🎷Beyoncé & Bear Markets🧸

Jun 16, 2022

TGIF!!! I really don’t have a lot to fill you in on this morning, except I woke up to the news that WE ARE GETTING A NEW BEYONCÉ ALBUM!!! It's called Renaissance, it's her first solo album since 2016, it's dropping on July 29th, and this is everything I needed in a Friday and more.

Friday is also my fave day of the week coz Rubes, Liv and I do 'Pie day Friday' where each Friday for lunch we buy and rate a new pie from around Tāmaki Makaurau. SO, if you have any pie recs for me, send em' my way! (Meat pies btw, not dessert pies - actually, that could be a good mundane poll...)

PS we've all been updating our playlists for you (I genuinely can't stop listening to mine)AND this weekend I'm gonna make sure to make a dent in the latest book I'm reading so I can add it to our bumper book list!

If you love these bonuses - or you just want to support me, Rubes, Liv, and Squish, please consider becoming a ✨SYSCA supporter✨ today 🥺

'How to murder your husband' writer sentenced for murdering husband
How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music
New Shit Show episode
I’m practising what I preach!
WTF is a Bear Market?
Does a pre-order even make sense?
A moment of silence for Internet Explorer

How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music

It makes sense that I would love this story considering how obsessed I was with the podcast Wind Of Change and everything to do with secret squirrel stuff like this. This piece, which I read in WIRED looks at Merryl Goldberg and three fellow musicians who, in 1985, flew to Moscow, and took with them “carefully packed sheet music, reeds, and other woodwind supplies, along with a soprano saxophone, to bring into the USSR. But one of her spiral-bound notebooks, lined with staves for hand-notating music, contained hidden information.”

Merryl had developed a code using musical notes (which stood in for letters of the alphabet) where she hide names, addresses and other info, that were masked as melodies.

“The American musicians were going to meet the Phantom Orchestra, a dissident ensemble that Goldberg described as an amalgamation of Jews who were barred from emigrating out of the USSR, Christian activists, and watchdogs who tracked Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The trip was a rare opportunity for American and Soviet players to make music together. It was also a chance for the Americans to smuggle information about aid efforts and plans to the Phantom Orchestra, and for the ensemble to send updates back, including details about individuals looking to escape the Soviet Union.”

What makes this whole story even more amazing is that Merryl and her muso mates were actually searched and detained several times, but their hidden music codes were never found!!

If this stuff interests you as much as it interests me, you should read about it here!

'How to murder your husband' writer sentenced for murdering husband

In what I assume was an extremely difficult investigation, a woman who penned an essay titled ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ has been sentenced to life in prison for… murdering her husband.

Yep! An Oregon judge has just sentenced Nancy Crampton Brophy, (who wrote the romance novels "The Wrong Husband" and "The Wrong Lover") to life in prison for murdering her husband of 26 years, for a $1.5m (£1.2m) life insurance pay-out.

A few years earlier, Nancy had written a piece called "How To Murder Your Husband," which despite having been deleted from the web (but… is anything ever really deleted from the web??) said things like: "the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”

A judge actually ruled against using the essay as evidence in her trial (yet they’ll use rappers' lyrics against them?) but they had enough evidence to prosecute her anyway.

I’m practising what I preach!!

Yesterday in the piece I wrote about Lizzo and how, when we get something wrong we should fix it publicly so that everyone can learn from our mistakes, I did that exact thing! I made a mistake!!

I was talking about feeling ‘lame’ for doing something, which a few of you (in the most LOVELY manner) emailed me about, to let me know that my use of that word was ableist in itself. The word's original definition refers to being unable to walk/ get around without difficulty, but here’s a more detailed explanation about why we should avoid using it if you want to know more.

Something I’ll always believe is that we have so many words and synonyms for things, that if a word you’ve used has hurt somebody, there’s no excuse not to change it. I even tweeted about this last year:

vigilante shit you should care about @SYSCAbout

When it comes to our language evolving and changing as we learn what words are not okay to use today, I have one thing to add: when there are so many words in the world and so many synonyms for every word, why would you still choose to use words that hurt people?

So here I am fixing it, and helping us all in real-time, because that’s how we grow!!! Also thank you for constantly letting me know when I make mistakes in the nicest way - I love it when we teach each other things.

New episode of The Shit Show!

BTS & Bear Markets - The Shit Show | Podcast on Spotify — open.spotify.com

No technical difficulties this week, hallelujah! We sit down to chat about BTS taking a break, wtf a 'Bear Market' is, McDonald's Russian rebrand, a new cancer treatment, and a mustard shortage! Tune in wherever you get your pods!

📚Shit You Should Read About📚

Every ✨SYSCA Supporter✨ gets access to our bumper book list as soon as you sign up! It's all the books we loved, hated, and the books that changed us.

🎶SYSCA Playlists🎶

If you’re a monthly or annual ✨SYSCA Supporter✨ then we are opening up our souls to you and gifting you some 🎶playlists🎶

Become a supporter to get access to all of these perks🥺

WTF is a bear market?

Folks, you may have heard that we’ve entered a bear market. And if you (like me) figured that this was a shop where you purchase bears, you’d be sorely mistaken. Thankfully for us, we have Squish to explain it! We spoke about it (including all my silly questions) on The Shit Show this week, but Squish also wrote about it for The Spinoff, so here’s a lil explo (is that a good abbreviation for explanation or nah??):

What is a bear market anyway?

Essentially it’s when stock prices decline at least 20% from a recent peak. These are relatively rare and quite often they kick off a recession, which is a big scary word for saying the total size of the economy is getting smaller, rather than bigger.

The S&P peaked on January 3 (which is now the “starting point” of this bear market), and the continued drop comes as concerns mount over high inflation, the war in Ukraine, Covid, and the Federal Reserve System (the US central bank) attempting to rein in the US economy with rate hikes.

I’m still out here wondering why it’s called a bear market tho. The internet tells me it’s because ‘bears hibernate, so bears represent a market that’s retreating’ but I think it’s because bears are scary and so is the state of my Sharesies wallet right now.

Like I said, more shit finance chat here!

Does a pre-order even make sense?

56% think it does
44% think it doesn't

I’m now of the belief that a pre-order doesn't logically make sense (Sannah, I’m with your Dad.) However, if you attach the ‘pre’ to the concept of producing the item, or releasing the item, rather than the actual ordering of it, then it does. So maybe it should be called a pre-production or pre-release order. But then that’s just a mouthful! Ugh! Does this even matter!!!!???