Tea-Offs at My Place This Weekend
And hey, the links are good!
Featuring late coverage on the Fightin’ Phils, me begging the youths NOT to get botox, and some funky Middle America stuff.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny (Do You Know What a “Tea-Off” Is?")
The Good Links have been spotty for about two years now, thanks to the pandemic and me getting an MPH, but in late October and early November (about three weeks ago), they were spotty because I had a full time job watching the Philadelphia Phillies make a completely unexpected run to the World Series (where they lost to a bunch of cheaters). They finished the regular season with a ten game losing streak that almost knocked them out the playoffs, and then they went on a winning streak and fucking made it to the World Series. Philadelphia was totally electric for about three weeks, and when the Philadelphia Phillies won the NLCS in late October, our eccentric citizenry stormed broad street and a bunch of drunk people did what they do best: climbed the poles on Broad Street.
I say all of that to present you this short yet incredible profile of a guy who climbed one of those poles and then shotgunned seven beers the crowd threw up to him:
Sean Hagan was at Cavanaugh’s Rittenhouse watching the game and doing “tea-offs” with other customers to see who could slam bottles of Twisted Tea Light the fastest when the Phillies won the National League Championship Series on Sunday…
…“My friend bailed on me, she was too drunk,” he said. “I mean, I should have followed her lead, but Broad Street was calling my name.”
Once there, Hagan, a 29-year-old union carpenter from South Philly, scaled a street light pole at the corner of Broad and Sansom, where he stayed for at least a half hour. While atop the pole, Hagan caught at least seven beers thrown to him from the crowd, which he then shotgunned as a ring of cops circled below.
A Less Serious Item (Botox? More Like No Tox, Thank You!)
Botox! You’re [enter any age over 25 here], maybe it’s time! Or maybe it’s not. I’m a big fan of a series of pieces from Slate about trends around botox, starting with this from (friend of the links!) Eleanor Cummins, who writes about the scammy nature of preventative botox (generally botox administered to the faces of people under 40):
But with repeated and consistent use—the kind recommended to pause the clock—Botox can lead to more permanent muscle atrophy. It makes sense: You’re asking your muscles, over and over again, to stop doing their jobs; eventually, they do. This can cause your skin to become thinner and looser, and discolored or “crepe-y,” and veins may become more visible, says Dr. Patricia Wexler, a dermatological surgeon in New York City who has been injecting Botox in patients for more than 30 years. The immobilization of certain muscles can also mean other parts of the face are recruited when a person inevitably makes a facial expression. As these other muscles get a workout, they may start to wrinkle, resulting in “bunny lines” around the nose and creases beneath the eyes.
I send this mostly because I have been caught in a disturbing number of conversations with (excuse the creepy uncle vibe here) beautiful young people who are either getting preventative botox or are really seriously thinking about it. Please! Just wait til you’re 40 at least. Plus, it costs like $400 every time you do it — in this economy?!
Goldie Hawn in the First Wives Club, iconic botox and lip filler recipient.
This Week’s Theme: Small Town America, Here and Abroad
Have a read about Humboldt, Kansas, a small town that’s been revitalized in recent years to the point that it made it onto a list of New York Times’ 52 places to visit this past August. It’s not really anything that special, except that everyone in the town seems united in the desire to make it a functional place - with all the businesses and little restaurants that make a neighborhood bumbling and fun to be in - including the town’s largest employer:
It was not the first time the national press took note of Humboldt. NBC News came to town in 2009, at the height of the recession, to highlight a feel-good story unfolding out of B&W Trailer Hitches, Humboldt’s largest employer. Like other businesses, B&W had hit a downturn. But rather than laying off any of his 180 employees, founder Joe Works lived up to his name and kept everyone on the payroll and instructed them to improve the town: painting churches, pruning trees, cleaning up playgrounds.
I will say there are a lot of artist and artist-adjacent people who seem to have moved to the town saying stuff like “you can just have so much here!” and it sounds like the town might be on the verge of running out of housing, BUT it’s kind of a nice story where people all just want to live a nice life together in a little walkable area.
And then we’ll hop across the pond for a quick interview with a Polish guy who, along with about 300 other Polish people, has been LARPing as trailer park residents from the state of Ohio. Oh yeah, you read that right, there are a bunch of Polish people in Poland who dress up like Ohio trailer park residents and then proceed to have a fake Fourth of July BBQ. I know what you’re thinking - what do they even say when they do this? Well, there’s a several hundred page script that the producers of the event have written for it! So they’re saying a lot!
I guess what they say is true - you can LARP anything if you put your mind to it!
The Politics of Screens Before Bed (Team Screen)
I had a lot of fun with this lengthy dispatch from Vulture’s Rachel Handler about her own experience with sleep and a faux experiment she conducted on herself about usage of screens before bed and their effect on sleep. There’s a lot going on but I am clinging to this paragraph from a sleep doctor she interviewed:
Dr. Kennedy is fundamentally anti-screens. She compares being on a screen before bed to taking a shower immediately after a run: “You’re going to still be sweating when you get out because your body needs a chance to slow down more gradually.” Not all screen content is created equal, though; watching cat videos is preferable to porn, the latter being more “agitating.” She feels better about a person who watches TV across the room before bed than a person who opts to stare directly into a phone, absorbing blue light and generally Orwellian vibes. Engaging with social media, she says, is the worst of the presleep activities because it “triggers social comparison,” reminding you that you are a person trapped in a body trapped in a world of bodies.
To which I say - see! Watching my Roku TV before bed every night isn’t the absolute worst thing you could do! Never mind that we’re all people “trapped in a body trapped in a world of bodies”!
P.S. I did not love this excerpt “I sleep well over eight hours, getting up only twice, and have a confusing but pleasant dream about starting a stand-up-comedy troupe.” Stand-up-comedy troupes, ill-placed hyphens and all, are not a thing!
P.P.S. What this woman is doing: “My friend Lisa has been watching The Office before bed every single night for decades but in a very elaborate manner. ‘I have to have my iPad set up next to my head where I’m listening to The Office, but I’m not actually looking at my iPad. Then I usually have to play some sort of game on my phone. I put a timer on my iPad so that it will go off in 20 or 30 minutes,’ she says. If she wakes up in the middle of the night, she has to start this entire process over again.” is wrong.
A Celebrity Thinger (Ticketmaster Disaster)
Ah my fellow Swifties, what a time in the trenches it’s been. I hardly even qualify as a true Swiftie, but I was thinking recently: shouldn’t I try and go see my #1 Spotify Wrapped artist (top 7% of listeners!) in concert? As an adult with a job, isn’t that the kind of thing you spend your money on? Well, don’t you worry, the website Ticketmaster and its monopoly on ticket sales squashed my little businesswoman dream by absolutely fumbling the bag on the Taylor Swift presale so hard their website crashed multiple times. Tour demand for tickets is at an all-time high, but Ticketmaster also has no handle on their bot ticket-buying problem, resulting in thousands of tickets on resale on StubHub for thousands of dollars. Le sigh. Maybe next tour - whenever the heck that’ll be!
P.S. Now the Tennessee Attorney General is looking into it, so at least there’s that!
Flop Links (It’s Giving Justin)
Well, I’m flopping! [To the tune of Valerie Cherish’s “Well, I’ve got it!”] The reason? I was not kissed by Matty Healy at the 1975 concert this week. Despite my best efforts (I wore all black and Doc Martens), he did not see that I was cool and aloof enough to pull on stage during “Robbers” for the kiss, which is something he has been doing to fans lately for reasons only Matty Healy knows. I am REALLY. HAPPY. FOR. THEM.
Anyway, who else is flopping?
In Her Christmas Era
One day I will launch a full investigation into why having a Christmas era is a necessary and essential component of the career arch of most celebrities. For now, I’m here with a case study - the famously infamous Lindsay Lohan, whose Career section in Wikipedia currently looks like this:
I personally can relate! After this extended hiatus and period of chaotic yet somehow iconic moments over in Mykonos, Lindsay is back in the spotlight with a potential strategy for success - chucking into the Netflix void a generic Christmas film with that yuletide sameness that makes perfect background noise for hooking up with your hometown ex in their grey vinyl-floored studio apartment.
For someone who’s been poised for a comeback for over a decade now, you wouldn’t think a mid-tier Christmas movie would kick off a sweeping Lohanaissance, but it’s definitely a start, and Gawker put together a report card summarizing her recent Christmas-themed power moves. Overall, she seems to be doing a great job, and as someone who became conscious of ~celebrities~ during the Britney/Paris/LiLo party monster trifecta, I’ll always have space in my heart to celebrate any of them doing well. Now all I need is a true return to her music career - which was always flopping, but that gave it flavor.
The Nepo Babies Strike Back
In the past year or two, us consumers of media have really been Going Off on nepotism. Some kind of veil has been lifted off our heads and we are all collectively understanding that there must be some other force at work if someone with as little to offer as Hailey Bieber can remain booked and busy. However, I’m not here to talk about Hailey Bieber… yet. Instead, another Nepo Baby said something vapid and nonsensical last week about their place in culture, and it’s Lily Rose-Depp - someone I am only aware of due to her involvement in bringing back vintage AirPods.
Off the top of my head, I can’t name a single project this person has been involved in, but here she is with an Elle magazine cover and interview to promote a show called The Idol, which I’ve only heard about at the weekly A24 fanboy fight club. Anyway, when the topic of nepotism comes up - because how else did we get here - she had this to say:
It’s weird to me to reduce somebody to the idea that they’re only there because it’s a generational thing. It just doesn’t make any sense. If somebody’s mom or dad is a doctor, and then the kid becomes a doctor, you’re not going to be like, ‘Well, you’re only a doctor because your parent is a doctor.’ It’s like, ‘No, I went to medical school and trained.’
The brilliance of Nepo Babies in culture is that most of them have truly never had to think critically about their place in society, and now, we’re all asking them to do it. As a result, we have statements like these, which really only prove the point that nepotism is That Girl and constantly acting in the world around us. I won’t spend more time unpacking exactly why comparing acting training to medical training is ill-fitting, because I think most of us can get there on our own, but what I will say is that labeling a Nepo Baby as such is actually a healthy practice. It gives us, the people at home wondering why a certain someone with 5 feet and 2 inches of height to their name is closing Chanel fashion shows, a way to feel less gaslit on a daily basis. And as people just trying to get by in this attention economy, can’t we at least have that?
P.S. I am going to note here that I am liable to be walking back any critiques of Lily Rose Depp in the coming weeks because I LOVE fictional pop stars and apparently she is playing one in this (aptly titled) show The Idol.
A Recommendation (A…Podcast?)
When it comes to podcasts, I am way, way, WAY behind the times. I hate when podcasts try to teach me too many things, I hate when podcasts are hosted by one person who is talking the whole time, and I especially hate when a podcast is trying to tell me what’s wrong with society or whatever. This has severely limited the number of podcasts I can listen to. In this vein, I have finally started listening to Defector’s “Normal Gossip” podcast. It turns out I am an enormous idiot for putting this off even one year. This is an incredible podcast wherein one woman has on one guest (two people talking! win!) and they go through a salacious gossip tale submitted by a normal citizen (i.e. not a celebrity) over the course of fifty or so minutes. It is glorious, it is a gift, and I will offer my recommendation in the form of one singular episode: Season 1, Episode “Leave ‘Em a Little Bit Broke, a Little Bit Mad with Laci Mosley” which features the most excellent guest host doing 4-D chess analysis of two sorority sisters out-bitching each other when they both get boyfriends.
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