The Secret Of The Knäckebrottelefonierer

Meet November Intern Kira, and Today in Animals.

Today in Animals:

Grain spilled from railcars along the tracks can be a tempting treat for bears… With enough moisture from snow and rain, “the spilled grain actually ferments in place and becomes a de facto brewery.”

Grizzly bears eat the fermented grain and get drunk, which would be kind of funny except

Bears that are attracted to the fermented grain “might fall asleep right on site if they get drunk first. They can, and have, fallen asleep in a drunken stupor right on the tracks,” [retired federal ecologist Chuck] Neal said.

“Other times they loiter on the tracks until a train approaches, at high speed, then drunkenly attempt to outrun the train — no can do — and are smashed,” he added.

This has been happening for more than forty years, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad—”no can do”—doesn’t intend to do anything about it.

Dril tweeted: “they should call it ‘ daylight Sucking Mine’ . Fuck clocks”

Bored Ape Yacht Club took the crypto-nerd “laser eyes” meme too far at ApeFest 2023, lasering the eyes of attendees until some of them got “Photokeratitis — aka, ‘welder’s eye,’” via UV stage lights, Jess Weatherbed reported for The Verge.

“I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore,” said @CryptoJune777. “Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital.”

“Listen. I like satire as much as anybody. But this is simply far too on-the-nose,” writes Albert Burneko. The whole thing with the apes seems like it happened a thousand years ago, in a gentler era when we had a zero-interest-rate Ponzi bubble instead of genocide, so a news story about crypto goobers doing something ridiculous feels weirdly nostalgic. But if you love to risk snow blindness and bankruptcy while dancing with white dudes I guess they’re still at it. Matt Levine also summed up the SBF verdict today, lamenting that Bankman-Fried’s “‘actually it’s complicated’ defense of the collapse of his crypto exchange” was “not, on its own terms, true.” Levine also mentioned Elon Musk’s baffling attempt to create a mechanical Reply Guy with his AI company’s new edgelord chatbot Grok: “Traditional large-language-model chatbots are fluent, confident and inaccurate; Grok is fluent, confident, inaccurate and also ‘snarky,’ amazing.”

And while we’re in the cursèd Venn overlap of animals, crypto, AI, and robots: Boston Dynamics put googly eyes and a tiny cowboy hat on its terrifying dog robot, which can apparently talk now?

If your local police department buys one of these you should throw it a welcoming party, with festive balloons. Just don’t accidentally pull the battery out or shut it off. Here’s an info-sheet so you know exactly what not to do.

One person who is happily outside the cursèd Venn overlap of animals, crypto, AI, and robots is our brand new November Intern Kira Deshler.

It's Getting Kinda Hazy

What up, I’m Kira, I’m 28, and I never f****** learned how to read. Just kidding! I can read, but I do have a lifelong fear of reading out loud in class that haunts me to this day. I love to write, but if you try to force me to articulate my thoughts IRL I’ll probably just send you to an article I’ve written, which gets really awkward when I start going “no, it’s aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash double you double you double you…”

The government knows me as Kira, the DMV knows me as the owner of a really cool Ford Fiesta named Dory, but my given name (to me, by me) is Dr. Lesbian because I run an urgent care clinic for lesbian pop culture emergencies in the form of my newsletter Paging Dr. Lesbian. I don’t have an M.D. (Manipulator of Discourse) or a Ph.D. (Philosopher of Discourse) but I do have an actual Master’s degree that hangs in my bathroom, getting sweaty.

I generally spend my time watching lesbian films (I’ve seen all of them—please make more), ‘90s blockbusters, the latest network procedurals (is anyone else watching the Magnum P.I. reboot? Hello, hotties!), and thinking about Patrick Swayze (RIP king). I also write about TV and film for straight people, fan culture, and I’m especially good at writing “what character are you based on your zodiac sign” articles. I like to giggle but (controversially) don’t like comedy. Find me laughing at horror movies instead. Boo! 

—Kira Deshler is “Practical Magic (1998)”

Reader, for the next four weeks you are in the hands of not one but two Cancers, so get ready for double my normal bullshit. Page Dr. Lesbian in case of emergency, and thanks again to Mysterious Benefactor Ruth Ann Harnisch for funding what has turned out to be the prestigious Tabs Lesbian Internship Program, 2023.

Adam Sharp: “There’s a word in modern German slang, Knäckebrottelefonierer, which describes a person who talks into their phone while holding it in front of their mouth like a cracker. It literally means ‘crispbread phoner’”

The reaction in the Native world is quickly evolving. It went from the initial denial, to shock and then rage. She has her defenders, who criticize the CBC for telling the story, instead of leaving it to Indigenous people to tell. Others point to their interpretation of Cree law, and say that, by that law, Sainte-Marie is Indigenous. People who are angry about what she’s seemingly done have targeted and harassed the Piapot family in Saskatchewan because of their connection to the singer.

Sainte-Marie’s son Cody Wolfchild has apparently confirmed the CBC’s reporting, and posted on Facebook that his mother darkened her hair and used skin-darkening makeup. According to him she did it because she was Italian-American, and “big nosed Italian girls were not popular in the 50’s.”

Silvio Dante from The Sopranos says “It’s anti-Italian discrimination.”

Everything Extremely Normal On X, The Age of Consent Polling App: Richard Hanania, who according to O.R.P. Substack founder Hamish McKenzie “makes a strong case for what he calls ‘enlightened centrism’”, would like to know how much it should cost to rape a fourteen year old, while Aella wonders what if it was a 13 year old, and they were gonna die anyway? [Dead dove, do not eat.]

Today in Media: Taylor Swift reporter hired. Jazmine Hughes fired (“resigns”) from the NY Times for “signing a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza.” Word up! It’s a huge L for the Gray Lady. Wired politics can’t be worse than the Times’ politics desk. And Charlotte Klein on the Washington Post’s identity crisis in this woefully Trump-less interregnum.

And Finally: “Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Intake in Resurfaced Video.” Absolutely the weirdest guy, and in an incredibly crowded field.

Today’s Song: Blood Command, “Cult Drugs”

Lmao it’s so dark out. Please subscribe so the sun will eventually return. Thanks to Music Intern Sam for the five or six song options he offered me today from which I chose the first one without listening to any of the others yet. It is, as I said, extremely dark right now.

Oh also they gave me another Bluesky code: bsky-social-uciss-7xzgg

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