How Pop Culture Explains The World
Besties! Tomorrow's Culture Vulture newsy is all about musicians and their mental health (and why we expect them to be the 'tortured artist' to make good art.) There's also a BUNCH of new recs in there that you're not going to want to miss!
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Happy Friyay angels! Absolutely obsessed with how much you all adored Bel and I's dual chimes yesterday (how do we feel about more of the Luce/Bel duo?? Maybe we make the double chimes a reg thing? Let me know!)
Anyway, today we have an incredibly exciting edish because for one, I've teamed up with Pocket to put together a collection of my fave content that uses pop culture to explain the world, and secondly because the rest of the newsy is a Squish Edish!!! (Squish is my brother, and co-host of The Shit Show... but can also put pen to paper in a pretty good way.)
Hope you enjoy, and here's some more cat X tech content (I'm in love.)
How Pop Culture Explains The World
New episode of The Shit Show
F1 Silly Season: It's a Piasco
Donald Trump accidentally endorsed two different Erics
The Pawshank Redemption
Do you drive a manual or an automatic car?
How Pop Culture Explains The World
This section was brought to you by my FAVOURITE APP IN THE WORLD - POCKET. Pocket is an app where - at the tap of a button - you can save articles from anywhere and it’s how I save literally everything I write about in here!!
I mean you all know this, but I spend my entire life (or at least, my entire job) trying to figure out how to explain the world to you in ways that actually make sense. To do this, I need to be able to understand some pretty complex stuff (I’m looking at you, supply chains 👀) so when I find something that combines my two loves - pop culture and trying to make sense of the world - it’s my favourite thing to read and my favourite way to learn. So, together with Pocket, I’ve put together a big old collection of the best piece of content on the web that use pop culture to help us make sense of the world. Let me give you a wee taster:
You should seriously go and read/ watch/ listen to everything I’ve collected up, and let me know if you have any other bits of content that fit into this genre!!
New episode of The Shit Show!
Taylor’s Swift Jets & F1’s Silly Season — open.spotify.com
Kim K is a minion, Taylor is Swiftly jetting around the country, Ukraine is now Ugrain, F1 has entered their silly season, and wtf is the Pawshank Redemption? All of this and more in this week's episode of your fave news round-up!!!
The rest of this newsy is a Squish Edish!
F1 Silly Season: It's a Piasco
In case you hadn’t noticed, Luce’s new obsession is Formula 1 - much to my amusement! That means this is Lucy's first F1 Silly season, and by howdy has it been silly so far! It all kicked off with Sebastian Vettel retiring and opening up a seat at Aston Martin. Surprisingly to most (I'd say), was that a few days later they announced fellow former world champion, Fernando Alonso, on a multi-year contract, which means he is leaving Alpine.
Now, followers of the sport and all these contract shenanigans would know the logical next step, but for those who are already waiting for the next story, I’ll fill you in. Alpine has sponsored a young Australian driver called Oscar Piastri through the junior formulas - essentially feeder series' to f1 - for the past couple of years, and he is widely regarded as the next big talent in F1, winning F3, and F2, in his first tries each time. So, it makes perfect sense for the Alpine-sponsored prodigy to drive for the Alpine F1 team in the seat left by Nando, right?
Well, that's what all of us (and the Alpine F1 team itself) thought, because they tweeted this:
Unfortunately for Alpine, Oscar seems to have different ideas, and tweeted this:
[also, Alex Albon chimed in and hilariously tweeted this:]
Now, this is interesting stuff, and it's that last line that really sticks out to me: "I will not be driving for Alpine next year." Alpine responded with a tweet including the phrase ‘we believe we’re legally correct.’
I love a saga that starts out with ‘we believe we’re legally correct’ - it almost certainly means this is going to degrade into even more of a shit show.
This all brings up so many questions, and it really kicked the F1 rumour mill into overdrive, with so many Charlie Day-style conspiracy boards being drawn up as we speak. One of these rumours is Piastri to McLaren, another is Piastri to Williams, and another is Piastri to replace the Ferrari strategy team (it couldn't get any worse than it is now.)
For the meantime, however, here are some questions to ponder until we get some new information:
If he has a seat at McLaren, why hasn't McLaren said anything?
If he has a seat at McLaren, where is Ricciardo going?
Has Piastri shot himself in the foot by outright stating he won't be driving for Alpine next year?
Does Piastri just hate alpine so much that he would rather not drive in a guaranteed seat than drive in F1?
Is this just Alpine staking claim to Piastri for the upcoming legal battle?
Should we be focusing our energy on something other than what colour car a person we will never meet is going to drive in circles next year?
The jury’s still out on that last one.
Donald Trump accidentally endorsed two different Erics
Here's a classic fantastic twitter short story I saw yesterday: Jacob Rubashkin, a political reporter for Inside Elections saw a post by old mate Donald Trump saying that he was going to be "endorsing a candidate for the Missouri Republican election candidate." This seems fairly standard until you realise that there are two Erics running, so Jacob Tweeted, “The truly chaotic move here would be for Trump to just endorse "Eric" and let the voters figure it out”
Well, can you guess what happened?
Yep, on Monday evening Trump released a statement just saying “ERIC has my complete and total Endorsement”, prompting both Erics to release statements thanking the former president and claiming the endorsement for themselves.
Just another day in the American Republican party I guess. Personally, I hope they both lose.
The Pawshank Redemption
Do you all remember The Shawshank Redemption? Well, a woman in Florida has given us the Pawshank Redemption, after she crawled through 300 feet of stormwater (yep, in the drain) to rescue a cat. Lindsey Bembli said she heard the kitten crying for help, and when firefighters arrived on the scene, they couldn't pull the kitten out.
Bembli said she "left food for the kitten and made several tries during the week to grab it, but it kept running away."
"I didn't want him to die down there," Bembli said. "This isn't what rescue is, it's not out of the ordinary. It's the kind of thing that we do on a regular basis."
Jones crawled through 300 feet of faeces, spiders and cockroaches to rescue the kitty and his rescuers have named him Donatello after the purple-wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who lives in a sewer in the cartoon!!!!!
Now that's a happy ending, but I have done enough confined space courses after working in wineries to know that this is actually really really bad idea and could have gone really really wrong. Luckily Lindsey and Donatello made it out ok - so we'll leave it at that!
Do you drive a manual or an automatic car?
32% drive manual
68% drive automatic
Period Dramas & Mental Health in Music (Culture Vulture)
Taylor’s Swift Jets & F1’s Silly Season (The Shit Show)
Our Love Island Debrief (Culture Vulture)
SYSCA playlist (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)
