It's not the humping, it's the hypocrisy

They don't care about the humping, they care about the HYPOCRISY

North Carolina House Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been having a bad few months. It mostly started in March, when he alleged that several Congress members he once “looked up to” in Washington D.C. were snorting cocaine on the regular and inviting him to “sexual get-together[s].” This pissed off Cawthorn’s GOP colleagues; as Rep. Kevin McCarthy noted, the comment “got a lot of members very upset.”

Then, apropos of nothing, mysterious leaks began to reveal details of Cawthorn’s own personal life. First, there was a photo obtained by Politico that showed Cawthorn dressed in lingerie at a party. Then a conservative PAC dedicated to ousting Cawthorn filed an ethics complaint about allegedly improper gifts to his aide, Stephen L. Smith. The complaint included a video of the two in a car, in which Cawthorn can be heard saying “I feel the passion and desire, and would like to see a naked body beneath my hands," as Smith, as Insider phrased it, puts “his hand on the lawmaker’s groin.” And just this week, the same PAC put out a press release titled: “REP. MADISON CAWTHORN DRY HUMPING SOMEONE'S HEAD AND MOANING LOUDLY.” The release does indeed deliver a video of Cawthorn doing that. The congressman later said the other man was his cousin, which I think was supposed to be an exonerating detail. Continue reading

Or she won't be able to make it to the Palace of Holyroodhouse garden party

Ah, there’s nothing like springtime in England. Jet skiing the Thames towing a slackline connected to a minor royal figure on an intertube; traversing the Abbey Road crossroad back and forth until your Geri H.-style Union Jack platform soles wear thin; having a cracking polo match but getting distracted from gameplay because the horses’ eyelashes are soooo pretty. And then of course, there’s the garden parties. The Queen is always at the famed Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, and this year I’ve really been looking forward to talking with her about all the times Tina Brown called Camilla a dumpy country slut in the first half of The Palace Papers.

But wait! The Queen just announced that she will NOT attend garden parties at Buckingham Palace and Hollyroodhouse amid growing concerns over her health? Per the Daily Mail, “The 96-year-old, who has been suffering from mobility and health issues in recent months, will not be at the events which are taking place for the first time since 2019. The decision is likely down to the format of the parties in that the monarch would have had to stand for more than an hour and move down the lines greeting people.”

Nooooo!

Continue reading

A crazy, but not too crazy theory about the Supreme Court leaker

On Tuesday, my family group chat was lighting up, popping off, being preposterous, things of that nature, for the same reason every other chat was. The night before, Politico published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case on a Mississippi abortion ban that was widely expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, and without significant pivots from the conservative justices, almost certainly will.

In the aftermath of Politico’s scoop, conservatives and procedure-obsessed centrists seized on easily the least consequential aspect of the draft: that it had been leaked. This was, at worst, a transparent ploy to divert attention from the Court’s widely unpopular ruling; at best, a knee-jerk allegiance to a flawed court which lost any pretense of legitimacy after the mad-dash confirmation of handmaiden Justice Amy Coney Barrett. To my mind, the bigger concern is the possible rollback of a basic human right and the unsubtle overtones that others might follow. But that’s just one blogger’s take.

For an unelected body with lifetime appointments, the Supreme Court operates with extremely little transparency, much to the chagrin of anyone trying to hear Justice Stephen Breyer flush (allegedly) on a Zoom version of juridical C-SPAN. And while there have been leaks from the Court before, including during Roe itself, a full majority opinion draft has seemingly never been published before a formal decision. The leak is also a mystery. It is more fun to play armchair detective than to imagine how this ruling will force millions of women into unwanted or dangerous pregnancies, and how the Democrats will fail, again, to do anything about it. That brings me back to the group chat, where we were guessing about the leaker.

There are several possible theories about the culprit — a left-leaning whistleblower, a far-right clerk, a hacker, Chief Justice John Roberts — all but the latter of which are plausible. New York magazine did a good job unpacking most of them here. They did not, however, mention my parents’ theory, which was what a 20th century British poker player might call a “wildcard,” and one shared mostly by anonymous accounts in Twitter replies. It was somewhere on the spectrum between “so crazy it just might work” and “so crazy it is, in fact, incorrect.” It was Ginni Thomas, the wife of ultraconservative Justice Clarence Thomas. Continue reading

Oopsie in the sky with pilots

If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere? Well, that’s bad news for one soon-to-be-but-not-yet pilot. A Virgin Atlantic flight headed to New York City from London was forced to turn back after 40 minutes in the air after it became apparent that one of the two pilots on board was not properly certified to fly. Like it’s hard??

The likely embarrassed non-pilot joined Virgin in 2017, but had yet to complete his final assessment. This information only came out while they were flying somewhere over Ireland. It’s unclear what conversation led to the discovery, but it was probably something like this:

Certified pilot: Damn, it’s good to be a certified pilot.

Uncertified pilot: Ugh, stop. I’m so jealous.

Certified pilot: Hon why? We’re both certified pilots …

Uncertified pilot: Umm LOL

Virgin blamed the mistake on a “rostering error” and stressed to the New York Post that both pilots were “fully licensed and qualified,” but the one who was a real pilot was not cleared to function as a designated trainer for the baby pilot. So they had to turn back around and wait on the tarmac for three hours before a non-baby pilot could be scrounged up. Continue reading

A new edition of 'Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black' reveals a singular talent

Who Cookie Mueller was depends on who you ask. I'll start with one of her own descriptions: "Clothing designer, racehorse hot walker, drug dealer, go-go dancer, underground film actress (otherwise known as independent feature actress), theater actress, playwright, theater director, performance artist, house cleaner, fish packer, credit clerk, barmaid, sailor, high seas cook, film script doctor, herbal therapist, unwed welfare mother, film extra, leg model, watercolorist, and briefly as a bar mitzvah entertainer, although I’m not even Jewish.”

To the writer Gary Indiana, Cookie Mueller was freedom. He first saw Cookie at a play in New York City in the eighties, and then whispered to his friend: “She is the one.” The two became collaborators: Cookie posed as several of his boyfriends for an art show alongside Kathy Acker at the Mudd Club, and for "years," Indiana wrote plays “only for Cookie." At her behest, he wrote The Roman Polanski Story in one night. “The freedom that she had about herself, that extraordinary freedom,” Indiana said of the downtown legend in her biography, Edgewise. “I loved it so much, I craved it so much.”

To the filmmaker John Waters, Cookie was "a better writer than she was an actress, and I think she would have been the first to say that." She had, in fact, always been a writer, beginning to write at the age of six and since, "never stopp[ing] completely." At the age of 10 — in hopes of being the youngest novelist alive — Cookie wrote her first novel, dressed it up in saran wrap and cardboard, and placed it on the shelves of her local library. As a teenager in Baltimore, Cookie wrote poetry and liked to lay flowers at the graveyard of her literary idol, Edgar Allen Poe. While living in New York City during the seventies, Cookie wrote art reviews for Details magazine, pseudo-medical advice for the East Village Eye, and her own personal writing, compiled and published by Semiotext(e) in 1990. Last month, Semiotext(e) released a new edition of Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, now with new stories. Continue reading