It's A Good Time Friday! - April 26, 2024
Inside jokes, the one true ketchup, and more
Happy end of Mercury Retrograde and happy final Friday of April!
Sorry to disappoint 0.2% of you, but I’m not going to talk about The Tortured Poets Department (except to say that I’m not going to talk about it!) in this newsletter. Maybe once I’ve processed more. But you’ve got the rest of the internet’s hot takes, which should give you about 31 days’ worth of reading.
Let’s get to the good times:
➡️ If you’ve ever been in a long-term relationship, whether romantic or platonic, chances are you have some ongoing inside jokes: phrases or words that make absolutely no sense to anyone but your group of two or your inner circle, but which you will repeat ad infinitum.
This post from Brendon Leonard of Semi-Rad illustrates just how prevalent these are — and maybe how these snippets of randomness are the key to sustaining hilarity and connection throughout our lives?
And for those of you who know: Other cats. What’s their deal?
➡️ As someone who once wrote an essay on why Heinz is the one true ketchup (something I believe all Pittsburghers can get behind), I was pleased to find this 2004 Malcom Gladwell piece from the New Yorker archives.
It covers not only why it’s so hard to develop a ketchup that tastes better than Heinz, but it also recounts the famous Grey Poupon commercial of the ‘80s that I happened just reference last weekend. Inside jokes!
➡️ This one’s for the baseball nerds and, full disclosure, is me being proud of my husband for his excellent work. As you may likely know, Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s number 42 on April 15, 1997, so no new players on any team were permitted to claim it moving forward.
But there were a handful of then-current players who were wearing that number at the time (one, in fact, who was wearing it during the announcement at Shea Stadium!). Here’s a roundup of 9 of those players and their thoughts on donning the iconic 42.
➡️ Someone I follow on IG mentioned that they recently rewatched the movie Singles, which had been a touchstone of their teenage years, and now found it misogynist and embarrassing to watch (I paraphrase, I can’t find the post now.)
This makes me sad. I still fully love it, flaws and all. And though I realize this essay on the enduring emotional connection to Singles was written by a man, I share his sentiment.
It’s better for us that “Singles” has been largely forgotten, because it still feels small and private, like a time capsule. Its characters talk on big clunky phones and discuss the Seattle SuperSonics; a major plot point involves an answering machine eating a cassette tape. (None of these are things anymore.) And there is the grunge.
I could probably write a whole essay on how Singles and Almost Famous bookended my life, and maybe I will. . . .
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