Hello,
I have written a lot for this week’s newsletter, there’s some real investigative REPORTING for you all. I am not a journalist, just a nosy ol’ bitch, so I hope you enjoy it regardless. Thanks. Cheers. Best wishes. It might cut off in your inbox.
Sooo, follow the link to read it in full if that’s what you want to do. I don’t own you.
🦋 SWEETIE RATES 🦋
Paula!
Shout out to Danny Pellegrino for alerting the people this week to the existence of an incredible gem.
Here we have priceless footage of pop queen and alleged plane crash victim Paula Abdul performing at the 2022 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Looking like the cutest little Leprechaun at Pride, Paula took to turkey brand Jennie O’s stage and tapped, spun and lip synced for her life — all while an overjoyed Flava Flav cheered on from the sidelines.
I’d just like to note that Paula Abdul is 60 years old here. Selena Gomez, 31, could never!
Pass Out by Tinie Tempah
A lot of people don’t know this — but Pass Out by Tinie Tempah sounds exactly like being a woman in her early 30’s who works full time and lives in East London. Theeeee official soundtrack for people who can’t drink more than three pinot noirs without getting a hangover, who journal a thousand words a week and who take fibre supplements.
A lot of people also don’t know that if you play Pass Out backwards, you can actually hear Tinie Tempah rap “Your fertility is declining — you are losing a viable egg every time you menstruate.” So cool!
Ohhh myyy podddddd
Mona Chalabi is a US-based writer, illustrataor and data journalist from the UK. One of the best working journalists currently, she recently won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her piece, 9 Ways To Imagine Jeff Bezos' Wealth for the New York Times. In her recent interview on the Longform podcast, Chalabi spoke with host Max Linksy about her experiences in a white-washed world of journalism. It’s really, really, really interesting. I promise.
What was to be a straightforward interview about Chalabi’s interview turns into an impassioned and important discussion about responsible reportage on Palestine, her professional setbacks, and her honest opinions on which publications are currently lacking in appropriate ethics.
While, yes, it’s a thought-provoking conversation — it’s still full of levity. Chalabi also very helpfully name drops journalists who she believes are both reporting in good and bad faith when it comes to Israel’s war on Palestine. Name a journalist with more cojones right now, I dare you.
🔮 SWEETIE HATES 🔮
Baba Vanga is back, betch
I’m sure if you’ve spent even a modicum of time on the internet, you will recognise this woman.
Bulgarian Mystic Baba Vanga, born Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova in 1911, died in 1996 and is still trotted out by click-baiting media outlets every year to froth up social media rage. Just like clockwork, articles are beginning to trickle out once more about her predictions for the year to come.
To wit:
Baba Vanga's 2024 predictions - from 'terrifying weather' to 'rise in terror attacks'
Assassination attempts on Putin to calamitous climate events: Here are Baba Vanga’s 2024 predictions
Hard to resist clicking, I know.
Baba Vanga has “predicted” Princess Diana’s death, 9/11 and the Boxing Day Tsunami. But here’s the thing that drives me i n s a n e about the Baba Vanga mythology — there is not one centralised source for her predictions. Visually-impaired and semi-literate in Bulgarian, Baba Vanga never wrote down any of her visions, or at least not in any citable literature. There is no concrete evidence to suggest she made any of her famed sweeping predictions, accurate or inaccurate, at all.
According to Baba Vanga’s Wikipedia page, her predictions were supposedly made to members of her staff, who then… Did something with them. But good luck finding out what that something was! Yet, every year, despite having a team of scribes, these new predictions appear with no identifiable source in sight. All I can seem to find is this poorly formatted and scantly-detailed PDF that outlines her upcoming future predictions. Again, the information in the PDF has no source linking directly to Baba Vanga herself whatsoever.
One of Baba Vanga’s only secondhand ‘certified’ predictions — her alleged assertion that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would become ‘lord of the world’ — came from a private conversation with writer Valentin Sidorov in 1979.
According to Sidorov, Baba Vanga decreed “All will thaw, as if ice, only one remain untouched - Vladimir’s glory, glory of Russia. Too much, it is brought in a victim. Nobody can stop Russia. All will be removed by her from the way and not only will be kept, but also becomes the lord of the world.”
Sidorov, who died in 1999 and whose writing is surprisingly difficult to track down, was a Russian-nationalist who wrote a poem which contains the quote “I believe in the mission of Russia: It will be saved and will save." Well then! One can only assume he must have really enjoyed that conversation — which, I cannot stress enough, I can’t locate where it’s actually published.
Alas, even after all this poking around, I am nowhere near close to identifying the media’s sources behind these fear-mongering annual predictions, and I am more confused now than when I started. Was Baba Vanga really a charlatan, or was she a visionary with a PR rep that rivals Tree Paine? I just don’t know.
The girls are fighting
Utterly distressing news this week — Daryl Hall, of Hall & Oates, has filed a lawsuit and acquired a restraining order against John Oates, of Hall & Oates. This would be like me suing Wingstop, or Tom Cruise suing shoe lifts.
What an ungodly series of events. The nature of the legal issues are to do with business things, which I am not interested in/do not understand, but I am saddened nonetheless.
While, yes, it’s all around bad news, what a great reminder to listen to Private Eyes.
Who needs litigation when you can make a song that sounds like that?
Shitty Little Thing
Black Friday, an excuse to gorge on capitalism’s sweetest spoils, often brings out the worst in brands. UK purveyors of polyester, PrettyLittleThing, decided to outdo literally everyone this Black Friday, holding a 99% off sale for over a thousand items on their site. With prices starting from as little as 8p, whole items of clothing sold for, quite literally, next to nothing.
Ok fab, we love a bargain, right? Wrong. PrettyLittleThing and competitor brand NastyGal are both owned by Boohoo, who have repeatedly been caught manufacturing their products through alleged modern day slave labour and otherwise unsavoury practices.
In 2017, Channel Four’s Dispatches found that workers in a Boohoo factory were given "strikes" for slights such as smiling or checking their mobile phones. In 2018, Boohoo were named and shamed in British Parliament for, among a litany of other issues, producing £5 dresses which one expert warned would be of such low quality, that “Charity shops would snub them.”
According to a Sunday Times undercover reporter in 2020, a factory supplier for NastyGal paid their workers £3.50 an hour (at the time, minimum wage in the U.K. was £8.72 per hour for those over the age of 25) and was also still operating during the covid lockdown in Leicester.
Just this month, right before their fail sale, Boohoo’s ethics were once again exposed by a BBC Panorama investigation. An undercover reporter working in Boohoo’s Manchester headquarters found that the company’s modus operandi remains much the same — with a bloodthirsty demand to slash production prices and lead times. Yikes!
8p for a hideous, plastic dress, but what’s the cost?
Farewell for now. My Baba Vanga-style prediction for you? You’re going to have a great week!