Gawker - When I am king I will have you punished

They’re FaceTiming

Any day I wake up to a Just Jared Jr. alert from Google is going to be a good day, because it probably means that Jojo Siwa, the Dance Moms tot turned civil rights activist, has blessed us with a new red carpet quote. Jojo is always a good interviewee, even — and especially — when her voice is so raspy it sounds like she’s just been doing a frame-by-frame remake of this hourlong supercut of once-mentor Abby Lee screaming her head off.

As we reported earlier this April, our favorite Gawker Person of the Year had recently acquired a new girlfriend after splitting with her long-time sweetheart Kylie Prew. But Jojo’s latest press with Extra has us wondering if what’s new is old again. When asked about rumors of her reconciling with her ex, Jojo responded: Continue reading

Prince Wombat was a royal terror

Uh oh, it looks like Prince William has a history of displaying some chav-like behavior in his youth, not unlike his estranged weenie of a brother Harry. According to Tina Brown’s new book The Palace Papers, which I can’t get my mitts (manicured with a tawdry too-nude nude paint that the Queen would NOT approve of) on fast enough, Wills was quite threatening as a toddler.

Per Page Six, Will, whose childhood nickname has been revealed to be “Wombat,” repeatedly threatened violence against his royal governess. “By the time he was four, he had the unattractive habit of yapping at his nanny, Barbara Barnes, ‘No one tells me what to do! When I am king I will have you punished,’” Brown writes in the book.

Retaliatory young William was second-in-line for the throne (and continues to be — presumably, neither his 96-year-old grandmother Queen Elizabeth nor his 73-year-old father Prince Charles will die or accede until at least the year 2422), which must have left Nanny Barnes in a Baby Hitler predicament, you know, like from the thought experiment. Could Barnes somehow have changed the course of history by preventing Brexit, Megxit, Diana’s death, Prince Andrew’s whole thing, and 10,800 misprinted “Jubbly” plates if she had nipped that evil at the bud in the mid-80s? Continue reading

The semi-finals bring more questions the answers

Songstresses, we made it to the semi-finals. To be honest with you I thought this show might have been some kind of horrible Sartre-esque situation where we would be stuck watching qualifying rounds until the end of time. But we did it, and we should all congratulate ourselves for making it this far.

Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson opened the show with some light sketch comedy, where Kelly found Snoop prepping in his dressing room dancing to “New Boot Goofin.” You’ll have to trust me when I say it was charming.

Then it was down to business. The performers from last week who would be moving on to next week’s round of semi-finals were American Samoa’s Tenelle, North Carolina’s John Morgan, and California’s Sweet Taboo. We like all of them, so this is great news.

You may have thought the semi-finals would bring some kind of change in the performances. Perhaps artists would be singing a different song or have to adjust their original song in some way, because why on earth would we all want to watch the same people sing the same songs we heard mere weeks ago? Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, much like in Eurovision, we just heard the same songs for a second time. The only marked difference was that the sound engineers finally got their shit together and everyone sounded slightly better.

Before we get into those performances, I have a question. How the heck is the finale going to work? Will we be voting during the show? That would give the people who perform earlier in the night a leg up. Will we vote afterward and the winner gets crowned off-camera and announced in a tweet? Continue reading

Let tourists think you're mysterious while you enjoy an overpriced drink

The good news: nightlife is back. No more “park dates” or “park parties” or “park confrontations with enemies from your past” — we’re going inside and this time we mean it. The bad news: nightlife is back for everyone. With COVID cases both dropping and becoming less severe, wait times at restaurants and bars have exploded. Want to get a G&T with the girlies? Good luck hearing yourselves. Want to grab a beer at the dive around the corner? Too bad: the neighbors who got a pandemic deal on the apartment above you got there first and there’s twenty of them.

With a dearth of options and a need for a place to sit down for three hours, consider: the hotel bar.

The hotel bar offers quiet. The hotel bar offers elegance. The hotel bar offers the illusion of travel close to home. “Don’t I have to be staying at a hotel to go to the hotel bar?” No. Are you stupid? Anyone can go to a hotel and make a beeline past the concierge and go sit at the bar. Continue reading

That's fine

Recently, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley attracted a lot of derision for tweeting: “People are like, ‘he regards himself as self-important.’ No fucking shit. I would regard myself as an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years. I have zero intention of being just another Ivy League professor whose work lasts as long as they are alive.” Stanley deleted the tweets, but, unfortunately for him, they live on.

People found his pronouncements very funny because they were indeed self-important, but inevitably, a meta-discourse developed: what was so wrong about this ambition, after all? Shouldn’t we want to create something that will last hundreds if not thousands of years? Don’t we all want to live forever? Continue reading