Bikes & Sex Bracelets & Maroon 5, Oh My
The Good Links are back to their scheduled programming.
Featuring the humiliation of locking your bike up, the misadventures of biking across the country, and generalized celebrity infidelity.
P.S. Like my newsletter? Make your friends sign up and feed my sense of self-importance.
Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny
Say an official goodbye to the millennials/generation section of the newsletter. Unfortunately, lamenting about the generations has been completely driven into the ground. Sure, I could talk about it forever, but that doesn’t mean I need an entire section in my newsletter dedicated to it.
Feel free to write me if you think my deletion of the section is some sort of crime against humanity, or just if you have a hot, new toxic opinion about Gen Z. Either way, the section isn’t coming back.
So now this section is just for stuff I think is funny! Deal with it!
We’ll kick it off with a short column about how absolutely humiliating locking up your bike is. As someone who finally bought a bike worth more than the repairs it needs, I have been instructed to upgrade to both a Kryptonite chain lock AND a U-lock. Now every time I arrive somewhere with a bike, I lose some of the precious minutes I saved by biking trying to figure out what structures around me will allow me to utilize BOTH bike locks.
Clio Chang from NYMag has more on the subject, including an admission that she has honest-to-God nightmares about locking up her bike.
What the guy I bought my bike from made it seem like I needed to do in order to avoid getting my new bike stolen.
A Less Serious Item
Some insane reporter at Stereogum (Tom Breihan) has been writing, since early 2018, about every single Billboard #1 hit since the Billboard Hot 100 began (which was in 1958). He has, as of this week, made it somewhere into the year 2001. This includes a very fun dive into Shaggy’s hit cover of the song “Angel” that topped the charts for one week in 2001 which I really recommend. The extremely hard-working journalist on this beat really does his research and includes fun bits like:
Shaggy is still around and still working. Earlier this year, for instance, Shaggy competed on The Masked Singer as the Space Bunny and then accepted an honorary doctorate from Brown University. I don’t think too many other people have done those two things in the same year.
This Week’s Theme: Keeping It Cycle-Centric
I really enjoyed this feature from Outside Magazine about a woman’s misadventures as a cross-country bike tour guide. The ending isn’t so happy in the sense that she tried to do something truly different as a career (“do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” as failed concept) and gave it up to be a journalist. But it’s a quick longread about one of those jobs you’ve never thought about.
Here she is waxing poetic about the cross-country biking trip she did on her own that made her fall in love with the activity:
On the road, I pedaled all day and wrote in my journal into the night, detailing my misadventures by the glow of a headlamp inside some of America’s sketchiest campsites. Each day was different and surprising. Would I find rustic, shaded forestlands to sleep in, or an abandoned Lions Club park by the side of a seven-lane interstate? Might I encounter a smooth, winding descent alongside a river, or a series of 19-percent-graded climbs guarded by feral pit bull mixes? How long could the human body subsist on peanut butter and banana sandwiches alone? Better yet, how long could I continue to go without showering before being added to some sort of national-parks watch list?
P.S. This piece also has some fun illustrations that I almost missed entirely because I think everything is an ad these days! Keep an eye out.
The Politics Of… Moral Panics
The Ringer did a great piece a few months ago about the moral sex panic that surrounded jelly bracelets circa the year 2003. The rumor was that tweens and teens were wearing jelly bracelets as sex bracelets whose colors corresponded to certain sex acts they were willing to engage in. In a shocking (read: not) twist, it turns out the whole thing was probably made up by adults and then further blown out of proportion by adults (including multiple plot lines on multiple TV shows). The piece takes a fun look at moral panic and the generally off-base idea that subsequent generations are always fucking way more than the last generation:
“There is not any great evidence suggesting the age of first sex has gotten younger, so that alone is a miss,” Bogle says. “Those things move in increments. Not in any dramatic, ‘Oh, 12-year-olds are having sex now’ [sense]. The median age to first have sex in a lot of countries around the world is around 16 or 17. It hasn’t dramatically changed, and when it does it changes by centimeters.”
But my favorite fact from the article is that the UK equivalent of a “sex bracelet” is called a “shag band”:"
According to Bogle, the jelly bracelets panic was a function of the same pervasive fear of a slippery moral slope. Her research with Best found the earliest recorded mention of sex bracelets was not Haberlin’s story, but rather someone with the username “Junior” posting a definition of “shag bands”—the counterpart to “sex bracelets” in the U.K., which swiftly reported its own wave of school bans—on Urban Dictionary.
Always a good day to remember that Brits call a make out session a “full on snog”
A Celebrity Thinger (“Maroon 5 is basically elevator music at this point”)
Incredible low-stakes celebrity drama has come out of the woodwork in the form of a model/influencer (what we all want to be when we grow up) named Sumner Stroh claiming she had an emotional and physical Instagram-DM-fueled affair with Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine. So why is she bringing it up now? Because Adam Levine took it upon himself, to use his MAIN Instagram account to DM her asking if it’s okay if he names his next child after her.
Even funnier if it turns out that his kids Dusty Rose and Gio Grace are named after other women he’s had affairs with - something je nais se quoi about Adam Levine sexting a woman named Dusty.
P.S. Whatever the opposite of iconic is for Maroon 5 to announce a Vegas residency in the middle of all this.
P.P.S. Sure, I could have run long on the “Don’t Worry, Darling” drama, but better newsletter writers than me have done it and then some. Feel free to check out Hunter Harris’s Hung Up.
P.P.P.S. I will shout out DWD star Kiki Layne and her new co-star beau who posted a very fun photo to Instagram saying they may have been cut from the movie but at least they found each other.
Would You Rather?
Would you rather be a Try Guy or a Chipotle bag?
P.S. Credit to my friend Justin for some of the links in this section and the Celebrity Thinger section. He’ll be helping me with a new section called Flop Links next week, so get excited for that.
A Recommendation (TV! Who is she?)
I have been watching and enjoying the first few episodes of the Hulu original Reboot. It stars Rachel Bloom as an “edgy” writer who wants to reboot a hacky sitcom from the early 2000s about a guy adjusting to his new life with his new wife and stepson. She gets the whole cast to agree to come back (stepdad: Keegan Michael-Key, mom: Judy Greer, dad: Johnny Knoxville, son: American Vandal’s Calum Worthy used very well), only for the original creator of the show (esteemed network sitcom vet Paul Reiser) to decide he wants to run the show again. Plot twist! It turns out the “edgy” writer is the original creator’s daughter. Intergenerational hijinx, network hijinx, and overall generalized hijinx ensue. The first three episodes are out now (with easily digested 30 minute run times) and the subsequent episodes drop on Tuesdays.
This show is so new there are no easily-located screen grabs, so here’s a promo picture! Hulu, I’ll await my spon check in the mail.
P.S. The show also includes guest spots from character actors like Fred Melamed, Rose Abdoo, and Kerri Kinney, if you’re into that kind of thing!
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
Have you link you think is good? Submit link suggestions here.