Your favorite podcast is back after a week’s hiatus to talk about Dr. Seuss, a quick romp through a couple weeks of news headlines, and another edition of America’s fifty-seventh highest rated podcast game show, Wack Shit or Wacky Shit. Listen! It’s for you!
Show Rundown
6:00 — Dr. Seuss Cancelled?!
21:26 — WGAS News!
24:38 — Congress voting access reform
38:34 — $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus/relief package
49:04 — Biden administration response to MBS murder of Khashoggi
54:43 — Virginia legislature sends death penalty abolition and marijuana legalization to the governor’s desk
58:33 — Texas lifts COVID restrictions with widespread vaccine access two months away
1:05:22 — Wack Shit or Wacky Shit, NFT Edition
Here’s the poem that opened today’s episode, since you were obviously asking for that:
“Here we are, Abe. Cast Iron Brains. A podcast…”
That we invented twice, first in twenty-oh-nine;
Neither virtue nor vice, mostly just asinine.
We read Twitter all day, endless hate and outrage,
It feeds something inside, can’t seem to disengage.
Hot takes and depraved trolls, deep fakes and worthless polls,
The rumors, the subtweets, the journos on woke beats,
Matters not where you go, there’s that creep Andy Ngo,
And Nikole Hannah-Jones, all right there in your phone!
Empathy for a fee, promoted GoFundMe’s,
The cancelled and the doxxed, the explainers from Vox!
Some celebs sing a song—no, that’s not what we meant,
When we said we must all / get along—not like that!
Sexworkers, freelancers, thought leaders, creators
Of gifs and youtube clips; and, oh! The meme-makers—
Oh the memes, memes, memes, memes! Hardly tell what they mean!
Nonsense in the extreme / there’s no meaning to glean!
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the memes memes memes memes!
From Substack to Quillette, New Yorker! Atlantic!
Slate and Drudge! Vice and HuffPo! The links come so frantic!
There’s no getting away, from these things in your pockets,
Be much better if you / gored your eyes from their sockets!
You click and you pull, nothing to break your fall,
Maybe a network lull, or a blessed paywall.
The feeds keep refreshing, the news is enmeshing,
Its claws ‘tween each synapse—
Blearily you unlock / that which has you in hock
On the verge of total collapse!
Toss the phone! Just smash it! It’s smoothing your brains!
‘Gainst the wall! It explodes! You’re free! Grab the reins!
But tomorrow you’ll forget, filled with FOMO and regret,
Plug in the old one, the one with the cracked screen,
Boot it up, tap your PIN / safely logged in again.
The Brain Iron has you, ‘neath its warm, friendly press—
Don’t fight it, it loves you, it’s what we call progress.
Here’s a link to a Google drive folder with all the “banned” Dr. Seuss books. I saved it to my cloud storage in case the original gets deleted. Read them and come to your own conclusions, I guess! The best one, and the one most inexplicably unacceptable, is McElligot’s Pool. Enjoy!
Here’s Don Jr. proudly showing off his copy of The Cat in the Hat with a decidedly awkward hold. Is he trying to cover up that he has the bilingual edition, or just that old familial trait of “Trumps not knowing how to hold books” coming through? Hard to say!
Here’s the Washington Post on what’s in Congress’ voting access bill HR - 1.
Georgia is among the many Republican-controlled states seeking to restrict access to voting in response to the 2020 election. Jimmy Carter has raised an objection.
Here’s the NYT on what’s in the COVID-stimulus bill set to pass Wednesday. Is it too big? Maybe! It’s probably not too small!
A declassified US intelligence report on the murder and dismemberment of Saudi-born and US-educated WaPo columnist Jamal Khashoggi makes plain the fact that Saudi “crown prince” Mohammed bin Salman was ultimately responsible for the plot. Here’s the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof on the Biden administration’s failure to hold MBS accountable.
The Virginia legislature passed legislation to legalize marijuana in the commonwealth in a couple of years. Ralph Northam could speed up the process with a stroke of the gubernatorial pen, though that’s unlikely.
In other VA legislature news, they’ve also sent death penalty abolition to the governor’s desk.
Texas has opened itself “100 percent.”
People are buying NBA highlights for thousands and thousands of dollars, because we live in a fallen world. But what is an NFT?
And, finally, the Nyan Cat sold at auction for more than half a million dollars. Why? See for yourself: