EPISODE 832: THE ONLINE VERSION OF THE NARWHAL
Also, Breaking Bad's 10th Anniversary, Ahsoka's S1 Finale and Peas vs. Grandma's Thanksgiving
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter that dares to ask:
I see we’ve got a whole bunch of newcomers to the Wow. Welcome! Feel free to throw a hey in the comments and some shekels in the fishbowl. It’s great to have you.
Lots going on. Let’s get into it!
THE WOWND UP
This week Ahsoka and Only Murders in the Building both ended their seasons with a bang. Ahsoka saw the spooky doppelgänger who has been trying to take over her existence for decades finally and thankfully put down, while Murders saw Mabel and the Twins stranded a whole galaxy away from everyone else and forced to hunt down whoever murdered those giant statues, I guess? Meanwhile, the Blue Man Group has finally begun its Cosmic Domination tour.
(Both shows had great finales totally different than described. Highly recommend.)
This week also marks the 10th anniversary of the finale of Breaking Bad, aka Toxic Masculinity, A Love Story. In an interview with Variety, creator Vince Gilligan said one of his favorite scenes was Skinny Peter and Badger talking about the Star Trek episode they wanted to write, which animator Matt Czap has since turned into a great cartoon.
In the interview, Gilligan also called AI “horseshit,” “a giant plagiarism machine, in its current form. I think that ChatGPT knows what it’s writing like a toaster knows that it’s making toast.” He teased that his new series with Better Call Saul goddess Rhea Seehorn will have some kind of sci-fi twist to it. And he said of streaming that on the one hand, without it, “Breaking Bad would have been cancelled,” and on the other, “sometimes it feels like a Ponzi scheme to me.” It’s a great interview.
In other news, scientists around the world are exploring vast underground ecosystems of fungi called mycorrhizal networks, wondering both how they’re doing with climate change (answer: badly) and whether it might be possible to “inoculate” fungi from areas doing well into places doing poorly. These networks, which extend pretty much around the globe, do a lot to strengthen the plants on the surface and to transport captured carbon. Also someday they’ll be used to transport people across the cosmos, but don’t tell anybody because otherwise it doesn’t fit in continuity.
#StarTrekNerdHumor
And finally, ICYMI, Covid is back, baby!, and it wants you all to itself for 7-10 days again, so hey, make sure you get that booster. The government is also once again offering four free Covid tests. Free stuff, Huzzah!
A TALE OF TWO SYNODS (AND ONE CONTEST WINNER)
On Wednesday I dropped a piece explaining the Synod in terms of side dishes and 80s animated cartoons. Thanks to all who so kindly liked it and passed it on.
This weekend I noticed there were two interpretations of the Synod roaming around out there in the papers.
On the one side we have the The Church Needs to Eat Its Peas take from frequent Francis critic Ross Douthat, who argues that the Pope Francis is basically running an Ice Cream for Dinner Papacy, where he keeps pushing the church to embrace “problematic” ideas like women’s ordination and blessing same-sex relationships while ignoring things like church unity or the history of the Church. Like many conservatives, Douthat simply doesn’t believe that the Holy Spirit could want things like gay marriage, or that Francis is really interested in the movements of the Holy Spirit anyway. Douthat’s take is much more Sorry, woke Catholics, Jesus didn’t want lady priests, and this isn’t a democracy (it’s a patriarchy). If that bums you out, try the Unitarians.
Always a fun read, that Douthat.
In a more hopeful vein, what I might call the Pope Francis is the Church’s Grandma at Thanksgiving take, E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post argues that conversation is the whole point of the synod. Rather than trying to force his way past the divisions in the church, Pope Francis is trying to create the circumstances by which Catholics on different sides can come together. Like a grandparent, he’s trying to help his family to find a way past the endless tediousness of mutual recrimination. “We cannot be judges who only deny, reject, and exclude,” Francis wrote to the group of five cardinals who posed a series of questions/attacks about the Synod before it started; the Synod is him trying to help everyone learn the same lesson.
Meanwhile, those who read my Synod piece will remember that I had set this challenge: Can you come up with a version of Something on Something-ity (like Synod on Synodality) that actually makes sense?
There were some valiant attempts. The most successful ones changed the preposition, like Maria’s “Religion of Religiosity”—so good!—and my personal favorite, “Posteriors of Posterity,” from Vashti. I feel like I’ve seen a calendar like that ha ha ha.
But in terms of Something on Something-ity, I’m going to give the gong to Tyler T., who pitched this: “Okay, hear me out, Jim. If there was a large group of crows that decided to get together and discuss the moral implications of homicide (HEAR ME OUT....), it could be a Murder on Murdering.”
Loved it! Tyler T., email me your address at jptmcd@gmail.com and I will send you a gift direct from Pop Culture Spirit Wow HQ in Manhattan.
(Also, honorable mention to Jeff for “Bacon on Baconality.” Jeff, I don’t know what that term means, but it made me very hungry for NYC diner breakfast, and that’s always a good thing, until later, when it isn’t. Bravo.)
MEME GIRL CORNER
Last week I was looking for fun cole slaw memes—and seriously, there are so many cole slaw memes, and based on them I think it’s fair to say cole slaw is not the internet’s favorite side dish.
More likely candidate for the internet’s favorite side dish:
That would be Ke Huy Quan, who is in the new season of Loki and is already killing it.
While I was looking for cole slaw memes, I came across something really weird.
That’s actor Bob Odenkirk in his persona as Saul Goodman of the Breaking Bad pre/se-quel, Better Call Saul, which ended earlier in this year.
This meme had no explanation with it. It just was. And as far as I could remember, there are no coleslaw references in Saul. And yet, the internet begged to disagree:
As I tried to figure this out, things started to get weird.
What does any of this even mean?
There were other Bad/Saul memes like this, too.
My personal favorite is this one for Hector Salamanca.
That picture is just killing it.
It turns out, this is just something the internet does of late: find a series of words that sound like something else, circle them and add a photo of that other thing, as though in explanation (which to me is the funniest part).
There are some pretty good ones.
There’s even a Garfield meme (and you know how I love those):
I’m always hungry for a backstory. But as far as I can tell there’s no explanation for any of this. It’s just something that the internet now does.
It’s like the online version of the narwhal. We can’t explain it, but isn’t it great?
THE FISHBOWL
Thanks for reading! If you want to help support my writing/time spent investigating memes, I’m on Paypal at paypal.me/jimmcdsj, and my Venmo is scannable below:
Later this week: Never Say that to Anyone—Me, on Sex Education.
See you then! Have a great week. Ooh, and if you’re here this week for New York Comic Con, have a blast!