PicoBlog

This is the second letter in the Total Work series, the first of which was Life as Nonproductive Act. You can read this letter as a standalone, but you might get more out of it if you read the previous one first. This series is primarily inspired by the book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which introduced the idea of “Total Work”, and I’ll continue exploring its themes in this letter.

It’s the start of a new year my fine marketing muse friends, what do you say that we ease our way into our 2024 journey with some lighthearted fun, as it will only get more serious and complicated from here, right? O.K. here we go… Type in the words business jargon generator into Yoda, (that’s code for Google for those new to this thread,) and check out some of the sites that will auto-generate “dazzlingly fancy new business buzzwordy gibberish” – it will surely put a smile on your face.

I recently watched a video of Tom Jones singing “I won’t crumble with you if you fall”. He sang this as a tribute to his wife before she passed away from lung cancer. Here are the lyrics to the song: I will wake in the morning if you call And I'll stand beside you as long as I can ncG1vNJzZminoJq7b7%2FUm6qtmZOge6S7zGinrppfmLyuudSnoK2xkaGwqbHMoqqtZ6Bkr7bAjKJksKeeqXqkvtSmmaWdXay2tbSMsqauZZmberq71HisraWPqLy2vsKedKmno6lzpLvMppynrKNywbPBxF%2BsraWPorKltdSmdLCdkg%3D%3D

This week brought an exciting bit of news for the Piano Man Hive: Billy Joel is going to release his first new song in nearly two decades, and his first full-on pop single since River of Dreams dropped in 1993 when I was in *mumble mumbleth* grade. The final track on that album, “Famous Last Words”, seemed a pretty conclusive note on which to go out (“these are the last words I have to say, that’s why it took so long to write”), and Joel has spent the intervening thirty-some odd years touring, performing at Madison Square Garden, putting out some classical music and so on.

It’s fun to laugh at models, right? It’s even more fun to laugh at male models! This is the principal premise of one of the most successful movies of the early 2000s: Zoolander. Premiering in 2001, it was such a hit with my high school friends that whole sections of dialogue became a permanent feature of our vocabulary. It’s been such a rough start to 2024, and while the world burns and the future of humanity looks ever more bleak, I needed a bit of comic relief.

[It’s Butt News’s birthday this week! We’ve been doing this silly little project for two years and, if I can be sincere for a second, I am so grateful to everyone who subscribes (paid and unpaid!) and comments and participates and laughs and e-mails me and makes this extremely niche thing that I LOVE to do feel like it has an audience and a purpose. Thank you thank you thank you thank you forever—I can’t say this has been my BEST mental health year and Butt News is a balm, my absolute #1 favorite part of my job, and I only get to do it because of all of you, and in the third year of Butt News my only goal is to do it MORE.

I spit out my yogurt on my computer monitor from this line: "Kevin walks through the streets of Manhattan, which are deserted using Satan magic. It’s like early Covid! We honor our essential workers! Haha, remember when honored our essential workers before we had the collective spirit slowly ground out of us by capitalism and the Republicans AND THE DEMOCRATS? Maybe I do believe in Satan!" So, eternal thanks, Lindy, for that.

In the 1960’s, a meteorologist by the name of Edward Lorenz posited that tiny “butterfly-size” changes to the starting point of his models could result in anything from sunny skies to violent storms. This was problematic because if true, it meant it was nearly impossible to make long-term weather forecasts.  This phenomenon, commonly referred to as the “butterfly effect”, implies that a seemingly innocuous event (such as a butterfly flapping its wings) has the potential to completely upend a complex system.

My 9-year-old and I recently began rewatching Battle Kitty, a truly unhinged animated show on Netflix that has a deeply disturbing preoccupation with butts. Beyond the butts, the show is actually about a kitty with dreams of being a great warrior. Together, he and his sidekick—Orc—make their way through the battle royale-like challenges on Battle Island. During our recent rewatch, I googled info on the show’s origins and stumbled upon some controversy over the show’s age rating.