Hi everyone, how are we doing? Good? Great. Yeah I’m good too, thanks, but I’m still trying to find a good brownie recipe. I tried again yesterday with a BBC Good Foods recipe with a length akin to War and Peace. Even after all that, the flavour is pretty good, but the consistency was too springy. Shoot me!
⭐️ SWEETIE RATES ⭐️
Egg
My binge of Parts Unknown keeps getting interrupted by ad breaks, because paying for the streaming service isn’t enough (Jeff Bezos is a Capricorn). More often than not lately, these ad breaks include the trailer for The Pod Generation, a biopic based on the robot from Snog Marry Avoid?
Every time the trailer comes on, rudely interrupting my close personal friend Tony Bourdain, I’ve found that one specific line reading leaves me breathless. Academy Award-nominated star of the film, Chiwetel Ejiofor, delivers a piece of dialogue that I can’t stop thinking about:
“Hold on, you put us on a waitlist to have a baby in an egg?”
“It’s not an egg”
“I-it’s an egG”
Something about this exchange has bewitched me, body and soul. Most actors would have done this line differently. Let’s use Ejiofor’s contemporaries as examples: Benedict Cumberbatch would’ve hissed this line, David Oyelowo would have delivered it softly and sombrely, Michael Fassbender would have gone for a cheap laugh. But instead, Ejiofor almost falls over it, it comes out like it’s an accident. It’s clunky and kind of awkward, but I find myself hearing it over and over again in my mind. “I-it’s an egG 🫤⁉️”
Me asking Heidi Klum’s husband’s what his 2023 Halloween costume is:
Film me in
Been bumpin’ that podcast This Had Oscar Buzz lately. I just loveeee to listen to two hour episodes of people being bitchy and incisive about films and the behind the scene machines that curate and generate HYPE. Love the episodes on Cats (release the butthole cut), Sliding Doors and Red Rocket.
Blaming everything on mercury retrograde
Mercury retrograde is real and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t. So many little things have gone wrong or awry over the last two weeks. My bank went completely out last Sunday, leaving me unable to pay for anything and starting to wonder if the people who hide cash under their mattresses might be right. I’ve had many technological fuck ups, even just trying to get this newsletter out. I saw a scary man with this penis out on a street in Notting Hill (“Hey everyone!” He said, before dropping trou). The pub down the road ran out of beer on a Friday night. My flight booking to Budapest got cancelled for no discernible reason, then the flight price jumped up, for… scernible reasons (corporate greed). I am not going to Budapest.
What I’m trying to say is: it’s all mercury’s fault, and while it’s not fun to see little things go tits up, it is great to be able to have a reliable scapegoat. Mercury is retrograde until 27 August, if you want to get in on the blame game.
💆🏼♀️ SWEETIE HATES 💆🏼♀️
Give it a Blake
Blake Lively has been in the news, oh, every day this week in the wake of the disastrous It Ends With Us PR campaign. I’m tired of it. I know, I know, I spoke about her last week, but it was exactly that, last week.
I think we, as a culture, can begin to heal and move on. Blake Lively is neither interesting nor influential enough of a concept to twist your body into knots over. She’s not Pol Pot. She’s an actress who can’t dress, a maybe-rude-person, and a definitely-tone-deaf capitalist. But really, that’s about it. As queen Sutton Stracke would say, “Let. The mouse. Go.”
Does anyone, literally anyone, remember when celebrity gossip could be lighthearted and fun, and not get people whipped into a foaming-at-the-mouth rage? When you could just decide that someone’s actions would make you not like them, instead of trying to hold them to a (meaningless) public account? I do. And I think it’s over forever.
If you want an excuse to be fired up, to speak truth to power, I promise, there are many other things you can direct your anger at, things that mean more than just punishing a blonde actress and her painfully unfunny husband.
Mpox
Like Prince, Rachel Leviss and Snoop Doggy Dogg Snoop Lion Snoop Dogg before it, Monkeypox has gone under a rebrand. Now known as Mpox, it's in its CDC-designated ‘moderate risk alert level’ era.
It’s got a much catchier name, but it now feels slightly less sinister. It’s really not giving ‘lesions’. It kind of sounds like a Temu speaker system or an experimental type of birth control. Of course, at the end of the day, no matter what it’s called, it’s still very bad and I think it should stop doing that. I’m very brave for speaking out.
Help
Me: The Paul Giamatti doll isn’t real and it can’t hurt you
The Paul Giamatti doll:
Thanks bye!