Extra Evil - Front Page Riot

Today’s Fortune: There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when you should sleep in.

Sep 27, 2023

Newsreel

Senator Menendez confessed to true love.

Refine your shutdown jokes now, it’ll get competitive.

I won a bet about Russell Brand.

Arctic sea ice is doing just as well as Antarctic sea ice.

WGA climbed to a deal over Bill Maher’s remains.

Amazon ruthlessly undermined competing antitrust lawsuit coverage.

Today's Mood

War Journal

In a Spirit Airlines line, one morality play unfolds twenty times. What is a personal item? What is an attendant’s duty, if any, to the species? Who would win a fistfight between a desperate passenger and sleep-deprived stewardess?

Bet on the stewardess. Poor strikers don’t last.

Wrestling fans appear surprised that skilled, loyal, and popular figures have been marched into the snow. Odd, considering the three strikes in the news. “As above, so below,” needs a variation: “As real, so kayfabe.”

I’m visiting my sister in North Carolina, where the dominant demographic is megachurch. Not megachurch attendees, the buildings themselves. I’ve seen more giant crosses on this trip than people. They stride over the land like untaxed titans.

Odds are I’m the problem. For the in-group, monuments provide hope. Or at least stable icons on a chaotic planet. But pleasing everyone’s impossible, and for the outgroup they’re confirmation bias layups. I can’t see a megachurch without wondering if it’s publicly traded, and if a little fiscal hypocrisy would send me to edgelord hell.

Either way, they remind me of my own history. Don’t follow my spiritual lead: if Baptists supported Mortal Kombat, premarital handholding, and letting people pick their divorce court partners, I’d probably have stuck around out of inertia. Who needs family drama, or direct glances at death? But saber-rattling fills the big buildings.

The best way to keep more dorks from turning out like me is banning Superman II. I saw Luthor’s obsession with land, the state of St. Anne churches vs. everything else, and morphed into a tiny high-pitched Carlin. The rest is holiday-ruining history.

An old riff:

Bboys only dress up as Spider-Man or Deadpool. It’s nerd law: once you learn half a windmill, you wake up in red spandex at Comic-Con. I don’t make the rules. The Wu-Tang clan does.

Why retell it? Because I want to do a meta-costume this Halloween. And it won’t make sense unless I ram this joke through every medium possible. I may buy sky-writers.