Katie Way had a fun assignment from Vice: try and recreate the banned Four Loko drink and write about her attempts.

To be totally transparent, I was born in the wrong generation: I should be 31 right now, because if I was, I would have taken the full brunt of the original Four Loko craze directly to the forehead. Unfortunately, I was in tenth grade in November 2010, when the FDA banned alcoholic energy drinks. So, while nobody reading this has had an OG Four Loko in over a decade, my memory isn’t the sharpest—I was probably worrying about how to get a good PSAT score or some bullshit like that when I was tentatively sipping a lukewarm watermelon flav Loko in a Safeway parking lot. (To be honest, if OG Loko existed when I was finished with puberty, I’d probably be a very different person—someone, at least, who’d gotten her stomach pumped during college.)

I wish I could get a gig where I had to try and make a boozy alcoholic beverage with insane amounts of caffeine and then write about it. I will admit a time when “Red Bull and vodka” was a drink I drank a lot.

Also, come on Katie… you definitely had your stomach pumped in college.

The INTERNET -K-HOLE is a vast amount of very amateur snapshots taken from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, with absolutely no other context provided or needed. Mostly a whole bunch of people I’ve never seen before… but if I scroll long enough—hours maybe—I will see an image of myself somewhere, I am sure of it.

NSFW warning: a small amount of lite smut compared to the gargantuan size of the collection; however, the second picture in the latest post happens to be of a butt. The one after that is Lemmy in a hotel room. Then comes the panoply of randos.

And more butts.

Dave Perell, in his weekly Monday Musings email, made a smart observation.

Whenever I’m in a city and I need to use the bathroom, I walk into a fancy hotel.

Fancy hotels always have nice bathrooms. And if you’re dressed well and walk confidently, you won’t be hassled for using the bathroom.

The world is becoming more casual. But if you dress too casually, it looks sloppy and careless.

When you want to cultivate serendipity, stick to the “Hotel Bathroom” dress code. Always dress well enough to walk into a bathroom at a hotel you’re not staying at and get away with it.

If you remember the “Hotel Bathroom Principle” you’ll always look sharp enough to capitalize on a serendipitous encounter.

This is good advice.

Seth Godin wants you to make a plan.

What do you want to be doing 100 days from now?

What change do you seek to be making? With which skills? Surrounded by which people?

For that to happen, day 99 will need to be different from today.

And so will day 98. In fact, so will tomorrow.

If we keep focusing on ‘what’s next’ we might never get around to doing the work we need to do to get us to day 100.

I’ve never done something like this. I wonder if I would benefit? Probably.

The first new song from Prince. “Come on in… sit right down.”

Ahead of his time.

I’ve been waiting for new Prince music since he passed away. I can’t wait.

Rebecca Onion (What a great name…), writing for Slate, reviews the expert opinions on if the 2020s might copy and paste from the 1920s.

I remain very interested in the reasons the ’20s appeal to our imagination right now. Of course, it’s the booze, the sex, and the parties. But it’s also a decade with a very strong identity—and I think that helps.

I think it’s important to note, no one says, “Roaring 30s.”

I tend to think there’s going to be a massive uptick in parties as 2021 winds down and the pandemic is firmly in the rearview mirror. My best guess is this is exactly what will happen right about New Year’s Eve 2021 through 2022 and likely beyond. 

Apologies to Prince, “Two Thousand Two Zero, party overruled out of time. So tonight we’re gonna party through Twenty Twenty-Nine.”

David Roth, writing for Defector, explains the stupidity of anti-vaxxers.

That minority’s inability to take anything in stride, or to sublimate even the smallest personal comfort for the most urgent and essential collective good, invariably winds up being political, but it is also its own pursuit and even lifestyle. Some MLB players who will not be vaccinated surely subscribe to it, and live by choice amid the seething frenzy of ominous intimations and powerful enemies and heated but vexingly disconnected signifiers that comprises contemporary American conservatism. You can look at the anti-vaccination sentiments that Cubs second baseman Eric Sogard’s wife Kaycee has been posting to get a sense of the temperature of that discourse, and to see how furiously unresolved it all is. “This is absolutely disgusting,” she wrote in her Instagram story about MLB ‘s COVID vaccination protocols, which impose restrictions on teams that do not meet an 85 percent vaccination threshold. “And you will not ever convince me this is still about a virus.”

If you have ever spoken to an anti-vaxx person, you have encountered this kind of doofy rhetorical flourish, which is usually delivered, as it was by Sogard, as a devastating and unassailable conclusion. If you have ever asked an anti-vaxx person to go beyond that and say what they think it all really is about, or what COVID vaccination protocols might be about beyond COVID, you’ll hear answers like “money” and “control” that are, again, not quite as conclusive as they are meant to be. But for all the convoluted and cosmetic suspicion of the politics and the opacity of their oafish paranoid patois, this all resolves to the precariousness that all those false choices are designed to obscure-to the suspicion that it is unfair and somehow wrong that any element of their all-important personal convenience might be contingent upon or even related to anyone else’s, and to the fear that their holy ease will be threatened by some other greater responsibility. You truly will not ever convince these people that this is Still About A Virus, because they never once believed that anything is ever about more than their own sour selves, and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their comfort. That grandiose vanity is the only force capable of holding together such a disordered worldview. In that sense, and only in that sense, it works very well.

Roth writes with such skill that I’m always in awe of his output. I just love “…because they never once believed that anything is ever about more than their own sour selves and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their comfort.”

His ability to get to the heart of the matter regarding vaccinations and “muh freedoms” people is perfectly rendered behind the lens of professional baseball players.

Gabz wrote a little something that made sense to me.

It doesn’t matter what app you use, what system, or where you host your site. Whether you use a static site or not. It doesn’t matter if you have images in all your blog posts or not, how big or how small. What syntax, language, cheat code or pen you use.

Just blog, it’s that’s all you want to do. I don’t care, and it shouldn’t matter how you go about it.

Just blog.

Yup.

Sarah Morrison, writing at Vox, explains the concept of apps and websites using dark patterns to trick users into doing what they want you to do.

It’s hard to know what’s an actionable deceptive act or practice when there’s no privacy law in the first place. And it’s hard for consumers to know what they’re giving away unintentionally or how it might be used against them when it all happens behind the scenes.

It’s all deceptive practices. This stuff is insidious. The explainer showcases all the tricks so you can be smarter about it in the future.

Kevin Drum explains that people are idiots because they can’t understand a few simple facts about COVID-19.

We know this relationship. It’s obvious and well established. If cases start to rise, then deaths will start to rise a couple of weeks later. By then, however, it’s too late to do anything. We just have to ride it out.

And yet, time after time, we ignore it. We see that the case count is declining and start opening things up well before the count is even in the general neighborhood of zero. When the case count begins to plateau, we look the other way and hope that it’s just a blip. When it becomes clear that it’s not a blip, we shrug because, hey, there’s nothing we can do about it now.

He’s not wrong.  I hate these people who refuse to wear masks because they’ve decided the pandemic is over. It’s not over and the more they open up/close up, the longer it’s going to take to get back to normal.

Still, the great awakening is coming. If everyone would just get the vaccine, I’d feel better marking a day we might all come out of hiding.

Nicholas Bate with some advice

All days are special. Monday: fresh start. Friday: whooopeee!. Wednesday: almost there……But Saturdays. What a day. A-slippin’ and a-slidin’ between the world of work and the world of play and rest. Some chores, some catch-up. Fewer deadlines, fewer crises, less ‘concatenation of support silos’. Action, not Zoom Zoo. Chats, not conference calls. A real meal, not a baguette at a keyboard. Saturdays are the air-lock of transition from craziness to sanity, the ‘hey-you-can-stop-running-and-look-up-from-your-phone’ days. Saturdays allow you to breathe deep and full, mobilise after a sedentary week, wash your socks, listen to music, spend time at stuff, drop him/her a note, lie on your back and think. And then play ball to detox those slide-decks from your metabolism.

Miles Surrey, writing for The Ringer, has some thoughts on the recent run of time-loop movies.

Whether or not you currently have the mental fortitude to endure a time-loop binge in the middle of our loopy monotonous reality, there is a reason we keep getting drawn into these stories. There’s the allure of second chances, the hope of breaking a bad cycle, and the promise that it can actually be done with enough self-actualization. Shaking free of banality can happen only by taking things one slightly less repetitive day at a time.

The list of recent time-loop movies is interesting mostly because I hadn’t really thought about it until this article pointed it out. Maybe I was just reliving it all again and again. Also, we are probably due for body-switching movies (Freaky Friday, The Hot Chick, etc.) to be a thing again.

NPR reports that several Dr. Seuss books are actively going out of print. On purpose.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises will cease publishing six of the author’s books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo — saying they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The books have been criticized for how they depict Asian and Black people.

The decision to stop publishing and licensing the books follows a review by a panel of educators and other experts, according to Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that controls the author’s books and characters. The other four titles that will be permanently shelved are McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer.

The company says the decision was made last year, in an effort to support “all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.”

The best part of this story is that Dr. Seuss Enterprises simply decided they needed to cease publication themselves and not some outside group influencing them and making a show of it. He’s not being canceled. Times just changed. They decided to pull these books because they care about people and want to be better. That’s damn impressive. Even though And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street launched his career, they’re still shelving it.

The Seuss estate is doing what’s right, and there are loads of other Dr. Seuss books still available. Like The Lorax.

Kill The Newsletter is a website that converts email newsletters into Atom feeds.

It is glorious. By eliminating so much email from my life and pushing it into my RSS feeds, I can manage it so much easier.

Of course, you have to be using an RSS Feed reader. The real question is why aren’t you?

Tom Gauld suggests some literary collective nouns.

My favorite by far is “a gruop of proofreaders.”

I am not a gardener, but as I understand it, if you don’t tend to the garden, it will get overgrown and cumbersome. Weeds will kill the real plants you are trying to cultivate.

If you don’t take care of things, they will start to accumulate. Suddenly, you have hundreds of emails, jobs that are half-finished, a book pile, a to-read pile, and simple tasks that have been put off for far too long.

The garden gets overrun.

What I’m going to try and do this year is block out time to clear things out and tend the garden.

Review work and personal email and start cleaning it out at the end of the day.

I’m going to have to spend some time just getting to inbox zero, but once I’m there I’m going to try and stay there.

Review my Instapaper queue and start cleaning it out or archiving.

I am terrible about using my read-later queue as a catch-all. It needs some curating.

Spend an hour at the end of the day to take care of all the little things both personal and work-related.

I’m terrible at this and just making the list of things to do is not enough. I need to take action.

Plan chores and errands for the weekend.

Not having a to-do list on the weekend just means things don’t get done.

These four steps aren’t hard. They might take a few hours at most. What I need to do is a plan and then follow through. My days are incredibly busy, and carving out time to do what needs to be done to make things go smooth in my household and work is vital.

I admire focus in other people but lack it in myself. Setting myself up for success by focusing on the tasks at hand is also vital.

Clear out the weeds. Tend the garden. Make my life easier for myself.

Pat Forde, writing in Sports Illustrated, has an in-depth profile on Ayo Dosunmu that gets to the core of who he is and how his family and friends have shaped him.

He can be heard chattering in the gym at just about any hour—early, late, whenever. The pandemic might have curtailed the social life of most Illinois students, but it’s pretty much business as usual for Ayo. “He doesn’t party. He doesn’t hang out. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t go to the bars,” Chin says. “He’s never been to Kam’s [the venerable Champaign bar that labels itself ‘Home of the Drinking Illini’]. He’s all the way in this deal.”

And

“It starts with not being afraid to fail, not being afraid of the moment,” Ayo says. “I want to take on that challenge. I loved Kobe Bryant’s mentality. He was never afraid of failure. He had the guts to take those shots.”

They are the moments every player relishes in pretend settings—in the backyard, in the practice gym. Not everyone has that same eagerness in reality when a game is on the line and the world is watching. Ayo does.

“His belief in himself is a testament to his work,” said Illinois strength and conditioning coach Adam Fletcher. “That leads to confidence in those moments.”

As startling as the individual plays have been—back-to-back threes to break open a tie game in an upset of Michigan State as a freshman, the buzzer-beater against Michigan as a sophomore, the Northwestern super dagger this week—the totality does not surprise the architect or his father. This was the plan all along.

“This is what he was built for,” Quam says. “This is all the stuff we envisioned. We don’t duck. We don’t hide from anything.”

He’s a special player.

Kolton Wong penned a heartfelt goodbye to St. Louis with The Players’ Tribune.

This was home.
 
You guys are family.

And I just really hope that you know that I always gave you guys everything I had. I hope you remember me as someone who never left anything out on the field.

Who was always trying to do something special to make you happy.

I may have gotten punched in the mouth a few times over the years, but hopefully you’ll remember me for getting right back up and working twice as hard to be the best player I could be for you all.

In the end….

I just hope that I made you proud.

A class act all the way. I expect he’ll get more than a few cheers when he finds himself back in St. Louis.

This will not be a hot take or even an original take. I don’t understand the criteria for what constitutes “rock and roll” in the eyes of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The latest list of potential inductees has surfaced. It includes Mary J. Blige, Kate Bush, Devo, Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Iron Maiden, Jay-Z, Chaka Khan, Carole King, Fela Kuti, LL Cool J, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, Todd Rundgren, Tina Turner, and Dionne Warwick.

Of this list, basically half are actual rock and roll artists: Devo, Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Iron Maiden, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, and Todd Rundgren. Solo Tina Turner is borderline, but I’d still say she’s more pop and soul than rock and roll no matter who calls her the “Queen of Rock and Roll” (She isn’t). Besides, she’s already in the Hall as part of Ike and Tina Turner, which is where all of her real “rock and roll” work was done.

Kate Bush is pretty and artsy and so not rock and roll. Dionne Warwick and Chaka Khan are R&B artists. Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z, LL Cool J are rap artists. Fela Kuti is a world music/afrobeat artist. Carole King is already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for songwriting, which she’s most known for, not as an artist.

Looking at the whole list, the artists who deserve to go in are the Go-Go’s, Iron Maiden, and Todd Rundgren. The rest of the real rock and roll contingent should wait. I’m sure I could be persuaded regarding the Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine, but there’s no way it should include the New York Dolls or Devo.

Obviously, the rest should not even be considered. As I’ve indicated above, they aren’t rock and roll artists and should not be included in a hall of fame that recognizes rock and roll artists. For example, you wouldn’t see the Foo Fighters as nominees to be inducted into the Rap Artists Hall of Fame. Or the Beatles, for that matter.

Who should be in and are criminally overlooked? Paul Revere & The Raiders, Tommy James & the Shondells, Foreigner, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, Humble Pie, Grand Funk Railroad, and the MC-5.

I rest my case.

John DeVore sure hopes Gina Carano is happy with her anti-semitic social media posts and anti-mask wearing social media posts, and the rest of her general shitty posts.

I think it’s super disappointing Carano showed us who she is but maybe it’s for the best, for her and for Star Wars fans. I liked her performance as Cara Dune, she had Han Solo’s swagger. And while I think it sucks the show is losing her, The Mandalorian did introduce incredibly strong female characters in the second season, just absolute royal badasses like Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackoff and Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka, the popular wandering Jedi. So fans will soldier on, I suppose.

Ironically, Carano’s co-star Pedro Pascal, the titular Mandalorian, was also in the news this week joyfully supporting his sibling, a trans woman. There is a subtle difference I’ll point out between Pascal and Carano: Pascal was celebrating someone he loved and Carano enjoys sitting on her couch wondering how she can upset strangers on internet message boards.

It really is too bad that Star Wars was just her day gig and her real passion was being an asshole online. She’s now proudly bragging that she signed a new film deal with pundit Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire. I guess the plan, all along, was to use the most successful Hollywood franchise in history as a platform to audition for a conservative clickbait website.

I hate having to say this, but it’s about time. Now just go hire Lana Parrilla or Lucy Lawless and move on.