Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 45.3 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
My favorite person to hate is stepping down from the easiest corporation to hate: goodbye Jeff Bezos. He’s going to ‘turn his attention’ to philanthropic projects and remain in some sort of advisory role.
This changes nothing for Amazon’s massive effort to squash the union vote Alabamian employees have been organizing towards for the last many months. Feel free to squirm with the details of how hard Amazon is fighting this effort, or hold onto the tidbit that
“Lawyers for Amazon are currently trying to appeal the decision to allow the election to be carried out by mail, and have requested the election be delayed until their appeal is reviewed.”
Not to be confused with how the last administration handled our so-called ‘democratic’ ‘process.’
While Bezos gets down to the hard work of being a heartless trillionaire, another white-man-pandemic-figurehead is coming under the microscope. I don’t know about y’all, but I certainly didn’t need—with my credentials as a New Yorker—this much time to figure out that Andrew Cuomo actually wasn’t a savior sent down by the heavenly fucking father himself.
In Andrew Cuomo Needed Donald Tr*mp, the picture becomes clear: Americans, distracted and distressed by the horrific leadership of the last few years, mistook the less-bad for the good. Now that our boy DT is out of office, Cuomo’s assorted nonsense is coming to light—including ways in which he more or less did exactly as the former president.
Colleen Echohawk, in an effort to continue disrupting the long history of white people holding most positions of power, is running to become the first Indigenous mayor of Seattle.
While crickets and other non-human friends surely stand to benefit as white people hold a smaller percentage of elected positions, human noise still disrupts their mating behaviors.
(via)
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
We're rapidly approaching the first year of our Covidversary folks -- 12 months since we were all sent home for what we thought would be an upending of our lives for 2 weeks maximum, which has clearly turned out to be a joke. I guess I've gotten somewhat used to the monotony of life in (self-imposed) lockdown but if there's one thing I'm grateful for in this new year, it's the new seasons of all the reality television shows I've been following. And just several weeks in, I'm already emotionally spent from all the drama.
Spoilers ahead!
It's week 5 of The Bachelor and Matt James has finally decided to purge his pool of suitors of the mean girls by eliminating Anna and Victoria from the show. And thank f*cking hell for that because I could not have withstood yet another week of hearing Victoria bleat about how great she is and putting myself through being gaslit for an hour and a half any longer.
In case you missed it, this is the culmination of last week's drama in which Anna started spreading unsubstantiated rumors that one of the new girls, Brittany, was an escort in Chicago. Anna's rumors were not only stigmatizing and shaming of sex work(ers), it could have also potentially ruined Brittany's life. Yet somehow, Anna thought it would serve her well to play the victim by claiming that her actions were "out of character" and something she never would have done normally.
On the other hand, Victoria impressively continues to endear herself less and less to the audience, the competing women, and the Bachelor himself down to the very last second of her appearance on this wretchedly entertaining show to which I have sold my soul. Here is her parting gift of completely obnoxious and unabashedly insufferable delusions to the rest of us who have been cursing The Bachelor producers for keeping her on the air for this long.
I was about to turn my telly off when I realized that all of this took place within the first thirty minutes of the show and I had yet another sixty to sit through. The one-on-one dates this week were boring. A shopping spree for Rachael? A good time to put together my quinoa salad for dinner and have the show on as background noise. Cooking with 21-year-old Kit who grew up a socialite in New York City and whose biggest struggle in life so far has been to grow up with Gold Bentleys and endless fame and money? I'll triple-forward and put that shit on mute for good measure, thank you very much. Which was just as well anyway because the last 10 minutes of the show was yet another screaming match I needed to cap off my Tuesday evening.
Here's my Hot Tip for Matt and any future Bachelor hopefuls: avoid future screaming matches by identifying who the Mean Girls in the house are by the size of their eyebags. That means if Matt is going to continue his purge, then MJ, you in danger girl. I rarely wish it was Monday but boy, I truly cannot wait to see how this ends next week. Fingers crossed that it'll be with Jessenia's vindication and MJ's exit instead of the other way around! #JusticeForMarylynn