Queen Update Requested: Results Inconclusive

But do we know for sure?

Yesterday, a blog called Hollywood Unlocked exclusively and reasonably reported that Queen Elizabeth had died.

The person behind the byline WPengine (which appears to be a security measure taken to protect the anonymity of staff members but has only been used to post this one story, according to this disclaimer) wrote:

Socialites, it is with our deepest regret to inform you that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has died. Sources close to the Royal Kingdom notified us exclusively that Queen Elizabeth has passed away. She was scheduled to attend the wedding of British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, but was found dead.

I was devastated, but I had the assurance of former “Love and Hip Hop” star and Hollywood Unlocked CEO Jason Lee that this report was airtight. According to a notes app post to Instagram last night, he has never lied, has never been wrong, trusts his sources, had yet to see an official statement from the palace otherwise, and would be at the Donda concert that night.

I would like to buy a vowel

What’s in a name? That which we call a Zydn by any other name would smell as sweet. Shakespeare wrote that about Odell Beckham Jr.’s newborn son, wild sense of foresight on that guy. The Los Angeles Rams wide receiver welcomed a baby boy with girlfriend Lauren Wood last week, and just revealed on Instagram that his name is Zydn.

“The words, I can’t even put together for the overwhelming emotions that ran thru me … a moment I will never forget and cherish forever. Zydn was born n at that moment I knew my life changed for the better,” Beckham wrote under photos of him and Wood cuddling the newborn.

Between a Super Bowl ring and becoming a dad, Beckham has had a wild month. I’m sure that in the flurry of emotions he and Wood just forgot to add proper vowels to the baby’s name (the “Y” does not count). Or maybe he has a lot of money in Zyden Gentec stock and wanted his son’s name to be an homage to the company’s ticker symbol.

Zydn is believed to be a variation of the name Zayden, which means abundance in Arabic. While that is beautiful, I’m still not entirely sure how we’re pronouncing this name, but I do have a few ideas.

The convoy has provided many Canadians with an opportunity to remind everyone how good they are

Canada is in the news for bad behavior, which means bemused questions from my American friends about whether or not I still have any civil liberties. It also means an outpouring of excuses from Canadians about how the world stage has caught us on a bad day — this isn’t actually who we are.

As always, nobody made it personal until Canadians did so themselves. When a convoy of truckers rolled up to the nation’s capital to high-five cops and complain about vaccines in January, the country’s reputation wasn’t really in peril. But, on social media, a vocal contingent insisted that the right-wing occupation, while being something they opposed with every fiber of their homegrown being, was really and truly about them. Slogans like the old chestnut “I am Canadian,” the not all men–lite of “Not My Canada,” and the embarrassing identity-speak of “As a Canadian” blazed across Twitter in the tens of thousands. The hashtags were occasionally used by the convoy and its supporters, but they were more commonly appended to phrases meant to show our true national character, which is to say, law-abiding, mask-wearing, fully immunized, a good hang, and definitely not racist.

This obsession with policing the borders of the nation’s character isn’t new; rather, it’s what the country has built much of its brand on. Canadian pride has always bloomed around a sense of us-and-them woundedness — people have been practicing for a moment like this for years. One of the phrases that’s gotten a lot of play in the past few weeks is “I Am Canadian,” the slogan of an early-aughts beer commercial that staged a canny trade between Canadians’ feelings of cultural inferiority and full-throated national pride. In 2000, Molson Canada released a sixty-second ad spot of a flannel-clad, mangy-looking white man who rants into a microphone about all the ways his homeland is different — and notably superior — than the U.S. His litany involves the usual touchstones: we love diversity, we hate policing, we believe that “the beaver is a proud and noble animal.” The ad is a cringey display of insecurity — when it comes to describing ourselves, especially to ourselves, is not America really the best we could do? — but it went viral before virality was a thing. They would air it in stadiums and cinemas and Canadians would go apeshit (and buy a ton of beer). This is what many people have insisted on rallying behind as proof of being not like those other Canadians — that the beaver is a proud and noble animal.

Similarly, large swathes of our journalism have been powered by the phrase “meanwhile in Canada,” which pivots on the same idea — that the news south of the border is a constant stream of tragedy and human rights violations, but up here, we’re a bundle of laughs. A representative example is the phrase appended to a photograph of Trudeau cuddling baby pandas at the Toronto Zoo, the implication being that the country’s running perfectly and there’s nothing more serious requiring his attention. HuffPost Canada, may it rest in peace, ran an entire “Meanwhile in Canada” story category on their site, with an archive going back to the fall of 2016, a telling time to start flaunting such smugness. Some of this is gentle self-mockery — Americans have dragged us for dullness and niceness long enough that we’ve decided to follow suit. But it’s one thing to poke fun at yourself for being a square; it’s another to claim that you’re such a square that all the bad shit perpetrated by your government and your compatriots is an anomaly every single time it happens. That’s an awfully delusional pass to give every kind of atrocity, and it provides a dense cloud cover for something like right-wing radicalism.

There may have been a scheduling mishap.

It is February, and yet our This Is Us family has found itself in the days ahead of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving of what year? Unclear. There hasn’t been a mention of the pandemic in quite some time, even though This Is Us was at one point so focused on COVID-19 that one episode was centered on the creator of the technology that led to Zoom, so we are left without a signpost. No matter. Let’s check in on our relatives.

HAS MOTHER DIED?

Not yet.

Let's really test how much looks don't matter

As a single woman, nothing puts me in a state like the Netflix dating reality show Love Is Blind. I become absolutely catatonic when it is on. The series, which encourages contestants to fall in love sight unseen, makes me feel amazing that I am single. I know that whatever happens to me, no matter how much heartbreak I endure in my life, I will never be as pathetic as the people who participate on this show.

Despite my superiority complex, I still spend a lot of time thinking about what Love Is Blind, which just released its second American season, has to say about love and relationships in general. What I find most striking is how the show is an extreme example of how anyone can fall in love if they let themselves. For the participants, the whole point of this experiment is that love is simply a choice that happens. The men and women court each other through a wall, the man proposes to the woman without seeing her — this is supposed to say something about looks not being everything — they finally meet, they go on a tropical getaway together, they move in together in the real world, and eventually they get married or break up, all within the span of a couple months.

One of the most fascinating things about Love Is Blind is how seemingly easy it is to fall in love. The cast members’ conversations in the “pods” (the isolated rooms where they have their conversations with each other) are basically repetitions of “I love my friends and my family” and “Wow, I have chills, that is so important to me, too.” It takes almost nothing for these people to choose each other. Which brings me to my idea for how to really take season 3 really over the edge: Love is Blind: The Imitation Game.

Out of the 12 men and women who participate on this show, the producers should make two men and two women bots that possess artificial intelligence. The bots will be programmed with highly sophisticated programs that will perfectly mimic the conversations that make contestants fall in love with each other. For example:

Man: My mom is the best.

Woman: Mine too. I feel so close to you right now.