After Re-Downloading TikTok, I Have Slid Back Into Crazy Houseplant Plant Territory, So Get Psyched About All The Propagated Pothos I Shall Soon Inflict On Houseparty Hosts.
My lovelies! Lately, I’ve been binging episodes of ‘Ruined’, a podcast wherein one of the head writers for fav pod Lovett or Leave It recaps the plot lines of scary movies to her squeamish horror-curious co-host. And if that doesn’t sound like the aural comfort food your addled brain craves, remember that I looooooove thrilling movies, but must watch them in broad daylight with the sound down, closed captions on whilst concurrently reading the wikipedia page so I can feel control in knowing what will happen next and avoid a week-long bout of insomnia. Completely normal behavior, why do you ask?
INTERNETS ABOUND, LET’S CATCH ‘EM ALL
Oh, hey, y’all wanna nerd out on what goes on behind the scenes when a publication publishes an op-ed (because y’all are still always scrolling to find the bio of any opinion piece so you can ensure you’re reading it within the right media context, right? RIGHT?!?!)? ‘Behind the Scenes of Justice Alito’s Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal’ (ProPublica). And to answer the statement included towards the end of this piece (‘We leave it to the PR professionals to assess whether pre-buttals are an effective strategy’), I guess we have to presume the Justice’s goals of the exercise in order to judge the tactic’s efficacy. If the goal of the op-ed was a shortsighted first shot to get ahead and try and win a day-one battle of setting the initial news cycle and share of voice, sure, it technically did that. But if the goal of the prebuttal was to win the battle to tamp down any and all interest in the Justice’s actions, all in the hopes of preventing the story from becoming a sensation picked up around the world and transforming perception of the story into a nothingburger... welp, I once again point us all towards the Streisand effect on Wikipedia and remind us how sweet those traffic numbers must have looked like the day ProPublica published the actual article in question.
Considering that I firmly believe lawyers should not be able to represent themselves in legal matters, despite the fact that some seem to think that passing the bar means one absorbs the entire collective wisdom of the profession and is therefore imbued with a righteous intellectual infallibility no matter the type of law being practiced (yes, fine, I’ll take a couple of deep breaths), I am not at all surprised that a Jan 6 trial devolved into a self-represented defendant questioning his own son: ‘Jan. 6 defendant, representing himself, questions son who turned him into the FBI’ (NBCNews) And btw, major credit to the son for speaking the truth to his own father: “What you guys did today was treason and a homeland security threat ... Everyone there should be locked up for the rest of their lives, including you.”
This is definitely a privileged problem to have solved, but one of the best updates of late to delivery apps was the identification of non-restaurant restaurants in search results (see: virtual restaurants, ghost kitchens, etc.) And now, ‘Uber Eats is Purging 5,000 Ghost Kitchens’ (RetailWire) after The New York Post found that ‘Your favorite takeout joint is actually a catfishing scam — and it’s totally legal’, with one deli in NYC posing as 27(!!!) different eateries across delivery apps.
And finally, Mum of the Missive would like to remind all of your to take your vacation days, mmmkay? And actually unplug, alright?!? It’s good for you and the rest of us: ‘The toxic workplace trait that's costing employees money and burning them out’ (National Post). BTW, this comes from a Canadian national publication, so Americans should assume that the problem is 13x worse on this side of the 49th parallel.
That’s it, that’s all! You know you gotta drink some water, get outside, take a deep breath and be kind to yourself, yes?
xoxo Amy