Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 02/12/24

Superbowl Cooldown Edition

North Texas is truly a place of miracles and wonders. We endured drizzling rain on Friday and Saturday, and then Sunday suddenly turned cold enough to produce flurries of snow. SNOW. Nothing major, mind you. It was just enough to cocoon the Administrator’s seasoned orange Vibe, aka The Great Pumpkin, in a blanket of white powder so that it resembled the world’s largest Hostess Sno-Ball. Overnight, the temperature plummeted, producing the crackly, pebbly ice that is tailor-made for inducing a concussion. Before that had a chance to harden into sheets of murder ice, the sun came out with the dawn, and the temperature rose to a respectable 65 degrees before noon, obliterating all but the stealthiest of ice and snow, hiding in the shadows of west-facing buildings in the hopes of laying out some unsuspecting pedestrian via a fatal slip and slide.

You cannot convince me, or anyone else on staff here at the bunker, that we are not being punished for someone’s egregious reneging on a contract, or someone lost a fiddling contest, or who-knows-what, but this is not the usual order of business. I’m not actually blaming Y2K, mind you, but I can say with some authority that an awful lot of everyday ordinary life stuff (like weather) post-2000 has been a real tire fire.

Superbowl Shenanigans

It figures; the year I stopped watching the big game, it was actually a decent game. I’m not really bitter about it (mostly) because there’s enough pop culture saturation to ensure that I see every single picture of a three second moment of the game, on the sidelines, a place where far worse interactions have gone down both in the Super Bowl, and during the regular season, but for this one guy dating the most popular woman in the world, he is being scrutinized at the molecular level.

They are excoriating him for 3 seconds. “They” being the collective hive-mob that is Social Media, a monster I’ve come to completely loathe and despise. If there is anyone in the world who hasn’t lost their shit at a parent or guardian (or a coach or a teacher or a boss, etc. ad nausem, ad infinitum) and gone off for all of three seconds, please come walk on the water over to me so I can shake your hand. Wait, scratch that; even Jesus flipped some tables when he found moneylenders in church.

None of this would be an issue if half of the country wasn’t masticating on an imaginary political conspiracy concern so they can take to their platform of choice and voice their indignation, spew their wackadoodle theories, and in general make an ass of themselves in a public display of gross ignorance. When did that become a thing? I know we’re not supposed to bully people anymore, but when the goofus in class used to ask a really dumb question, he was peppered with scorn for being a dumbass. Nowadays, that’s called “engagement” and it doesn’t matter if you take a fool to school, the algorithm sees that and says, “You seem to like dumbasses. Here’s a few more for you to get all worked up about.”

Mom! Get off my Twitter!

You can’t really think this is a good idea, this grand Social Media construct full of sound and fury, signifying nothing and yet seeming to mean everything. And OH, YES, I get the profound irony of having this virtual conversation in the very place I just threw under the bus. Any shade you want to throw back at me is not without some merit. But, let me just point out, you have to want to read my words in order to, you know, read my words. This newsletter works on a subscription model. You opt in, you get to interact with me. You can’t stumble across my nonsense, because no one is blowing up two sentences and making a late-night talk show host monologue one-liner out of it. But the guy who complained that Netflix made Alexander the Great gay in a documentary was, ostensibly, serious and ignorant all at once. His engagement, subsequently, went through the roof. Sen-frigging-sational.

Dude’s got two Oscars. And he’s shilling for the worst donuts on Earth. I’ll bet you a Krispy Kreme this is the #1 Halloween costume in Boston for 2024.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Superbowl. The commercials were fun, I guess, for all of those famous people getting paid what can only be considered a shit-ton of money to act foolish, lampoon themselves, or just shill for the mega-corporations. Nothing made me laugh or even giggle. There were nods of recognition, mostly from seeing two people who were in that show back in the day being together to do a thing or say some lines. I mean, man, Mr. T? I get it, you know. It’s nostalgia. But we’ve wrapped around now to the point where what people are eager to experience, i.e. the mythical 80’s, are for me merely memories of a time when everyone smoked and people were afraid of having sex and the music was electronic and echoey. It creeps me out. Also, I feel a little sad for Mr. T, because he’s got that one spot he’s been standing on for all this time, and people still want him there and nowhere else. Jim Varney at least wrote his own scripts.

After all these years, and the monkeys, and the talking babies, and the Clydesdales, and everything else, the only things I care about anymore are the movie trailers, all of which looked like something people would want to see in theaters. So, yay, Chiefs!

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”