Hello and happy Friday, my friends!
I’m sorry but…it seems like we’re all just supposed to believe it’s September now? Personally, I disagree. My brain cannot compute that the football season has started or that it’s been almost a YEAR since we moved back to Chicago from California. Nope!
This week’s been busy (shocker) as I’ve been trying to cram five days’ worth of work into four days. I enjoyed the long weekend, though — I did manage to get caught up on some TV (not quite enough, but some!). And on Monday, I celebrated the Labor Day holiday like a red-blooded American and watched two men eat as many hot dogs as they could in 10 minutes.
They may have taken Joey away from us on the 4th of July, but he hath returned to us on the 2nd of September. 🙌🏻
The whole competition was utterly disgusting in all the right ways (men looking like they were going to barf at any moment, water running down their shirts, the people managing the competition wiping up all the mushy bits that fell out of their mouths into a dustpan to confirm they didn’t drop an entire hot dog’s weight worth of mush), and Joey ended up eating EIGHTY (80) hot dogs in 10 minutes1.
He got a trophy, a belt, and then I guess spent the rest of his day tooling around the Vegas Strip with eighty hot dogs inside him.
Oh and hey — check Joey’s sleeve — he’s got a sponsor! Let’s see who it is:
Oh great, DUMPkin spice has returned to haunt me again!!
That’s it. Dude Wipes, you have made an enemy of me this day.
On that note, let’s get on in to the goods from the week.
Karma’s a relaxing thought
Interesting.
Could have anything to do, karmically, with the Mayor’s animosity toward rats?? I mean, I don’t think we can prove that it doesn’t. Which, scientifically, is enough for us to call karma a theory…
Wonder if the FBI has found itself…a rat.
Just let them have their trash, and nobody gets hurt.
Space…the frightful frontier
As you’re probably aware by now, two astronauts have been stranded on the International Space Station after the Boeing Starliner (banner year for these guys, eh?) they went up in was deemed unsafe for use, and they’re currently stuck waiting for a ride back down to Earth.
Well, this week, the ISS reached out for help as there was a weird noise coming out of the busted ship. Take a listen to this (thanks to The Guardian for this embeddable YT video):
AHAHA! Abso-fucking-lutely not.
This is a horror film. The two day trip becomes more than six months, and now the ship is doing this? Okay M. Night Shyamalan. Come on out.
If you’ve been here a while, you’re familiar with how I feel about the ocean (bad, no, don’t go in there, no reason for it). It will likely come as no surprise that I feel the same way about space.
It’s literally the exact same thing: big creepy rocks, no oxygen, maybe even weird animals we just haven’t seen yet!! We do not need to go there! There’s simply no reason for it. Just let it do whatever it’s gonna do while we stay down here where there’s Chipotle and macaroni and cheese.
Why would anyone want to go to a place where they can’t wash their hair or take a normal dump and they have to exercise or they’ll be all fucked up when they get home? Nightmare.
Anyway, the ship is supposed to return to Earth on Saturday, un-crewed. And you’d think: well, that’s good. It’ll get back and get repaired, and being empty is probably a good idea just in case the door flies off on the way down, right?
Except…what if…something’s in there? You can’t convince me that noise is just some “pinging speaker.” We could be offering a space monster a chartered flight down to our planet this weekend. No big deal!! Just something normal to think about when you wake up in a cold sweat at 3AM. You’re welcome!
Pain de lumière
Don’t worry, this isn’t about the torture of the candelabra from Beauty & The Beast.
This gal got a croissant-shaped lamp from Temu from her sisters as a gift, and returned the next day to find a bunch of ants crawling around underneath it. She started to wonder if it could actually be bread, and…well, I’ll let you see for yourself.
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So uh, yeah — heads up that your cute li’l lamp might just be a resin-covered pastry with a light in it!! Also, if you suspect your cheap lamp is bread (and it really probably is actually bread), I do not recommend trying a piece of it. Even for science.
Good read(s)
I enjoyed this interesting piece from GQ about a vigilante whistleblower Batman who has made a career out of being rewarded for helping gather evidence against fraudsters. We love an unconventional king!
And for a laugh but also what feels like extremely accurate analysis, take a look through Brian Frange’s Apple Rankings for gems like this:
I currently have a bag of Honeycrisps in my fridge, which he ranks at a 95/100 — second only to the SweeTango, which I have actually never tried but will totally buy next time I see one.
Randomly selected animal cutie
Red panda. Red grapes. Little tiny smacks. What’s not to like??
That’s it from me this week! I’m off to finish up the rest of my work (digging through Twitter and perusing TikTok, hehe) for the day, at which point I’ll move to the couch where I’ll lay like a slug for the rest of the night. Have a good weekend!
K
At the end of the 10 minutes they were given an additional 30 seconds to finish chewing and subsequently swallow anything left in their mouths. Anything remaining went into the mush dustpan.
Red pandas will never not look like they were created by Pixar to me.