Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 4/1/22

Paying the Piper Edition

Everyone here in the Administration office is running ragged at the moment; it seems that someone in the office has been putting off doing their income taxes, and now the whole staff is working overtime to correct this oversight. While your administrator would like very much to blame it on a host of other things, the truth of the matter is that he’s pretty overwhelmed with the task, and always has been. Math is hard for him; he’s a language-based creative type.

But this is less about math and more about money. He’s not solving for X, here; rather, he’s putting all of the money he spent into separate categories and accounting for how all of the funds got divvied up. It’s tedious, made more so by his inherent and seemingly eternal disdain for money and the institutions surrounding it. This is contradictory, of course, since he sells books and comics and gets paid for writing and buys things with it, both essential and non-essential.  That the administrator recognizes the contradiction and still decries all lucre as filthy, and unconscionable is just part of what makes life in a post-apocalyptic world so interesting.

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Countdown to Surgery: T-Minus Six Weeks

I’m anxious. Not in a bad way, but I’m really ready to get this junk off of me. I had to get back on the Ideal Protein protocol after Greece, and it was pretty easy, to be honest. I can’t really process sugar or a lot of carbs anymore. I work best with a very high protein diet and a small amount of fat. And the Greece trip confirmed something that I already knew: I have to incorporate light to moderate exercise into my daily life. I ate and drank rather freely while I was over there, but practicing portion control, drinking water as often as I could, etc. Since I was unable to control when I ate (not every three hours, as I’d been doing), I made a point to refuel when we did eat, and if I snacked, I made sure it was protein-based. And then there was all of the mountain climbing and hiking and trekking I did. Want to know how much weight I gained on vacation? One pound. The takeaway for all of this is, I can sustain these habits. I can self-regulate. But only if the exercise is present.

Proof of Life, circa late March. The mustache is nearly ready to start shaping.

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My Very Late and Not Very Original Take on the Slap

I can’t comment with any kind of authority how it did or didn’t set anyone back, but I can tell you this: I was both disappointed and embarrassed for both Smith and Rock. I’m somewhat mollified by the fact that Smith issued an apology, but it’s kinda too little, too late for me. Especially when you play the “Christian upbringing” card. Unless Smith is somehow filing this under the “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” category, I’d say that his ostentatious little stunt has exactly zero Christian value attached to it. But that’s become secondary to the backlash I’ve seen—granted, it took three days, seventy-two hours of media clumping around the car crash, before the narrative changed to “people are dying and this is what we’re obsessively talking about?”

Ordinarily, I’d pooh-pooh that sentiment, mostly because there’s always a Debbie Downer on Twitter to mention blood diamonds and fracking whenever anyone starts arguing about Star Wars movies. But this time, there may have been enough push back against the Schadenfreude for everyone to say, “yeah, you know what? This is bullshit that doesn’t concern me.”

That collective response from the zeitgeist is about the only glimmer of hope in the giant tire fire that has now been consigned to the “Worst Oscar Moments” YouTube videos in perpetuity. There were certainly better stories from Oscar night, and were it not for the Smith’s marital hijinks playing out in real time, we’d have been watching the clips with Lady Gaga and Liza Minelli all week and going, “Aw, see? Maybe the Oscars don’t suck after all!” Whoops!

There were hundreds of memes. This one was my favorite.

And just one quick note about the Academy Awards in general. They aren’t going anywhere, which is to say, they’re going nowhere, man. Maybe they need to not be televised, though. Just put a camera next to the podium like they do with the science and technical awards and give us soundbyte clips of funny things people say in their acceptance speeches. That’s all we need, and frankly, that’s all the members of the Academy need, too. The celebrities of today can’t handle roasting, or even ribbing, and if this is the future, where people can double down on a bad joke with a horrible or even violent response, it’d save all of them a lot of publicity damage control to go back to the banquet format call it a day.

It might add a little luster back on the award, not that it needs any. We still use it as a measure of quality, even when the fix is in, and every award is handicapped by Internet Wags who say, “Oh, this is the ‘Oops’ award, since they didn’t win Best Actor last time they were nominated .” Think about it: the Best Picture win only counts if it’s a movie we can all agree on. Otherwise, the award is tacitly overlooked, or it’s factored out because of how popular the movie was *cough*Titanic*cough*.

But not if it’s a genre movie, no sireebob! Remember, the Best Picture category used to be called “Best Production,” which is all about the spectacle, baby. No matter what the maligned genre film might be in any discussion, we stridently cry, “It won six Oscars!” Yeah, for sound design, costuming, special make-up effects, special visual effects, cinematography, editing...the awards they hurry through on the show so that the actors and actresses have enough time to thank everyone and get a dig in on whatever their pet project or personal cause of the day is.

I know we’re not supposed to like the old Studio system and how rigidly stars’ lives and careers were controlled, but I can see the advantages. Having smarter people do their talking for them is something that the majority of them would really benefit from.

As for Smith and Rock... Whatever Will Smith’s next project is, he’ll crush it, because he wants to get back to work and put as much stuff between himself and the slap as possible. But Chris Rock? He can excoriate Smith in his next stand-up special, and probably should. He’s in the catbird seat for once. It was a crummy joke, and from a Monday Morning Quarterback standpoint, he probably shouldn’t have told it, but it wasn’t so bad, so offensive as to merit the response it got, nor the stink it engendered. And let’s not forget this, ever: you see Jada Pinkett Smith roll her eyes dismissively (the only response worth giving) and Will Smith laugh at the joke before they cut away. Next thing you know, he’s walking up and handing out a slap that, God help me, still looks like a stage fight. It was a bad night, all around, and no one came out of it without getting some of it on them.

We need to try harder to not care about stuff like this.