A hundred-millionaire goes grocery shopping at Aldi
Throwing a bucket of water on Pittsburgh's new mascot
And we’re back to our usual content! But first, a bit of housekeeping.
Housekeeping the First: No, I did not send last week’s newsletter to your inbox a second time. I wouldn’t do that to you. You either read it when I send it or you don’t read it and that’s that. But last week, Substack glitched and sent some newsletters out a second time. They say they have resolved the problem. We’ll see.
Housekeeping the Second: Much, much love for the supportive messages, DMs, texts, emails, and pigeon mail (your pigeon is on his way back to you only a bit worse for wear as he caught the tip of my shoe upside his chin oops) so many of you sent after last week’s personal essay. I enjoyed hearing your stories and I especially loved hearing how what I wrote inspired you to put away your own shame. I also received several messages from parents, relatives, friends, or teachers of children and teens with hearing loss and other disabilities who planned to have them read my essay. That is all I wanted. To stop someone else from spending a lifetime hiding something they shouldn’t feel the need to hide. To receive others’ grace.
Okay. Housekeeping is done; the place looks good. Let’s get to it.
1. The love child of Steely McBeam and … Steely McBeam?
Do not adjust your screens, your brains, your eyes, your screaming souls. This is not Steely McBeam.
This is the still-to-be-named just-unveiled mascot for the Pittsburgh Maulers team in the USFL— a new professional American football league that will fail. The Maulers are a reincarnation of the old USFL team that lasted one dismal season at Three Rivers Stadium in 1984.
This blue-eyed strong-jawed Joe Magarac-wannabe looks like if Steely McBeam got hit with the Handsome Squidward door and then completely forgot about leg days. It’s just a very unsettling look, which is the same thing I said about Steely McBeam. They had a chance to start from scratch and they came up with a tired cliche of a mascot that looks just like our other football mascot.
Had I been running the show, the mascot would be a kickass lady welder who sheds her overalls at halftime to reveal her 80s dancing outfit and also she walks around with a bucket of water that she regularly dumps on herself.
Give the people what they want, I would have shouted while smacking the conference table with resounding authority. Why don’t more people ask me for ideas?
Anyway, Pittsburgh has a new Baltimore Ravens-themed professional football team with a boring old mascot. But it could be worse. They could have Sheriff Woody on Meth, which is apparently the name of this dude from the Houston team:
“There’s a dime bag in my boot.”
2. Um. NO. WAY!
I’ve just been handed this note that the 1984 Maulers had cheerleaders called the Flashdancers! And the new team STILL didn’t pick a hot lady welder as their mascot I am screaminggggggg why won’t you people talk to me before making your damn bad decisions???
There is so much magic here.
Bring the Flashdancers back. I want face shields and denim overalls and leg warmers and buckets of water all over the damn place. Instead of the usual local mascot photo ops with Steely, Parrot, Penguin, and now Steely-Also (my chosen name for him), imagine a fun mascot meet-up where hot lady dancer welder (name TBD but I’m thinking Sparks) and Jalapeno Hannah meet up for hijinks.
It’s time for more gender equality in sports mascots. I look forward to your angry emails.
3. Damn yutes!
I’m quitting The Internets and living my old age out in peace. Nice knowing you. I’ll still accept care packages of Ensure, Metamucil, Werthers, fresh tennis balls for my cane and large-print word searches.
4. It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
New Jersey’s candidate for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat, Dr. Oz, has made the rising cost of gas and food one of his campaign’s talking points. He films himself huffing and puffing at the gas station about the price of gasoline that is much higher pretty much everywhere else in the world and he blames Joe Biden.
First, Dr. Oz has ONE HUNDRED MILLION dollars in assets. He’s not an everyman and no matter how hard he tries to hide it, his true wealthy elite self always comes sneaking out. Case in point? A hundred-millionaire pretending to grocery shop for his wife so he can whine about the cost of groceries (which yes, are way too high).
“A broccoli??” LOL. One way to tell people you’ve not grocery shopped in decades without telling people you’ve not grocery shopped in decades is by calling it “a broccoli” while grabbing one and then a bag of carrots so big it looks like you’re a bunny farmer.
“Honey, I’m at the store. I’m grabbing you a broccoli, 67 carrots, a dozen grapes, and two of the order dividers from the cashier’s conveyor belt. I had to fight her for them. Did you also need a shrimp?”
P.S. You can get all this at Aldi for like ten bucks and now I extremely need to see a video of Dr. Oz walking into an Aldi and molting right out of his skin.
5. A few random n’ats
Another bus in a sinkhole! Why is the earth eating so many buses? First Pittsburgh, then China, then the school bus in Flint, the school bus near DC, and now this bus in Boulder.
The first mural to come out of Duolingo’s $150,000 Community Arts program is finished and I love it.
It seems Kiski High School is closing some of their bathrooms during the day in what will be a completely ineffective attempt to stop vaping. This is forcing students to go further in hunt of an open bathroom with an available stall. Can’t express how insensitive this is toward those who are menstruating and in need of immediate access to a restroom for obvious reasons. Hope the media looks into this. Food is a necessity and lunches should be free forever. Water is a necessity and the water fountains should be opened at all schools (change them to bottle-fill fountains if need be). Bathrooms are a necessity and should be open, clean, and available at all hours. The end. Fight me so hard you bleed.
6. “Here’s your food in a paper bag, Ma’am?” “HOW. DARE. YOU.”
In the Good News file this week:
In a unanimous vote Tuesday, Pittsburgh City Council passed legislation that will ban the use of plastic bags at businesses within the city starting next year.
Businesses will be allowed to offer paper bags for customers’ items, though each bag will come with a 10-cent fee. Otherwise, consumers will be encouraged to bring their own reusable bags.
The ban will halt usage of single-use plastic bags at all grocers and other retailers in the city, effective April 12, 2023.
Bulk items — including packaged meat and fish, fruits and vegetables — are exempt from the ban, as are garbage collection and pet waste.
Now, unless you’ve chosen to live your life as willfully ignorant as possible, or are so politically poisoned that you refuse to acknowledge any human impacts on the Earth’s environment, you know what plastic has done to this planet. You know about microplastics. You know plastic is a scourge unto Mother Earth because humans have done a shitty job of managing their plastic waste. So banning single-use plastic bags, as other cities have done, including Philly, just makes sense as a small step in, well, NOT being part of the problem.
Okay? Hear that? At the very least can we try to minimize our role in the problem? Is that asking too much?
Apparently, yes. The usual complaints are already popping up. Is this really what we need our local government to be worrying about when there are bigger problems? I hate this argument with the burning fire of every star in the universe. Like, when did we decide people can only care about one thing at a time? Every time I tweet about Pittsburgh’s efforts to become a Dark Sky city, I get that pushback. Is this REALLY what we need the city to be worrying about right now?
Do these people not lie in bed at night and worry about more than one thing at a time?Do they think the entirety of local, state and national politics is a bunch of people sitting around a conference table with an agenda in front of them that holds only one item? It’s the most lazy and tired argument and if you EVER find yourself saying it about ANYTHING it means you don’t actually have a real argument against the thing you’re bitching about. You’re like a parent shouting, “Because I said so!”
Right now my teenage daughter is like …
(She loves a good cigarette and beer.)
Other arguments popping up are from business owners who say it will be more expensive for them to purchase paper over plastic. That is why the $0.10 fee is there. Pass the extra cents through to the customers! Put it on the receipt. $0.10 paper bag surcharge. So many cities have already put this same ban through successfully that this argument just doesn’t hold water.
Of course, there are those in the comments and replies to the local news stories on this forthcoming 2023 ban along the lines of “GOOD JOB MAKING PEOPLE GO TO RESTAURANTS AND GROCERY STORES OUTSIDE OF THE CITY, MORONS.”
Excuse me while I say as eloquently and ladylike as possible … holy shit.
If you ever find yourself with a person in your life who says, “I’d like to get takeout from that restaurant but it will be handed to me in a paper bag and that goes against everything I believe in so instead I will order from a place in a different county because plastic is my god above all gods pray with me,” may I suggest you cut that person wholly out of your life so their toxicity doesn’t choke the good out of you too?
This is basic kindness toward the Earth. Get you some reusable bags. I use the ones from Aldi for so much, especially Sam’s Club runs. Those suckers are so strong I’m pretty sure they could hold the weight of a grown adult. And they wipe clean.
Save the forking planet, you morons.
I’m getting that on a shirt.
7. And that’s all we have space for today.
Have a great week. If you’re in marketing for the USFL or the Maulers, get at me. Be kind. On clear nights, turn as many of your outdoor lights off as you safely can. Encourage local business owners that you’ll still support them even when they hand you a [gasp!] paper bag in a year. And as always, come out and see my new band The Dead-Eyed Mascots. We play—
Oh, wait. I’ve just been handed a note that Dr. Oz walked into an Aldi, U-turned, and ran out screaming something about “poors.”
Now how will his wife cook dinner without a broccoli?!