What's Good: Apr. 23, 2021

A milkshake duck, ice cream, and burgers.

Apr 23, 2021

Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine! Yesterday I was pretty much down for the count - I had a headache while I was awake, and I was only awake for about six hours total. But I feel much better today, and, obviously, I’m fucking vaccinated! It feels incredible, I am thrilled.

I think the thing I am looking forward to most about being vaccinated is reconnecting with people who have fallen out of my life - either over the last year because of covid, or even before that. It feels like a good opportunity to get back in touch with people, and to try to build something hopeful out of a time of such hardship. Or maybe I am just sentimental because of Sam’s speech in the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that I watched this morning, who knows.

Also, I cannot wait to pet dogs again.

Weed man good

Yes, yes, it was 4/20 this week. I did not partake, but I did make sure to bookmark this delightful interview of Seth Rogen, please enjoy:

Seth Rogen’s home sits on several wooded acres in the hills above Los Angeles, under a canopy of live oak and eucalyptus trees strung with outdoor pendants that light up around dusk, when the frogs on the grounds start croaking. I pulled up at the front gate on a recent afternoon, and Rogen’s voice rumbled through the intercom. “Hellooo!” He met me at the bottom of his driveway, which is long and steep enough that he keeps a golf cart up top “for schlepping big things up the driveway that are too heavy to walk,” he said, adding, as if bashful about coming off like the kind of guy who owns a dedicated driveway golf cart, “It doesn’t get a ton of use.”

Milkshake duck ice cream truck

Just about every ice cream truck in the United States plays the same song, and I am sure you have heard it hundreds of times. Ice cream truck season will soon be upon us once again, and I regret to inform you that the song is virulently racist. So racist, in fact, that much of the article I am linking to about it does not bear excerpting. Also, this is a content warning - the slurs present in the song are repeated in the article. Anyway, sorry to ruin your childhood or whatever, but here is the article.

And this is the story of why our beloved ice cream truck plays blackface minstrel music that sends kids dashing into homes in a Pavlovian frenzy searching for money to buy a Popsicle.

Maybe ask your local ice cream truck to play a different song?1

Gazeboland

I recently started watching (and tweeting about) Gilmore Girls, a show that I missed when it first aired but am thoroughly enjoying nonetheless, all these years later. It turns out that a lot of people have been watching it during the pandemic! Although most of them are rewatching it, obviously. Anyway I read this nice post about how it brought a family together and I thought you would enjoy it:

One of my daughters likes to be frightened; the other cannot stand to worry.
The one who craves fear is 12: She swallows police procedurals whole, lobbies to watch Stephen King movies and takes refuge in Harry Potter audiobooks. Her sister, who is 7, is happiest with “Baby Boss” and a French cartoon called “Miraculous,” about Marinette, a superhero ladybug. She likes things that tie up nicely.
So even before our strange pandemic year of isolation, finding common television fare was near impossible. We avoided conflict, mostly, because huge chunks of time were — and remain — unnaturally divided. Orli, the 12-year-old, has spent many days in the hospital over the past 15 months, receiving chemotherapy, or suffering its aftereffects, or recovering from surgeries, of which there have been seven, of varying complexity. In the hospital, Orli watched “9 to 5” and “Working Girl” with me and binged on terror with my partner, her father, Ian. Back at home her sister, Hana, watched “Sing!” (on repeat) and “The InBESTigators,” an Australian Netflix series about a crew of mystery-solving kids.
Still, fortunately, we are together enough that I am often in search of something for us all to watch as a family, a refuge from Zoom school and pathogens, hospitals and worry, and treatments worse than illnesses, not to mention the regular, frustrating encroachments of never-ending video games the girls play for hours on end. We all need means of staving off continued Covid-induced boredom. I wanted us to engage with some of it together.
But three-quarters of the way through the pandemic, we had run dry. Then I remembered “Gilmore Girls.”

Gone fishing

We all love a good catfishing story, right? Right:

On Monday night, NBA Twitter was engulfed in a bizarre mystery featuring a Lakers podcast host that went missing which led to some wild catfishing allegations. The story is complex and has several twists and turns but I’ll try my best to give a quick breakdown of the entire situation.

Soft serve, cold war

We also all love a good corporate espionage story, and this one involves McDonald’s ice cream machines:

OF ALL THE mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.
Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.
“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu," O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.
As O’Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner’s manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines that are standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the US and tens of thousands more worldwide. And this opaque user-unfriendliness is far from the only problem with the machines, which have gained a reputation for being absurdly fickle and fragile. Thanks to a multitude of questionable engineering decisions, they’re so often out of order in McDonald’s restaurants around the world that they’ve become a full-blown social media meme. (Take a moment now to search Twitter for “broken McDonald’s ice cream machine” and witness thousands of voices crying out in despair.)

I promise I did not plan for this week to include so much ice cream content. But what a trip, right?

ACAB

I have two stories in the 1312 category for you this week. First, a ProPublica investigation about criminal cops who avoid jail for their crimes:

When New Jersey lawmakers sought advice about police accountability, one of the power players they turned to was Sean Lavin, a police union leader.
Lavin testified before state senators at a July hearing, where he questioned whether civilians are qualified to serve on police oversight boards, and suggested that chokeholds might sometimes be warranted. He also argued against releasing the names of officers who have been disciplined.
“It’s a public shaming to their families,” said Lavin, executive director of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council. “I don’t see the value in that, and I don’t think there is one.”

Second, a piece examining how communities with higher gun circulation result in more shootings, both by and of police:

The effort to reimagine public safety has to contend with two crises: a crisis of police legitimacy and a crisis of urban gun violence.
The first crisis is visible to the entire nation, especially as videos of police violence have proliferated and the trial of Derek Chauvin captures national attention.
The full scale of the second crisis is only now becoming visible, but it has been building for six years. After 2014, the safest year in the modern history of the United States, gun violence rose gradually but steadily. Then, in 2020, it skyrocketed. Along with Alisabeth Marsteller and Yinzhi Shen, I have collected and analyzed data on violence for the 100 largest cities in the United States. The change since 2014 is sobering.

I don’t have a unifying point to make here, I just thought both were really interesting.

Too racist for racists

One recent phenomenon is that some extremely hard-right politicians have been leaning into using the phrase “Anglo-Saxon,” seemingly without understanding what it means. But even funnier than the ahistorical nature of their racism is that it has managed to finally identify what the Republican party considers to be too racist:

Last week, far-right Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar distanced themselves from a proposal to create an America First Caucus, after a document bearing the group’s name made reference to “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”
Both Greene and Gosar told the press that they hadn’t seen the document and did not endorse its sentiments, after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy condemned the effort, saying that America “isn’t built on identity, race, or religion,” and rejecting “nativist dog whistles.”
If seeing the party of Donald Trump distance itself from nativism is strange, it helps to understand that “Anglo-Saxon” is what you say when “whites only” is simply too inclusive.

Oh, word, McCarthy? I think this is news to a lot of your voters! You should tell them!

Midbest

I have had In-N-Out. It is fine. It is a serviceable burger, getting the sauce all over everything is fun, there is something to be said for the experience. But if we are going to engage in any kind of reasonable Burger Discourse, there is a harsh truth that west coast folks need to face:

Takeout contributor Danny Palumbo recently wrote about how the fries at beloved West coast burger chain In-N-Out are very bad. Those are his words, not mine. These are now my words, not his: The fries at In-N-Out are bad. I still eat them, though, usually animal-style (mostly out of novelty, and yes, I know, I know, the fries get weird when the cheese starts cooling off, but I’m well aware of what I’m getting into).
I get the obsession with In-N-Out. The burgers are awesome, and I love my Double-Doubles, animal-style. If I’m in an area that has an In-N-Out, I’ll do my best to drop by. It’s a solid place. But there are great burger places a lot closer to home, too, and I started to wonder: does the Midwest have a spiritual analogue to In-N-Out, something we can only get here, and which is special to us in the same way as Californians embrace In-N-Out? After doing some soul-searching I came to a conclusion. The answer is yes: We’ve got Culver’s.

Culver’s is fucking great. Here is a lovely video of Craig Culver. (They filmed this bit for commercials in 2018, which is why no one is wearing masks.)