Hi everybody, and welcome to another roundup of news and gossip and, most importantly, TRASH. Have you checked the weather forecast lately? Trash shows no sign of letting up for the foreseeable future. In fact if I wrote a song about the trash forecast, it would be called "Lightning Trashes." If I were to be in a '90s soft-alt band about it, we would be called the Trash Test Dummies. If I were to make it into a Catholic thing, it would be Trash Wednesday, and we'd all wear a smear of garbage on our foreheads. Hey, what if instead of looking at anything at all that happened in the news, I just keep writing trash puns until I hit my word count?Â
JK. You know I cannot stay away from current events. I know my trash pandas must be fed.
Bleaking News
Unless you have smartly turned off the news notifications on your phone (I personally can't figure out how), you've been getting repeatedly smacked in the face with horror after horror from the new returning Trump administration. But believe it or not, there's some fun news in there too! For example, apparently some of the Trump inaugural parties gave out little goodie bags to guests like a tacky king hosting a birthday party. According to Page Six, they contained "a large red leather journal embossed in gold with a sketch of the US Capitol." Hmm, I wonder if the guests were disappointed that the artistic rendering didn't show the building swarming with insurrectionists and MAGA flags? The gift bags also included a large—I don't know, souvenir coin? Medallion?—with Trump and Vance's faces in profile. Trump looks aged down considerably although they did keep his vaginal neck folds, which I appreciate. Vance, however, looks exactly like a Garbage Pail Kid.Â
I mean:

Singer Jewel caught a lot of heat for performing at RFK Jr's Make America Healthy Again ball and she was quick with a self-facing phone camera explanation/apology. She tried saying that it was important to her as a mental health advocate, and “If I wait to try until I agree 100% with the people that might be willing to help me, I’d never get off the bench. I don’t think that’s how activism works, waiting until everything’s perfect enough to participate.” Yeah Jewel, there's "not perfect" and there's "psychotically anti-health." And I don't get how singing—presumably for money—counts as advocacy? It's not like she was speaking on a panel—she was at a party; it was a huge slap in the face to her LGBTQIA fans, as well as anyone who may have spent the past several years steeling their nerves in order to some day sing "Foolish Games" at karaoke only to be disappointed, heartbroken, and without a ballad in their back pocket. Her name is me. I can't believe this is happening.
Revelations about the role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. played in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa keep getting worse.
— The New Republic (@newrepublic.com) January 26, 2025 at 2:35 PM
[image or embed]
Oscar Nomnomnoms
I just had the idea to some day do a brunch on the morning when the Oscar noms come out and call the appetizers "Oscar noms." Is this cute or dumb? Doesn't matter, I'm going to be honest with you: I'm never going to throw a brunch, let alone on a random winter Thursday. Anyway, this year the musical Emilia Perez led in nominations with 13, and it's divisive! Are people preemptively readying to look back on this with the same cringe with which we recall best film winners like Crash (yikes!) and Argo (good and deserving, all of the rest of you are WRONG!). With EP I'm firmly in the camp of, I started watching it, was enjoying it, fell asleep about halfway through, and never felt like watching the rest. But I am loving that Karla Sofia Gascon became the first openly trans woman up for Best Actress in a time when the power that be would prefer she not exist. But she does, and fuck you while we're at it.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert just had to apologize after accusing a woman using the women's restroom in the Capitol of being trans congresswoman Sarah McBride (who is, of course, also a woman); I bet Boebert will have a lot of virulent hatred to spew about a trans woman like Gascon being nominated in a women's acting category. I'm trying to imagine Boebert bitching out Gascon for using the women's restroom at the Oscars, but I can't, because in no corner of my vast and wondrous imagination could I see Boebert ever getting invited to the Oscars. Everyone knows she'd be kicked out for trying to show Sebastian Stan her tits before they even got to Best Supporting. Â

Other Movie News
Excuse me, how did I miss that Ryan Gosling is in talks for a new Star Wars movie?! This news sounds like it was made in a lab to entice Heterosexual Couples of a Certain Age, which does include my household. "I wonder what planet they'll be on" said my male partner as I frantically googled if Jedis have to wear shirts. Would a man get a rash traveling at lightspeed naked, I pondered, and would Disney be brave enough to try? "I bet it'll have something about the Gosling taking the Millennium Falcon on the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs," he said nerdily. "Did you say sex?!" I replied hornily. In a time when stars are dressing quite thematically for the red carpet, I'm already excited for the hypothetical press tour for a movie that hasn't been made yet. It'll be kind of like Chalamet for Dune, but with clothes from the grown-ups section.
Also very relevant to my interests: Reese Witherspoon said she once had to serve on a jury and, because of her acting excellence in the Legally Blonde franchise, she was immediately chosen as foreperson. What a compliment! She really does seem like a highly competent lawyer in that movie, and I'm sure the rest of the folks on the jury felt comforted by her assumed legal understanding. Because not every actor who has played a lawyer gives actual lawyer vibes. Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men was good, but it doesn't give I-understand-normal-human-things-like-jury-duty vibes.Â
Animal News!
One of my favorite things is when I'm digging for gossip at People Magazine and find something that is both the opposite of gossip and something that I must share with all of you, and this week we got it: Australia is celebrating the reemergence if the brush-tailed bettong which had been on the brink of extinction. I love this both for the success of any effort to protect wildlife from harmful human expansion, and because of how delighted any Australian would be to find one of these little fellas in their garden. They look like a kangaroo had a baby with an antelope and then Cardi B did their nails. In a continent filled with snakes and spiders, they need reminders of the good in the world from such a top-shelf cutie and I'm happy for them.
In other animal news, how am I so lucky as to write for a journalistic outlet with such cutting news as dog show dogs are cute? Bookmark that for when other news is scary and oppressive, which will be often, but never forget that you deserve to be happy, and you deserve dogs, and you also deserve trash, but cutely, like when I write it for you. Thanks for reading, I'll catch you next time.
Doggedly,

Â