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Leopards ate my face

This week I caved and looked up what "leopards ate my face" means and ended up on the Wikipedia article for Turkeys Voting For Christmas." The particular leopard-related version of this idiom is sourced to a tweet from 2015 (!!) in which the user posted, "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party." Great, now I know. My online experience will surely be more robust and fulfilling as a result.

A thing I am thinking about a lot is a fable about a scorpion and a frog on a riverbank. The scorpion says, "Hey, can you take me across on your back? I can't swim." And the frog says, "No, because you are a scorpion and you will sting me if I let you on my back." The scorpion says, "Why would I sting you? If I did that, we'd both drown." The frog says, "Fair enough, I'll take you." The scorpion climbs on the frog's back and as they cross, the scorpion stings the frog. As they are both dying in the middle of the river, the frog says, "What the fuck, man!?" and the scorpion says, "LMAO I'm a scorpion, what did you expect?” We live in a world of not only face-eating leopards, but also scorpions. Except many of them are like, “Yeah, I’ll probably sting you, honestly.” And enough of us keep falling for it.

I am also thinking a lot about RFK's proposal to put everyone like me in re-education/labour camps where we'll be forced to harvest produce, presumably to replace all the undocumented migrant farm workers who are about to be deported. Good thing we would never do anything like that here in New Brunswick, what a relief it is to live in Canada. For now.

Miscellany

• I started reading Hair For Men by Michelle Winters this week. She's local! Her last novel was shortlisted for a prestigious literary prize! In the first 19 pages we get to see our heroine go from a child with a weird travelling salesman dad to a teenager who is sexually assaulted and humiliated at school, and then while walking home in a blind rage, she hears Black Flag for the first time blaring out the door of a record store. Coming out of the gate extremely hot, I’m in love with it already.
• Random Number Generator Horror Movie Podcast No. 9 recently did an episode on Don't Look Now, a Donald Sutherland movie from 1973. It's bananas, I watched it a few years ago and couldn't make any sense of it at all. Now with Cecil and Jeffrey’s thoughtful analysis, I want to watch it again. I honestly don't even remember what Donald Sutherland is doing in that photo. Probably watching leopard eat his wife’s face. There’s a famous sex scene in this movie that was rumoured to be “unsimulated.” I read somewhere it was the first scene in the movies the actors filmed together. YEESH.
• Frontburner had an episode on whatever the hell was going on in Munich this week. I just liked hearing about the American Vice President bombing in a room full of his colleagues in the most embarrassing way possible. Just stony silence from the audience, as this man plows through his prepared speech of baffling non-sequitors that make sense only to him. I've seen this play out approximately 10,000 times at open mics and dive bars across the maritimes over the last decade, it's fascinating to see men with no charisma or sense of shame, even when surrounded by assistants and advisors who are supposed have their best interest at heart, still don’t know when to shut up.
• Margaret Killjoy is talking about anarchopunk in general and CRASS specifically on her history podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I say "is" because it's a four-part series, the first two were out this week, the final two will be out next week. Guest appearances in the conversation include John Cage's 4'33" and Caliban and the Witch. Here’s what happened when VICE went to visit Dial House in the mid-2000s. Trigger warning for old dick. Nevermind, Penny Rimbaud's ween was apparently one of the victims of The Great VICE Archive Purge of 2024. Sorry to that man.
• I am also listening to The Daily Calm. I'm devastated to report that I think it's helping. It turns out I'm basically a slightly sophisticated house plant and so are you. Your brain needs water, nourishment, light and periods of rest. Do you want a 30 day free trial of the premium version of the Calm app? Email me (hello at marygreen dot lol) and I'll send you one.
• I watched all three and a half hours of SNL50 on Sunday night and it was... fine. It was fine. The best sketches were Black Jeopardy and end of list. It was funny that they convinced Meryl Streep to play an alien abductee alongside her “daughter” Kate McKinnon just for the incongruity of it being Meryl. I thought the sketch itself was mid. Fight me. It all felt extremely self congratulatory, which I guess is the point.

  

  Apparently it was also a COVID-19 superspreader event, which should surprise no one, given this segment on Weekend Update. The absolute best, hands down, not-even-close, GOATED part was Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard covering "Nothing Compares 2 U." Have the ad wizards @nbcsnl seen fit to make this easily available anywhere? Absolutely not, except for a 24 second clip on TikTok that is basically just Miley singing, “you, you, you…” at the very end of the performance. Keep up the great work down there.
• I am enjoying watching documentaries on the PBS Documentaries streaming service because it's very easy to find a documentary about something that has nothing to do with The Horrors. I'm making my way through Ken Burns' Country Music which is interesting but Jesus HR Geiger, someone needs to force that man to break up the episodes into 60-ish minute chunks. I can't commit to a feature-length film every time, I can't. I also really enjoyed A Midwife's Tale, which originally aired in 1988 (!!) and is based on the actual diary of an actual midwife who was plying her trade in Maine after the American Revolution. It's significant because we know very little about what women were up to in this era because almost none of them had the time, skills or inclination to keep diaries, or if they did, they are lost. Martha Ballard's sons seemed like real assholes and a lot of it was filmed at King’s Landing. You can really tell (complimentary) if you know what to look for.
• This poem got me this week. It can get you too, if you let it.

Thanks for reading. I love you.