill for $3.99

I know this guy is someone who has made “bon vivant” his actual job description, so the fake funeral his friends threw him was over-the-top, but I don’t know, I kind of like this. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to attend the party where everyone talks about how much they love you? Plus side, you could get the whole funeral thing out of everyone’s system, so when you do kick off, they can just go on with their lives. When Your Friends Throw You a Fake Funeral

I realize it is now January but look at these batshit Christmas cards anyway. Shock of the Old: 11 Murderous and Macabre Victorian Christmas Cards

I never watched Melrose Place - it started when I was 10, but I wasn’t a big tv watcher even when I was in the right age bracket to be watching - but after reading this, I kind of wish I had. This is amazing. One of the Most Audacious Pranks in History Was Hidden in a Hit TV Show for Years. Not Everyone Found It Funny

I have not lived in the right market to have heard this jingle, but I watched the video of the ad, and I get why it was stuck in everyone’s head, and why everyone exposed to it will remember it until they die. This is kind of pleasantly bananas. A Jingle That Will Not Die

This isn’t. B.J. Novak seems like the kind of guy who made podcasts so annoying: someone who thinks they have an idea that everyone needs to listen to, but there’s no substance to it and it doesn’t say anything, really, but they’ve either never been told to shut up, or they’ve never been told to shut up by someone they actually had to listen to. B.J. Novak’s Chain Food Fest is Hard to Digest

Okay. I never had a Cabbage Patch doll. I wanted one desperately when I was about 6 or 7, but my parents weren’t about to splash out Cabbage Patch money on a toy. Now, finding out they all came with these overwrought names, I wish I had had one even more. Every single one of these names sounds like someone who died of galloping consumption in a 19th-century novel. The Absolute Unhinged Joy of a Cabbage Patch Kid Name

I teared up a bit reading this interview? Obviously this is for the REM fans among you, but it’s also just a fascinating portrait of how this man’s mind works, which is something that resonated a lot with me. And also it has a scene of two big annoying names in the current music world who come off like pretentious toolsheds, which I found pretty satisfying. Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

This one also had me in tears. It’s the story of a whale who was kidnapped from her pod - there’s no other way to describe it - to be sent to an aquarium thousands of miles away, and how her life went after that, and how she affected the humans who passed through her orbit in one way or another. The Call of Tokitae

It turns out that there’s more than one side to the battle to reduce our fossil fuel dependency, and a lot of them are also kind of not great! We’ve really painted ourselves into a corner: the problems are bad, and the things that were supposed to help fix/mitigate the problems are also bad, just in a different way. In the Swedish Arctic, a Battle for the Climate Rages

I was not aware that there were “romance scams” - where someone first catfishes a lonely mark, but then strings them along for months or years and gets them to send a lot of money for various reasons. This is kind of heartbreaking, actually. To Catch a Catfish

Speaking of love. This is about the movies. As far as I know, it is not about real life8. Whither the horn? Whither the horn?? Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny

Imagine being an actor struggling to get jobs that pay the bills, watching your cohorts strike it big, and then… landing a gig that goes on for 15 years. Everybody Knows Flo from Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

This does not sit right with me for a lot of reasons, and I bet all of those reasons immediately occurred to you as well. A Famed Hospital Churns Patients Through Weight-Loss Surgery

What if the most important event of your life, the thing that defined your family, happened when you were too young to remember it? Piecing Together My Father’s Murder

This is an interesting piece about women-only communes; they had a moment, and now they’re largely full of older women, escaping both from men and the modern world. You might worry, as I did, that this is going to go to a TERF-y place, and the author is clear-eyed about the fact that some of these women (and some of the communes as a whole) do indeed exclude trans women - but that’s not a given, it turns out, to my surprise. Who Wants to Live on Women’s Land?

I actually bet old folks’ homes are hotbeds of romance! I’d imagine being widowed (or… widowered? Do you still say “widowed” when it’s a man? Anyway) is one of the main reasons old folks might move out of their house and into a seniors’ home. And just because your body is getting older doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity to fall in love! Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Listen, I’m just glad articles like this are giving women their due and calling her a “master” rather than pussyfooting around with words and acting like that’s only reserved for men. The painting itself doesn’t knock my socks off on content - I’m never going to be a “painting of a bowl of flowers” guy - but obviously she had the chops to be listed among the great talents of the age, so I’m glad we’re doing that now. See the Rediscovered Still Life by Forgotten 17th-Century Master Clara Peeters

I feel like I don’t know enough about Maria Callas and I feel like I should. She was fascinating as a person, and tragic, and of course blindingly talented. This article helped me be slightly less ignorant. Maria Callas Was Opera’s Defining Diva. She Still Is

Some tunes I’ve been listening to lately

I was in a heavy Sonic Youth phase at the start of the month. This caused all my recommendations to be more of them, and also all of their peers, which - okay. That’s not going to be bad, but you don’t have to recommend me all the exact same stuff I’m already listening to! Branch me out a little9! I thought that was the point!

I had such a hard time tracking this song down. It was on a tape a friend made me back in college, but he wrote out the tracklist as part of a little story, so the song titles weren’t always quite exactly right, and I couldn’t find out who it was by - until today. Bingo bango, here we go. The band name makes it seem like this is going to be a joke song, and hoo boy, is it ever not.

The problem with the end of the year is that a lot of what I’m listening to is stuff on lists that encompass the whole year, and as such, necessarily have already appeared this year. I found one that didn’t, though! Have some gay Providence rock ‘n’ roll!

This month’s top 5: Good activities to do when you are sick

1. Watch bad tv10

2. Feel sorry for yourself

3. Get someone else to do your chores for you and feel a little bit bad about this but not very

4. Kinda mail it in at work (from home, obviously! I am not condoning Bring Your Germs to Work Day!)

5. If you are my dad, go on a 31km bike ride… twice. I come from normal people

Okay - so again, let me know if you have a line on a newsletter platform that is free and doesn’t require you to charge your readers (Ghost costs money; Buttondown is only free if you are charging your subscribers, since otherwise they have to make money off you somehow, etc), and crucially, isn’t evil. This seems like a low bar to clear but evidently I’m asking a whole lot!