Gawker - Hero dog saved by hot dog

'Things I Should Have Said' doesn't work

Midway through the fourth chapter of her memoir, Things I Should Have Said, out this week, Jamie Lynn Spears drops a mission statement for the book. “I’m not here to debunk the falsehoods written about my family,” writes the 30-year-old former Nickelodeon star better known as Britney Spears’s kid sister. “I only want to confess my experiences and the complicated blessings of being part of the Spears family.”

Over 225 pages padded with extraneous details and strung-together childhood stories, this is more or less what she does. Britney fans hoping to read Jamie Lynn’s answer to the disturbing allegations Britney, 40, has made about her family will be disappointed, or perhaps furious. (The book currently has a one-star rating on Goodreads thanks to zealous Britney defenders.) Instead of revealing her thoughts about Britney’s struggles under the conservatorship that ruled her life for 13 years, Jamie Lynn focuses on differentiating herself from her sister and distancing herself from the rest of her family (who may or may not be responsible for the bulk of her sister’s woes).

Take me to higher ground (with sausage).

Few positive things come to mind when one hears the word “drone.” Drone strikes, Amazon delivery drone, the drone your boyfriend bought online and now he wants to show you all of the things he can do with it (photography, etc.). But one drone in England is working to change the drone narrative. Yes, one drone is using its drone capabilities for good. One wonderful drone has walked hand-in-hand with its brother sausage toward the light that is: saving a dog’s life.

According to a report from the Guardian, Millie, a Jack Russell Terrier, was stranded on dangerous mudflats after slipping her lead in Havant, Hampshire. The tide was rising and Millie had, until that point, evaded the help of police, firefighters, and coastguards. (I understand, Millie; I’m sure you were very stressed.) It was at that point that the drone pilot suggested something that might entice Millie to safety: attaching a piece of sausage to a string and dangling it from the drone.

“It was a crazy idea,” Chris Taylor, the chair of the Denmead Drone Search and Rescue team, told the Guardian. But after checking the maximum takeoff weight of their drone and Civil Aviation Authority regulations, they decided to pursue it. “One of the local residents on the beach where we were flying from supplied us with the sausages — I think they were from Aldi. The woman cooked them up for us and we attached them with string.”

Revisiting a book I wanted to love but couldn’t, and still can’t.

I was 17 the first time I read Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History. I do not remember who recommended it to me; likely, it was someone who felt it was the sort of book I would enjoy, consonant with all of the other things I loved. It was a book for teenagers who studied classics, who thought in Homeric epithets, who luxuriated among the fantasy of old things. It was a book for people who loved other books, who shared with its protagonist, Richard Papen, a “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Its plot was tailor-made for me, or for people like me: a Californian outsider is absorbed into a coterie of sexually and temporally ambiguous Classics students at a New England college, only to discover that their close-knit friendship is predicated, in part, by the frenzied, ritualistic killing of a “townie” during an inspired attempt at a bacchanal. It was the kind of book I wanted to love; instead, I hated it.

The Secret History managed, somehow, in a manner I could not articulate at the time, to both be about all the things I loved, and to miss the point of them entirely. I wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant. All these are to be found in The Secret History, to be sure: whole passages double as litanies of evocation. But actually reading the novel reminded me of a line from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” in which young Kay — whose vision has been pierced by a shard of ice from the cruel queen herself — finds that even the most beautiful landscape “looked like boiled spinach.”

Shell-shocked

Today, the Mars Wrigley company rolled out a sterile, bone-dry rebrand of those sentient, sexy, candy-shelled roly-polys we like to call M&Ms. Notably, the hot green one is no longer wearing go-go boots, and the brown one has a lower heel. The president of Mars Wrigley North America told CNN that tamping down the sexuality of our most beloved screen sirens by giving them more sensible footwear is “a subtle cue, but it’s a cue nonetheless” that M&Ms are feminism, that they are geopolitics, that they are egalitarianism, and that they are corporate ladder climbing.

Am I hearing this right, or are my feminine ear canals stuffed with holiday M&Ms because I shoved them in there because it seemed satisfying and now I can’t get them loose? The corporate fat cats in their ivory tower made of chewing gum have ughnooooooified the M&Ms because they think we, the current customers, are a bunch of dumpy sluts who need to be taught proper manners. The Mars Wrigley Corporation doesn’t think that girl M&Ms can do everything that boy M&Ms can do – and in heels!

So is Mars Wrigley going to disavow this M&M commercial in which a bunch of boy M&Ms melt into little chocolate puddles from watching the green one talk about raspberries and almonds on red silk sheets?

Finally unethical bosses are getting their time in the limelight

It’s tech season in Hollywood. Every so often, the people who make movies and television shows will decide that it’s time to explore a specific topic. If you remember the onslaught of movies about the Iraq War from 2007-2008, you will be familiar with this concept. Well, now the topic du jour is real-life megalomaniacal tech CEOs, people who burned bright and crashed hard, leaving a slew of never-profitable businesses in their wake.

Just today, the trailer for WeCrashed was released, in which Jared Leto plays the disgraced former CEO of WeWork, Adam Neumann (Yes, he is doing an Israeli accent.). On the horizon we also have Super Pumped, a show about Uber’s Travis Kalanick starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an Elizabeth Holmes movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and directed by Adam McKay, and an Elizabeth Holmes miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried. Over on the periphery is Inventing Anna, the Netflix show about Anna Delvey, who, while not a scammy tech CEO, shares a kindred spirit with all of these freaks.

So now the question is: Just how watchable will any of these be? Lucky for you, I am here to provide my entirely subjective opinion on the matter based on almost nothing.