Once Upon a Dump in Hollywood
I’ll spare you the details (unless you go out of your way to specifically ask, and then I’ll dish) but this week has been tough. I’ve maintained that this Dump-space is going to be as Covid-19-free as possible, because you can get that news anywhere. You didn’t come here so I can tell you what the death total is in Spain, or how the market is reacting to recent legislation.
No, you came here to be entertained by weird stories I find on the internet and more likely, my commentary on said articles because who actually reads the links anyway?
In Sam-specific news out here in Doha, after many years of recommending to any grocery store employee that would listen, one of them (Carrefour) finally started selling LaCroix. Of course… I haven’t been to the store in over a week so I am limiting myself to one can per day for the next 20 days. The cans are sold only in individual units, because, sure, and I’m paying like $2.50 per can, but I’ve got a hankering for water that bubbles and tastes of fruit, so I’ll pay it.
To the links!
What would be really useful right now would be a way to access all of the internet from a date, say, like 12 days ago, and cut out all the other stuff. But I can’t. So instead I just click Next Next Next Next a lot until I get to older stories that might provide some levity. Take this one for example: 14 fun facts about love and sex in the animal kingdom. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will share two of the details from this story, in case you aren’t that interested in how animals are hanging and banging.
Fact #1—> Male giraffes drink female giraffe’s pee to see if she’s in heat. The male giraffe tongue is basically a “ovulation stick” that can tell if she’s ready to go. Is there a video of this happening? You bet. Thanks Smithsonian Magazine!
Fact #2 —> Female praying mantises often decapitate their sexual partner, mid-coitus, and eat them alive. Why? BECAUSE DOING IT TAKES A LOT OF ENERGY and she’s hungry, and needs nourishment to fertilize the eggs. I guess the other option for the men is death, because the lifespan for a praying mantis is max a year and on average 6 months. As he’s dying, from you know, his head being lopped off, his body convulses and pumps the sperm into the lady. So he goes out doing something he enjoys. YOLO, I guess?
A successful dump reading list is a lot like a mix-tape playlist. You’ve got to get that order just right. There are some of you who may be are way too grossed out by story one to have even continued reading. Others are maybe so disturbed by the giraffe fact that you didn’t even read the mantis fact. What I am saying is I need to cool it down and get things back on even keel. In my time of quarantine, I’ve taken to word games. I left my scrabble board at school, so I downloaded ScrabbleGo. I’m currently 11-0, though three of my wins have been against an older man named John H who is really not good at Scrabble but keeps challenging me. I also downloaded and paid for a NYT Crossword subscription. I just completed the Tuesday in about 17 minutes. I don’t know how I came across it, but hey, here we are. A brief history of word games. I tried to tell Leen about it, but she died of boredom. So, now I have only you, dear reader. Created in 1913, the Crossword was a page-filler. It quickly became the most popular part of the paper. Maybe we can mark that as the moment that journalism began its long slow crawl to the grave. Speaking of graves, they did find a word-game at the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square is a five word column that reads “the farmer Arepo works a plow.” Who Arepo was, we will never know.
There are at least three readers of the Dump who are in the medical profession, so this is lightly pandering to my audience. One of my favorite authors is a guy called Shea Serrano. He writes for the Ringer, but has written a number of NYT Best-Sellers, about rap music, the NBA, and most recently, movies. He also occasionally puts out short PDFs about tv shows. He released one about the Office a few years ago and this month, he has one about Scrubs out. He typically takes some wild premise and writes 1200+ words about it. A chapter in the movie book, for example, is: Were the raptors in Jurassic Park misunderstood? The premise for the excerpt I’m dumping today is: Imagine you’re at a Doctor dinner. All the doctors from tv and film are there. Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Doolittle, Dr. Ross, Dr. Ross Geller, McDreamy, McSteamy, Dr. Quinn etc. You get the point. Anyway, you have to fill a table with the most interesting doctors. Who would you pick? I disagree with most of the picks here, but you know, we all have our own most interesting doctors and that’s okay! It’s about the experience. See who he picked here.
The Dumps used to be a music-heavy blog. I used to dump while listening to music and I’d tell you all about it. I now am dumping total silence, save for the hum of my water cooler and the gentle din of the brown noise we are using to lull Eliot to sleep. I had a pretty grim realization recently: I think music peaked in 2013. Yeezus, Random Access Memories, Modern Vampires of the City, Beyonce, Walkin on a Pretty Daze; Royals, Blurred Lines, Hold On, We’re Going Home, Roar, Hey Brother. It’s no coincidence that the year I think music stopped being good is the same year I can say I first spent outside of the USA full time. So maybe there’s some correlation there, but, and I haven’t given it a lot of thought: Are we sure music is good anymore? One guy that I really liked, at about the 2013 time was a guy called Francis Starlite, lead singer of Francis and the Lights. He’s never sat down for an interview before and many of you likely have never heard of him. He is “famous” for his one take music videos, like this one, and this one. Oooooh this one that came out in 2013. These music videos often feature him doing crazy dance moves, and that speaks to me. From the interview: As a 6-year-old at summer camp, he discovered his body had an automatic reaction to music, that this reaction was different from other people’s, and that seemingly everyone loved to watch. For anyone who has ever seen me dance, either throwing my shoulder out, making someone throw up, or air-humping every object at an empty bar post-brunch in Doha, you know that this description calls to me. Kindred spirits me and Francis Starlite are. Hopefully he releases this album he’s been working on soon. Maybe that would bring me back to music. Read more here: Francis and the Lights, Pop Star Interrupted.
I would love to enter into this post with an air of superiority, like “I watch better TV than you.” But that’s a lie. I watch trash. I am selective about the trash that I watch (Anyone watching Drive to Survive?), which, I guess makes this post weird. Last month, long before I knew what social distancing was, I watched The Circle. All of it. I watched every second of that show and thought: wow these people are terrible but I really hope that Shubam wins this thing. He seems so nice. I want someone nice to win this show. The circle gives us a chilling look at what the future of communication could look like if we all end up stuck indoors. How many of us only recently learned about Zoom? (Rumor has it they’ve got 20 million new users in the last few weeks). The Circle is basically what our life will be if we don’t get a vaccine. So what happens to dating if there is no cure? Well let me direct your attention to Dating in the Dark. Another terrible Netflix offering where people court one another blindly for a few week and then only get to see one another after they’ve accepted a proposal. Settle in. This is the future. And I am here to tell you that both shows are coming back for season 2. I suspect Netflix will rush these to production, though quarantine could make things difficult. But love will find a way. Read more here.
And that’s it. Hope however you are spending your time sitting at home is going well. I’ve heard from quite a few of you that you were happy to have the Dumps back in your life. I too am happy to be back. The Dump is only as good as the readers (and the stories they send me) I have. Only one person took me up on the five sentence update on their life, and to be honest, not until this moment did I realize that I didn’t respond. So you know what’s new with me, but I do not know what is new with you. Fix that. All the best. Sam
