Hidley ho, Trash Pandas! Welcome to The Trash Report. I'm your best friend, Elinor Jones, here with the latest in gossip, news, nonsense... kinda whatever, this column can really go off the rails sometimes. Whatever it is, it will be words. Let's go!
Trash Pandas>Raccoon Dogs
Speaking of trash pandas, more information is coming out about the origins of the coronavirus, and signs are pointing towards a raccoon dog! Without looking up what a raccoon dog is, I'm assuming it's an animal with the intelligence, memory, and charming personality of a dog, mixed with the griminess, cunning, and manual dexterity of a raccoon. Sounds like a cursed animal to me, and I feel just fine pinning the pandemic on it! Bats, which had initially been blamed for passing the virus to humans, are tapping their weird little mammalian bird legs off to the side, wondering when to expect their apology.
This is the best reaction I've seen to our current banking crisis:
Stars: They're Just Like Us! (As in, they're riding the bus, scared of their exes.)
It's been a week, but gossip from last week's Academy Awards is still trickling out. As we know, Top Gun: Maverick was nominated for Best Picture, leaving many convinced that Tom Cruise would grace the Oscars with his presence. Alas, he did not. The official reason he bailed was that he had to work on filming the new Mission: Impossible movie. As if movies can't pause production on a Sunday afternoon so its star can go do something else for a few hours? Not buying it! Others have speculated that he didn't go because he didn't want host Jimmy Kimmel to make fun of him. But the best suggestion is that Cruise didn't go because he didn't want to share the red carpet with ex-wife Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban. This one I like. This makes sense to me. That they broke up 20 years ago and still can't hang is the most relatable thing I've ever heard about Tom Cruise. I still avoid grocery shopping in the neighborhoods of people I dated a decade ago. I get it!
And my favorite little morsel from the event is that actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. and his 23-year-old daughter took public transportation to the ceremony. Like, "Honey, you wanna go to the Oscars?" "Sure, Dad!" "Great! We'll just take the bus, and then the subway, and then walk the last few blocks." This is just such a dad move, to make something as glamorous as getting to go to the Academy Awards, but then making it contingent on taking two different forms of mass transit to get there. I love it tremendously.
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