Godspeed You! Big Dumbasses

Global News Around the World, and Daniel Ek is so, so sorry.

It’s the last week of Tabs Season 5 and I feel like a fifth grader railing Pixy Stix off the back of a school bus seat, so let’s take a look at:

🌍 Global News Around the World

The Kenyan Communist Party is dropping one pre-election banger after another. In Ol’ Knifey Boris Johnson ran out of non-Welsh staff options, so: “Boris Johnson ‘not a complete clown’, says his new press chief.” And today in Brynn Ynno’s Welsh oblique strategies: Horns -locking -beeping. American-raised freestyle skiier Eileen Gu naturalized as a Chinese citizen in 2019 and now skis for China. In a wild throwback to 2014-era Slate, Justin Peters asks “is she a jerk?” 

She was pretty much a shoo-in to make Team USA in 2022, a fact she surely would have known, just as surely as she would have known about China’s human rights record. In light of all this, to choose China over the U.S.—which has its problems, sure, but is still an actual democracy—is a pretty jerky move.

That’s… certainly one way to look at it!

Canada is a land of balance and moderation so bad news: “Ottawa Declares Emergency as Protests Spin ‘Out of Control’,” but good news: the long-lost 1994 Godspeed You! Black Emperor cassette tape “All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling” has been found and posted to YouTube. Can’t wait to see what these creative lads do next. Bad news: Canada has been struggling in curling, the one Olympic sport that only Canada really cares about, but good news: GoFundMe stops funneling millions in donations to the astroturf Truckupation. Godspeed You! Big Dumbasses.

It was all bad news for crypto this weekend, which is good news for everyone else. Katie Notopoulos tracked down psuedonymous Bored Ape founders Wylie “Gordon Goner” Aronow and Greg “Gargamel” Solano. Crypto dudes are mad, but unfortunately not strong or useful. Max Read started “Mapping the Celebrity NFT Complex” and Dirty Bubble Media tried to figure out “Who paid for Reese Witherspoon's NFT collection?” because it certainly wasn’t Reese Witherspoon. And Kevin Roose wrote about Helium, “a decentralized wireless network for ‘internet of things’ devices, powered by cryptocurrency.” It almost makes sense until Roose notices that the whole scheme “exists in a regulatory gray area” and “might also technically violate your internet service provider’s terms of service,” but by crypto standards I guess that’s hardly any crime. Anyway here’s the most cursed headline I’ve ever seen: “AssangeDAO raises $38M in donations to help free WikiLeaks founder.”

Daniel Ek’s apology-of-the-day follows a weekend purge of 70+ episodes of Joe Rogan’s audio survey of modern fascist thought where Rogan or a guest used the n-word. Somehow it has been left to the less-famous Butler from Arcade Fire to write that musicians are mostly mad at Spotify because the company is constantly robbing them. This week I expect we’ll enter the “Spotify staff noisily quitting” phase of this long-simmering fiasco, so keep an eye out for that.

They did nasal swabs on a deer. In The Hollywood Reporter Kim Masters noticed that the alleged journalists at CNN sure seem willing to forgive Jeff Zucker for a lot of stuff that they wouldn’t overlook for any other public figure. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson watched all four “Jackass” movies in a row and was still able to write something good about it. And applications are open for the New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship (probably don’t pick Will Shortz as your mentor though).

Today’s Song: “People Who Died” by The Jim Carroll Band

~ twenty six tabs and a bottle of wine ~

I guess today I get to find out what the GY!BE fan + Tabs reader Venn diagram looks like. Sign my online guestbook @fka_tabs or @TodayinTabs. I’m about to take a couple weeks off but if you subscribe now you won’t have to remember to do it later. Godspeed You! Blessed Enabler.

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