Helllooooo, Trash Pandas! Welcome back to another edition of your favorite web-based news and humor column from an alternative weekly from a midsized American city, also known as: THE TRASH REPORT! I'm Elinor Jones, and I finally got my first sunburn of the summer this past weekend. I slid it in just under the wire, too, as the sun is now obscured by wildfire smoke. I guess not having to worry about sunscreen is one nice thing the end times have going for them! Ha ha ha. Now, the news:
Wow, the End Times are Stressful!
The unfairly attractive people who populate Southern California used to laugh off the traffic congestion and occasional earthquakes with "well, at least we don't have hurricanes!" Reader, I regret to inform you that Southern California now does have hurricanes, and yesterday, they even had both hurricanes and earthquakes! Hilary is currently bearing down on the world's 5th-largest economy and all of us up here in the (usually) soggy Northwest are doing our damnedest to gently mock their ill-preparedness like, "ha ha, need an umbrella?!" while internally acknowledging the unfunny reality that the climate is coming for us all.
Real life break: I was camping and away from cell service this past weekend (thus the sunburn) and I didn't catch up on the news until getting back to the city today. When I saw all the alerts on social media about "beware of Hilary!" and "Hilary is coming!" my 2016-PTSD-rattled brain thought maybe Hillary Clinton had announced some sort of reinvolvement in politics that I was in no way ready to emotionally process, and when I realized it was just the tropical storm, I breathed a sigh of relief like "oh it's just a hurricane named Hilary!" As if that's any fucking better?! We are all truly damaged.
(Person with the most tenuous grasp on anything that’s ever happened) It looks like Pete Davidson is dating the earthquake!!!
— broti gupta (@BrotiGupta) August 20, 2023
Queer Eye's Bobby Berk tempted fate on threads by bragging that in California, "At least we don't have snow storms!" Many people—myself included—screengrabbed the tempting of fate so that we can gleefully huck it back at him when the state eventually falls victim to severe winter weather. (We won't be super gleeful, because I'm sure it will be scary, but you know what I mean.) That'd be like me sitting here in Portland like "at least we don't have tornadoes!" and if I were to exhibit such hubris, I fully expect someone to project a hologram of said hubris over my feet when they're sticking out from underneath a misplaced house.
America's Mayor? More like America's Payer
Former New York City Mayor and current bumbling farter Rudy Giuliani is up to his hair-dye coated ears in legal debt. He's hoping that having served at Trump's buttboy for the last decade would help him a little financially, but Trump is reluctant to fork over cash to somebody so publicly and permanently tied to an embarrassing loser (the loser, of course, being Trump himself). Giuliani has taken to selling autographed 9/11 swag, selling T-shirts for (I'm so sorry, I'm just saying what I sees) $911 a pop. Yikes, dude. The only thing I can say for this magnificent fall from grace is that this is the trainwreck that got us the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, and while part of it is sad, as we must cherish and nurture our elders, this has been extremely, cathartically funny and definitely worth how weird all of us feel to be loving it.
The prison in Georgia where Giuliani, Trump, and their band of anti-merry-makers will be booked has been for years plagued with problems, including extreme over-crowding, poor heating and cooling, and bedbug infestations. Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat had even recently gone to a public meeting with four wheelbarrows of shanks that were fashioned from the crumbling building itself. One defense attorney described the jail as "miserable; it smells; it's generally unpleasant." Hey, at least Giuliani will fit in!
lol this is quite the self-own here pic.twitter.com/h10tIlfbOg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 15, 2023
Climate Change and Celebrity
I usually write more about celebrity gossip in this column and I recognize that the climate crisis has really colonized my content, so imagine my delight (not delight) when news broke that socialite Paris Hilton and her family were visiting the fire-ravaged island of Maui. They were reportedly staying at a resort a mere 30 miles from the ruins of Lahaina. Aware of the backlash, Hilton took to social media to insist that they were there helping with recovery efforts, and like, okay. Sure. That's nice. But let's pretend for a minute that this was true, and she and her husband actually were there to help. But they were there with their baby. Taking up three persons-worth of hotel space that could have gone to actual recovery workers. No matter how much Paris and her husband were willing to throw down, like, a baby?? You can't convince me that a baby was doing enough to make his occupation of hotel space worth it!
Otter? Damn Near Killed Her
Actress Crystal Finn, who was apparently on an episode of Succession, was recently bitten all over by some river otters in California. This following the viral story of the sea otter known for stealing surfboards in Big Sur. And apparently, over in Montana, another rowdy crew of otters nibbled at some unsuspecting tubers, to the extent that one of them had to be hospitalized. Um, actually maybe "nibbled at" was the wrong turn of phrase. This is just a reminder that when we're in the wilderness, we are in their house, and they might get pissed at us for it, as they have every right to be! You swim in an otter's house, and get chomped by an otter, you should say "thank you for letting me know your boundaries, and I'm sorry to have messed up your kelp." Let this be my public notice that whenever our otter lords storm the lands to retake what is theirs, feel free to throw me over to them to buy time for the rest of you to escape. I'd happily die by otter bites. Rather that than an earthquake, anyway. Or a hurricane.
Wow, what a week! You'll notice that I didn't touch on Britney Jeans Spears' divorce from her husband of one year and that's because it bums me out. Climate change bums me out, but I've had 41 years on this planet to figure out how to laugh about it, but I don't have jokes in my pocket for this one yet, as I was rooting for them/her. I hope that 1) our planet can be saved, and 2) Britney Spears can live peacefully on it.
Til then, here's me cruising into this week when things are...how you say...fucked:
Can everybody just Please look at this cow pic.twitter.com/WoE8nhBEvV
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) August 20, 2023
Divorcedly,