To Old-ly Go

Jeff Bezos did not blow up William Shatner today.

Don’t worry, Bill, we will all definitely see death. It’s Wednesday, welcome to:

Not satisfied with ruining high schools, U.S. News and World Report is now ranking elementary and middle schools too. This should drive the few remaining sane parents in the 9.9% completely off the cliff. So far reactions have been mixed, with some hating it, and others really hating it.

In South Dakota’s Great Plains Zoo, a rare snow leopard died with Covid-19 symptoms despite “a team of keepers… providing Baya with around-the-clock care” in striking contrast to the state’s human prisons, which “had one of the highest percentages of COVID-19 prisoner infection rates in the nation” but where there was a “lack of social distancing and little… done to protect healthy inmates from exposure to those who were sick.”

Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell transformed into a human 😬 emoji at a show in Bethel, NY and subsequently retired from not exactly singing, citing health and addiction issues. I make a lot of jokes here but I have unironically loved Smash Mouth since their first album, so this is sad.

A new study found that Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and FB Messenger are all so dreadful that Twitter, of all things, is the only social media platform to make its users less likely to believe Covid-19 conspiracy theories. “[W]e theorize that variation across key features make some platforms more fertile places for conspiracy beliefs than others,” write the study’s authors, which is Science for “everyone on Twitter is so full of shit that if they told you water was wet you’d drink sand.”

In other news: Area Man Weed.

The New York Times put down a marker on its future film rights to the story of the improbable number of bodies and amount of missing money surrounding South Carolina legal legacy and irl Flannery O’Connor character Alex Murdaugh, which continues to be both incredibly Southern and extremely Gothic. “How much, investigators have been trying to learn, did Alex Murdaugh wield his powerful connections to protect his family and amass his own fortune?” Is it: a lot? I bet it’s a lot. Also today in crime: Emma Berquist finally wrote Gawker’s first good post, “True Crime Is Rotting Our Brains.” “I would rather get stabbed again than have TikTok users descend like vultures on my social media, zooming in on pictures of my messy bedroom to analyze the tedious minutia of my deeply average life.”

Today in Tech: Wendy’s… Envisions AI-Rich Apps… With New Google Cloud Deal? That headline just kept getting worse. And Minh Duong not only rickrolled his entire school district, but also made it a model of ethical hacking and responsible disclosure.

Turning to politics: The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer ripped Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito a new shadow docket. da Wemple z0ne argues that contrary to the claims of CNN’s George Costanza Bryan Stelter and constipated cosplay lumberjack Tucker Carlson: “there is a New York Times of the right. It’s called … the New York Times.” In The New Republic, Natalie Shure reports that political-ish thinkfluencer Andrew Yang still sucks. And Robin Sloan proposes a book to be made into a movie to be made into a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson presidency that is hopefully not as “cheerful[ly] fascist” as it could otherwise be.

‘Allo ‘Allo Wot’s All This Then: On the blighter side of the news, “Anyone who’s into sprinkles will know what I’m on about. Sprinkles you can get in this country are totally shit. They look wank, they bake wank. Birthday Bruce will never be the same again.” And Brexit grifter Nigel Farage has a new job doing advertisements for drug dealers on Cameo. Sassiest plug around!

Heartbreaking: Cameron Wilson found the Worst Person you Know but he’s Spanish and absolutely doesn’t care.

Today’s Song: La Luz, “In the Country”

~ Well, it’s no trick to make a lot of tabs if all you want is to make a lot of tabs. ~

The Bad Art Friend is off today, but will be back tomorrow with more Discourse. Please pay me, I need to smuggle all these sprinkles to Leeds somehow.