MONDAY, MAY 28
Welcome back to One Day at a Time, dears—where the week’s big celeb news is all about the amazing Spider-Man! This week, the web-slinging superhero was—thank god—in Paris when a four-year-old precariously dangled from a balcony high above the street! Luckily, Spider-Man selflessly swung into action, quickly scaling the exterior of the building, leaping from balcony to balcony to bring the child to safety! It was a remarkable sight, and a reminder that we’re lucky to live in a world with superheroes like Spidey, the Avengers, the X-Men, and… oh, right. Spider-Man does not exist (sorry geeks, dweebs, losers, dorks, freakazoids, and Hubby Kip), and the wall-crawling hero was actually Mamoudou Gassama—a 22-year-old migrant from Mali who, as the New York Times notes, “journeyed through Burkina Faso, Niger, and Libya before making the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing to Italy and arriving in France in September, without documentation.” “I told him that in recognition of his heroic act he would have his papers in order as quickly as possible,” said French President Emmanuel Macron after he met with Gassama. MEANWHILE, IN AMERICA… Arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gone up by 40 percent during the Trump administration. A complaint has been filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that argues America is violating human rights by denying migrants asylum. And the Trump administration has been separating children from their parents as part of a “zero tolerance” plan to curb border crossings, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions kindly explaining, “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” Suddenly, darlings, we understand why people are flocking to nerdy comic book movies: It’s a chance to live, if only for a few hours, in a world where bad guys lose, good guys win, and people help people. Maybe that place is whatever dumb planet the Guardians of the Galaxy live on… or maybe it’s Paris.
TUESDAY, MAY 29
“WHERE IS MELANIA TRUMP??” asked no one ever! Well, until now—because Melania’s missing! The first lady hasn’t been seen in public since May 14, when she reportedly had surgery to treat a “benign kidney condition.” (Hey, that’s our excuse when we don’t feel like having sex with Hubby Kip! “Our kidney’s feeling a little… benign-y,” we tell him. It works like a charm!) Cue the conspiracy theories! “She’s left the White House and moved back to New York City,” Politico wrote in a round-up of “Where’s Melania?” theories. “She’s cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller. She’s holed up with the Obamas, working on a tell-all book about her husband—unless she had a secret nip and tuck, in which case she’s just healing.” Alas, Melania then explained her absence in the most boring way possible. “I see the media is working overtime speculating where I am & what I’m doing,” she tweeted. “Rest assured, I’m here at the @WhiteHouse w my family, feeling great, & working hard on behalf of children & the American people!” Hm. Well that’s underwhelming and—uh oh. If you take every third letter from that tweet and reverse their order, you get a very different message! “SAVE ME PLEASE SAVE,” the decrypted tweet reads! “STABBED OWN KIDNEY TO ESCAPE WEST WING. CAUGHT. HE REEKS OF OLD MAN SWEAT AND ROTTING BIG MACS OH GOD HE’S COMING PLEASE SAVE PLEASE HELP—”
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30
This week Roseanne Barr tweeted something stupid and racist—y’know, just like any other week! Except this time, her tweet was so stupid and so racist it made ABC cancel her sitcom! Roseanne—which ABC retooled in a shamelessly transparent attempt to pander to Trump voters—had been ratings gold for the network, and it only took something incredibly shitty for them to come to their senses. “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values and we have decided to cancel her show,” said Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC and everything else you watch. “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.” ON THE OTHER HAND… “These statements make it seem as if ABC is invested in doing the right thing,” Roxane Gay wrote in a brutally righteous piece in the NYT titled “Roseanne Is Gone, but the Culture That Gave Her a Show Isn’t.” “The statements make it seem as if the cast and crew are nothing like the show’s star,” Gay continued. “These statements are but part of an elaborate and lucrative illusion. ABC is the same network that shelved an episode of Blackish because it addressed the NFL anthem protests. I am more interested in the statement ABC could have made by never making the reboot in the first place.”
THURSDAY, MAY 31
One would think that the day after being fired from one’s wildly successful sitcom for tweeting something stupid and racist, one would have the sense to maybe… we don’t know… stop saying stupid shit on Twitter for just one day? But then again, we are talking about stupid Roseanne Barr. After lambasting her fellow castmates who refused to support her racist tirades (“You throw me under the bus. Nice!” she tweeted at Michael “DJ” Fishman) as well as ABC for not punishing other celebs who made controversial (but to be clear, not stupid and racist) comments, Roseanne placed the primary blame for her Twitter rant on a very peculiar culprit: Ambien. “It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting,” she wrote in a sorry attempt to explain why she compared a Black former Obama official to an ape. Naturally the internet really let her have it—but the shade of the day came from the Sanofi corporation, AKA the makers of Ambien. “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects,” the company tweeted, “racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.” BOOM! Just as a reminder, this is the world we now live in: where a pharmaceutical company dispenses sick internet justice as well as pills.
FRIDAY, JUNE 1
And that story, of course, brings us to Samantha Bee. Like Roseanne this week, the star of TBS show Full Frontal also hopped on the apology train after calling Ivanka Trump the “c-word.” (Note: While we happily support any woman who wants to reclaim and use this word, it’s personally not our jam. That being said, if a white male thinks it’s okay to say the c-word, prepare to have it slapped out of your misogynist mouth. Upset by this seeming “double standard”? Cool. Go fuck yourself. We now rejoin One Day at a Time, already in progress.) UNLIKE Roseanne, however, Samantha didn’t say anything racist, though plenty of internet shitbirds were quick to draw that false equivalency. Conservative shitbird/One America News Network host Liz Wheeler tweeted, “waiting for the liberal outrage and firing of Samantha Bee.” Thank heavens, then, for levelheaded Twitter intellectuals like Brian Santa Maria, who can tell the difference between insult and racism. “Racial slurs are different than ad hominems,” Brian wrote. “And by different, I mean worse. Roseanne wasn’t fired for being vulgar, she was fired for being racist. If Samantha Bee gets fired, it’s because people can’t tell the difference. (And if you can’t tell the difference… you might be a racist.)” IN A RELATED STORY… Ivanka Trump is also a shitbird.
SATURDAY, JUNE 2
To the surprise of… let’s see… NO ONE, corrupt EPA Chief Scott Pruitt has likely violated federal law AGAIN by ordering his aide to book his personal flights, go apartment hunting for him, and (wait for it) purchase an “old mattress” for Pruitt from the Trump International Hotel. Using one’s political office (and aides) for personal gain is clearly breaking the law—but we really need to talk about this “old mattress” situation. Query 1: If Pruitt enjoys such a high-class lifestyle (traveling on private jets and first-class flights), why does he want an “old” mattress? Query 2: Does Pruitt not realize what transpires on hotel mattresses? Particularly ones that have been around for a while? Query 3: He wants an old mattress from a Trump hotel in particular. We will leave you with two words: pee tape.
SUNDAY, JUNE 3
And finally, let’s end the week the way we started—with a selfless act of heroism! The Sun reports that a bicycling delivery person was attacked by a gang of four muggers in London recently, but he was rescued by none other than Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch (!!) who hopped out of an Uber to chase the thugs away. In response, America impeached Donald Trump (who had already lost the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes), committed Mike Pence to an insane asylum, and elected Benedict Cumberbatch president for the next 40-odd years. When the news reached Melania Trump, who’d been hiding in a Saks Fifth Avenue dressing room for the last three weeks, she squeaked, “Oh, thank god! I can finally come out now!”