Big year for beverages // What's Good: Jan. 19, 2024
Cups, fish, and the rat hole.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. It was too cold this week. My hands are all dry. I am very tired. I had a nice end to the week, but good lord. Also, the Reacher finale is great. Give me season 3 now please. Also also, Echo was fantastic.
Long live the Rat Hole
Let me catch you up:
ROSCOE VILLAGE — Neighbors and fans of the “Chicago Rat Hole” rushed to save the city’s newest attraction after someone tried to cover it up Friday.
NBC5 reported the rat-shaped sidewalk hole near near 1918 W. Roscoe St. was filled in with a “concrete-like material.”
It’s not clear who has a problem with the rat hole and doesn’t want us to have nice things, but Lakeview neighbor Johnathan Howell grabbed his license plate and went to work digging out the hole, NBC Sports’ Alex Shapiro reported. Other neighbors joined in, using other small tools to help.
The hole has since been restored. It has become an internet sensation. I hope it doesn’t get milkshake ducked.
Genre expressionism
What’s going on with music? The internet, kind of:
A 16-year-old from Argentina is blowing up with the most puerile plugg rap ever produced. AgusFortnite2008’s deeply overwhelming aesthetic teeters between creative and corny (think Chief Keef worship, graphics that look like diseased MrBeast thumbnails). He cites montage parodies, a video format made by defacing cartoons and video games by editing an hour’s worth of rainbow flashes and memes into every frame, as sonic inspiration. “Some 30-year-old man listens to one of my songs and kills himself,” AgusFortnite2008 joked to me over the phone. “They don’t understand the distortion, the references. It’s a generational appeal.” As someone who obsessively consumed and created montage parodies in high school, my brain nearly broke hearing him explain the way his style takes cues from shitposty internet culture.
And, unfortunately, speaking of Pitchfork:
ON JAN. 17, media conglomerate Condé Nast revealed that it would be laying off staff at the online music publication Pitchfork and merging the website with men’s magazine GQ. “Today we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization,” wrote Anna Wintour, chief content officer at the venerable company that also publishes The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, in a memo to staffers that was first reported by Semafor and obtained by Rolling Stone. After 28 years and countless album reviews — scored, with mock-scientific precision, on Pitchfork’s signature 0.0 to 10.0 scale — the music-criticism source that came of age with the internet had suffered its first major setback. The site isn’t over (as of now, its future under GQ is unsure), but on social media, voices from around the music journalism sphere mourned it like it was.
What happens to good cops
A red Mazda sped past a police officer’s unmarked car stationed at a tree-lined Staten Island intersection. The officer inside, Mathew Bianchi, clocked the Mazda at well over the limit and prepared to make a stop at a nearby streetlight. But the car blew through a red light. Bianchi turned on his siren.
Behind the wheel was a woman in her late teens or early 20s. As Bianchi began to explain why he had stopped her, she handed him a card.
Comedy is legal again on Twitter
Twitter recently lost one of its premier chaos agents: Jaboukie Young-White, the ace comic responsible for maybe the best single act of trolling in the hellsite’s history.
The Illinois native attracted a large social media following in the 2010s thanks to his Instagram posts and tweets brimming with sardonic wit and diablerie. He was branded “gloriously extra” (BuzzFeed’s words), featured on Rolling Stone’s 25 Under 25 list, wrote for Big Mouth and American Vandal, and spent a few years as a Daily Show correspondent. And then it happened: In 2020, on Martin Luther King Day, Young-White changed his Twitter avatar and name to the FBI and tweeted, “Just because we killed MLK doesn’t mean we can’t miss him.” His account was temporarily banned, but that only made his legend grow. It was eventually reinstated, only to get banned a couple of months later when he imitated CNN Breaking News to mock Joe Biden.
War of the cups
That’s right, we’re arguing about beverage containers:
Dahlia hasn’t always been this popular. Last school year, she’d been the new girl at her Dallas middle school, where she mostly flew under the radar.
Then, this year, she got a Stanley cup — and everything changed.
“Every day when I get into school at like 7:45 a.m., everybody comes over to me like, ‘Oh my God, I like your Stanley!’ or ‘It’s so cool, I want a Stanley just like yours!’” the 13-year-old, who is in eighth grade, said. “It makes me feel like I’m famous and being swarmed by paparazzi.”
Something fishy
Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t resist:
Fishwife, a company that sells whimsically illustrated tins of smoked salmon, sardines, and albacore tuna, was a hit with media elite and online hypebeasts from almost the moment it launched in December 2020.
Cofounders Rebecca Millstein and Caroline Goldfarb landed a profile in Vogue on December 2, and a slew of media appearances followed, from writeups in The New York Times to a tastefully muted photo shoot in Condé Nast Traveller under the headline "Meet the Women Making Tinned Fish Cool." In an interview with NYLON in 2021, Goldfarb declared: "Tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food," leading to a wave of trend stories about what was and wasn't "hot girl food."
Behold the wine
First we covered meme beverage containers, now for meme beverages:
The wines of Josh Cellars sit comfortably in the $12 to $25 range. They run the gamut of all popular varietals—pinot noir, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc—and the company’s bottles are mass-produced and widely distributed, to the point that you could likely find them incubating in a Target or a CVS. In both accessibility and reliability, Josh Cellars occupies the same terrain of other mid-tier national brands, like Yellow Tail or Jam Jar. But unlike those other vintners, Josh has recently been immortalized by a wave of mildly caustic memes. The root of the joke is in the name: Here is a stately cream-colored label, emblazoned on a gorgeous glass bottle, bearing a single word rendered in frilly cursive: Josh.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/NationalZoo/status/1748478780820091225
https://twitter.com/catshouldnt/status/1748339109280518454
https://twitter.com/TweetsOfCats/status/1748306059758866471
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1748515606955999292
https://twitter.com/CapybaraCountry/status/1748459999444299809
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1748454650494304655
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1748412527359164557
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Chicago-area man who sued women for badmouthing him on dating site convicted days later of tax fraud involving mob-connected sweepstakes kiosks. White House cancels $5 billion in student debt for 74K borrowers. How Boeing’s Corporate Culture Started to Rot. Trump's Truth Social kept losing money in Q3 2023.