In any event, listening to the news yesterday reminded me that truth is stranger than fiction, for the obvious reason that we expect our fiction to be realistic, and sometimes reality is not. Reality doesn't play by your rules! It's unreal!
Just yesterday there were several things in the news that seemed to defy reasonable expectations, such as:
Madonna turned 60.
Now, you can take this as proof that Billy Joel was right, but let's face it, thirty-odd years ago people would have expected some awful disease or overdose to take out Madonna, if not the director of one of her movies, but here she is. Heck, people who thought she might still be having birthdays at this point would have just assumed that it wouldn't make the news at this point. (I don't want to sound mean, but Toni Basil turned 70 on September 22, 2013, and it didn't make headlines.)
Speaking of headlines, we have: Newspapers versus Trump.
As libertarian mag Reason put it, "Newspapers team up to tell Trump they aren't colluding against him." Apparently the president not likely newspapers is akin to him sending storm troopers to burn them down. Wait until they find out that Trump HATES "Garfield"!
Roundup in Cheerios.
Traces of glyphosate, the weed killing chemical found in popular weed killer Roundup, were found in some popular General Mills cereals, including Cheerios. Which is not a popular additive in cereal. However, isn't it fitting somehow that a product like Roundup could turn up in a famously round cereal?
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| You know, for kids! |
In other food news, thieves in Georgia made off with $100,000 worth of ramen noodles, which by my back-of-the-envelope calculation is enough for 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meals, give or take a few.
Of course the sad news of the day was the passing of Aretha Franklin. I had a lot of admiration for her voice and her style, although I can't say I'm a fan of soul music the way many white people were pretending to be yesterday. I don't mean that no white person can be a fan of soul, not at all, but I'm just way too square. I'm so white that the most interesting part of the phrase "sriracha mayonnaise" to me is "mayonnaise." I'm just hopeless.
Anyway, I loved her in The Blues Brothers but not in Blues Brothers 2000, because you couldn't love anyone in Blues Brothers 2000. Her hardscrabble character from the first movie is inexplicably selling luxury cars in the second because -- why? Because it's obvious that Dan Ackroyd and John Landis were the only guys in America who didn't get the first movie, even less so than ol' snowmen like me. Anyway, it's certainly not Franklin's fault, and I'm sorry to see her go.
Finally, and this is not news from yesterday but I only heard it so it was news to me: A woman in Inverness, Scotland, rescued an injured bumble bee and nursed it back to health, and now they are inseparable. And if that does not have you singing "Eric the Half a Bee," I'm not sure if we can be friends anymore.
So, with facts like these, who needs fiction?
2 comments:
Love it - newspapers collude to say they aren't colluding. It's getting to the point where about the only thing I believe in papers like the Old Grey Hag or the Washington Toast is the date, and even that seems questionable sometimes.
RIP, Aretha. I was in my teens when R-E-S-P-E-C-T came out and was absolutely floored by it. Heard it yesterday in a waiting room and my eyes welled up. Soul & Funk I liked (late wife played alto sax in a funk band), even some of the early rap, but what it has all devolved into is absolute rubbish. I'll take "Eric the Half a Bee" any day of the week!
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