WHATS UP SPECIAL ED?!?!
We love re-reading old DYM Off-Season posts in our free time. We might be one of our top 5 favorite authors. One of our all-time favs is the one from June 2018.
That was the week Trump pressured the NFL to make a rule banning players from kneeling during the national anthem, which is exactly what DYM's fake Trump had done just 3 weeks prior. This was just the first in an increasingly disturbing series of events that seemed to have been toungue-in-cheekedly predicated in the previous month's DYM. If only we had known then that the Trumps would go on to ruin all three of our most treasured past-times: NFL football, Star Wars and election-time conspiracy theories. Who knows? Maybe we would have done things differently.
But the REALLY ominous shit that fucked our heads up for real back in 2018, was that we had a rough draft going for the June '18 DYMOS that was prefaced with fake Trump inviting Justify (the horse) to the White House to celebrate his Triple Crown (at the time, most championship teams were rejecting the offer).
We were on vacation in the Adirondacks at the time, so we weren't planning to publish until at least a few days later. That left the door open for these time-criminals like "Sheriff" David Clarke to steal our fucking joke before we even wrote it.
And it just so happened that later that night the wife and ourselves got a tarot card reading that was spooky at the time, and has become more and more prescient over the last year-and-a-half. Needless to say that week was an eye-opener for us; our perspective on a lot of things changed forever that week. And we haven't gone on a vacation since.
Sooth-saying is, itself, one of the many things we used to joke about before it actually became a part of our newly dystopian reality. Long-time readers know that as much as we love making fun of the news and pretending to write mock epic poetry, we really hang our hats on our (fake) powers of PROGNOSTICATION:
WhosHotStradamus is one of the True OG DYM characters - going all the way back to the message board lost tapes era - and we recently introduced you all to WhosHotStradamus's new kayfabe animus, Miss Cleo.
Perhaps subconsciously, the Miss Cleo character is an acknowledgement, and reminder to ourselves, that the majority of our most accurate predictions do not inform any actionable advice. We've come to realize that we're NOT really the Nostradamus of Special Ed, but more-so the Cassandra of the Group Text: Cursed to utter accurate and calamitous prophecies that none are wont to believe.
We only bring this all up because it was really striking to read the first paragraph of that June '18 post which says "This is the absolute weirdest time to be alive. The news is getting more and more surreal every day."
And, well, here we are.
Going forward, we're gonna refrain from earnest social commentary as much as possible lest we invoke another Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
We do have a lot of notes on the buddy comedy about these two Greek gods who get incarnated on earth, and their quest for a warm buttery waffle which eventually leads them to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Not that our mythopoaeia posts are any safer from Zule's minions, but at least they're a lot more fun to write.
DYM OFF-SEASON NEWS UPDATE!!
Our top story of the day was passed along on the group text by none other than the Commish Emeritus. We promptly Cassandra'd the fuck out of it:
It looks like our monkey paw is still in effect, cause we recorded all four late-night talk shows on Monday and Seth Meyers WAS in fact the only one to mention the Belichick story; although he missed the VERY VERY obvious joke that the comedy gods had teed up for him.
That fucking guy never fails to disappoint. The Seth Meyers show has always leaned toward a dry dead-pan humor which has become very awkward now that there's no audible laughter after any of the jokes. Even if the jokes are funny it sounds like a comedian DYING on stage. It's soooo weird. They gotta bring in a laugh-track or something. It's not dishonest if you're not trying to fool anybody, and everybody knows theres no audience, why do this to yourself?
Anyways, what he surely meant to have said was something more like this:
You're welcome, Seth.
Fallon had Bill Burr on (which was hilarious) and they're both actual Pats fans, so he's not touching it, and Colbert and Kimmel had much more heartfelt takes on the real news things from last week. They were fine, but we're pretty saturated with News Takes right now.
After a truly apocalyptic event like this, we get our most fire intellectual takes from the "think pieces" in Slate and The Atlantic and 'em. This morning we came across two such articles that were both extremely in our wheelhouse - talking about low-and-outside-fastballs to the Yoenis Cespedes that is our imagination.
The first, from Vanity Fair, details the wide swath of unflattering rumors about Melania Trump that have all been sourced from this one "friend" of hers. Apparently, the problem for Melly Mel is, this person is literally her only "friend."
We think this is a problem that a lot people can relate to right now -
Certainly anybody that decided to just hang out with just one friend during COVID, then made that friend resent you by waxing them in the fantasy football league that they used to be the Commissioner of.
Lord knows we been there.
Last but not least, to bring it all full-circle, we've got a piece from The Atlantic that's really our shit, and we WISH we could say we thought of it first cause - damn.
This is some real grad-school-sociology-type writing, and we are HERE FOR IT!!
Check this out:
The fashionability of raw pelts originally derived from an ancient belief that the wearer might inherit some of the traits of the animal—an instinct that has persisted from the Stone Age to modern Fifth Avenue.
Goddamn. We might be in love!! We wish we could take that sentence home and live with it forever. Kiss it and tell it we love it before work every morning.
"In anthropology, this is known as the fetish, and fetish is also the root word for fashion,” Barnard said. It’s significant, then, that one of the most prominent symbols adopted by the far right is the Gadsden flag—the Revolutionary-era banner emblazoned with a hissing rattlesnake and the words don’t tread on me—which was nearly ubiquitous on Wednesday. “Again, the use of animal imagery to suggest anti-government values and beliefs,” Barnard said. Perhaps Angeli and Mostofsky were attempting to cut the same figure: virile, in touch with their manhood, everything that those debilitated liberals are not. The so-called real America, finally taking back its supposed authority.
So good. Man. We have no more comment, these quotes are PERFECT!!
The far right has a long history of adopting Nordic imagery, taken as many of its members are with the fiction of a marauding all-white ethnostate terrorizing Europe. “It conveys white-nationalist sentiments of the ‘proper’ origins of white people,” says Katalin Medvedev, a fashion scholar at the University of Georgia. “Their perceived entitlement, and false claims to the ownership and leadership of the U.S. nation.” (It should also be noted that this reactionary fantasy is entirely ahistorical. Vikings were a multicultural people, and they never wore those famous spiked helmets. In fact, a modern Germanic pagan group, the Troth, published a statement condemning those like the QAnon Shaman for sparking violence.)
The world is a beautiful place, you guys.
