NTMP 125: The Big Stream
"You're in!"
New-To-Me Phrases, October 20, 2024
Fleshy bags of anxious water * Wyatt Chirp * Pee Bandit * Sentient Instagram Explore page * Morris the northern gannet * Jacuzzi vs. Jacuzzi * The big stew
The Phrases, With Context
Hello there! It’s hard to believe I’ve written 125 editions of New-To-Me Phrases, but here we are. It’s been a really fun ride; thanks for coming along with me.
This week, we have meatsuit metaphors, a great punny pet name, and an unsolved mystery involving bodily fluid deposits.
Let’s get to it!
1. Fleshy bags of anxious water
I love Ed Yong’s newsletter; he’s gone eyebrows-deep into birding and bird photography, and it’s so fun to see someone chase their enthusiasm like that. You may know Yong as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer who helped us make sense of the early days of COVID. The strain of that coverage led to severe burnout, and he now writes bestselling books about the natural world.
Here’s a poignant and hopeful talk Yong gave at XOXO that I highly recommend.
In his latest newsletter, he linked to this post on AI called We Deserve Better Than an AI-Powered Future by UX content designer Jane Ruffino.
In it, Ruffino makes many of the common arguments you’ll see out there from creatives and basically anyone outside of tech startups or enterprise-level business: The value of AI is still unclear, what it does do mostly sucks, it is highly unlikely to get better, it’s eating up energy at unsustainable rates, its bubble is likely to burst soon, and basically . . . only bad actors are getting anything from it, nobody wants it, and we all deserve better than this.
Basically a much more succinct version of Ed Zitron’s glorious 8,000-word AI rants (that I also recommend).
That’s the context for this phrase, in which Ruffino writes:
Despite how flawed we are as fleshy bags of anxious water, it seems we still prefer each other over robots.
BRB; making “Fleshy Bag of Anxious Water” my LinkedIn tagline.
2. Wyatt Chirp
I spotted this on BlueSky, a Twitter alternative run by people who actually know what they’re doing and aren’t transphobic, fascist pieces of shit who are trying to use their billions to sway the U.S. presidential election (that I’m aware of, anyway, lol):
Look at how proud he looks in his fancy little hat! I LOVE HIM.
Are you on BlueSky? Find me there and let’s share cute photos, tell jokes, and make fun of fascists together!
3. Pee Bandit
Do you love a good mystery? I do! In this case, someone is (thankfully?) leaving pee, not stealing it.
For six years, someone has been leaving urine-filled bottles on a utility box in Pasadena, California. Is it to send a message? Is it a crime of convenience?
For two of those six years, two guys have tried to unmask the Pee Bandit via TikTok. They gave a TV interview in which they low-key mess with the interviewer, who makes pee-related puns throughout. I insist you watch it!
The city added a metal pyramid to the top of the utility box to stop the Pee Bandit from stacking his peesterpieces. The first pyramid was torn off, and the second one has been dented so he can keep perfecting his pee placements.
I’d really love to know WHY he’s doing this. And if they find the Pee Bandit, I hope they send that same reporter out to interview him.
h/t brian grubb at type click type for this one.
4. Sentient Instagram Explore page
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day is a master at writing spit-take phrases. “Sentient Instagram Explore page” is how he described Heather Mahomes after she made the news for coming out as a Trump supporter.
No slouch in the funny phrases department, this week Lyz Lenz made a great version of this joke by calling Harrison Butker a “sentient fascist haircut.”
5. Morris the northern gannet
Aaaand we’re back to Ed Jong again. He wrote in another newsletter about a locally famous bird named Morris near Half Moon Bay on coastal California:
Northern gannets are an Atlantic species but sometime in 2012, this particular individual flew across the Arctic Sea and never went back. Named after the gannet genus Morus, he is now the only one of his kind in the Pacific. He spends a lot of time hanging out at this particular harbor and occasionally displays to the local Brandt’s cormorants, who seem unimpressed.
I LOVE MORRIS! I would watch the shit out of his tragicomic Pixar movie.
You can see pics of Morris and his beautiful blue eyes taken by Ed Yong at the link above.
6. Jacuzzi vs. Jacuzzi
I was not aware that the Jacuzzi hot tub was eponymous! I also did not know that one half of the sizeable Jacuzzi family, who came to the U.S. from Italy in the early 1900s—around the same time my maternal grandmother’s family arrived—sued the other.
My mom’s family didn’t invent a household-name product; all we ever did was settle in Chicago and produce a bunch of cousins named Rocky who look like Uncle Jimmy from The Bear.
The phrase “Jacuzzi v. Jacuzzi” (NYT, paywalled) is objectively silly and that’s why it made the list. h/t to Sketchplanations for this one.
7. The big stew
I don’t miss Twitter at all, in part because so many joke-tellers have moved over to BlueSky. But once in a while I get a glimpse of an A+ weirdo tweet like this one, found via Garbage Day:
Bonus Bits
1. Look what we did!
If you’re not a paid subscriber, you may have seen a link to Buy Me a Coffee in your NTMP emails. This year, readers donated $70 to support this project. This means I was able to send a $21 donation (30% of those earnings) to The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide prevention organization that helps LGBTQ+ youth stay in this game called life. Thank you for supporting both my work and this important cause!
2. Have you voted yet?
Here’s a one-stop-voting link to register, check your registration, see what’s on your ballot, and find out where to vote in person or how to vote by mail, via Sharon McMahon.
That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird and stay furiously curious.
Anxious meat sack checking in!