WP 06: The Mummy's Shin

Also: Wordpecker stickers just dropped!

Fart piano | Munge | Long-sleeve underwear | Broad-billed Motmot

Meat conspiracy | The Mummy’s Thumb

This week in phraseology

Since I last published an update, a whole-ass war broke out, which opened by bombing a school, my beautiful friend died after 2.5 years of pancreatic cancer treatment, and we had a family emergency that is thankfully stable for now. Also, Substack FINALLY, after three years of me bitching about it, added the ability to center text—the most basic of features they held back on because one of the founders doesn’t like it. 🙄🤡

It’s wild how we’re all expected to keep on working like nothing’s wrong and we’re not all still traumatized from COVID. All so we can enrich seven or so billionaire sociopath clowns while being gaslit that things like universal healthcare, free education, and free early childhood care are unaffordable while we can easily afford a billion-dollar-a-day war that we didn’t get a voice in starting.

Yes, I’m salty this week. I’m salty every week.

gaze into my soul

I took last week off to deal with everything, both logistically and emotionally. Writing Wordpecker is one of the things that tethers me to what is good in this life: Connecting to readers like you, writing jokes, and learning new things.

Another good thing right now is our always-fun discourse in the comments section.

What are you doing to cope with the current horrors? What keeps you tethered to reality, and to what’s good in this life?

I know you came here for words and phrases, and I’ve got some good ones this week, including yet another fart-themed phrase, the color of mediocrity, the nerd glasses of underwear, and more.

Let’s get to it!

1. Fart piano

As people are on social media less and less and our media landscape continues to fracture, I’m increasingly unsure of how to share some of the fun stuff I find for Wordpecker. I try to source more than one outlet, and most of them have login barrier issues, where sometimes a thing is viewable and sometimes not. Hell, even Substack prevents people from commenting here sometimes because their email login system doesn’t bring you back to the newsletter, but rather Substack’s homepage, and people give up without leaving a comment. Great job, fellas! 🙄🤡

Anyway, it’s a thing, I’m aware of it, and I’m not yet sure of a solution.

Allll that to say: I originally found this post about a toy fart piano by musician Andy Rehfeldt on Instagram, which not everyone uses anymore. But there’s also a YouTube version, which feeds you ads but doesn’t make you sign in. Yay?

Rehfeldt has several shorts featuring him playing songs on the fart piano - please enjoy:

1. Farting in the Name Of

2. Thunderstruck

3. The theme from Halloween

2. Munge

In Don’t Let the Machines Do the Living, Anne Helen Petersen recently wrote about AI in her typically thoughtful, nuanced way that’s worth a read. In this essay, she quotes Brian Eno describing his experience with AI output:

When I was a kid, I liked watercolor painting a lot. And I used to notice that after a day of painting, the water that I was dipping my brush into, which was, of course, a mixture of all the colors I’d touched that day, was always the same color. I called it “munge,” a sort of purply, browny — horrible color, basically. And whenever I’ve tried creating things on ChatGPT … I work very hard to get my prompts right and to filter what I’m saying to it and to try to urge it into something interesting. But the color of munge covers all of it.

Petersen likens this to what she calls pop graveyard, (another great phrase) where you’d get a bit of every soda from a fountain and it always ended up tasting “like orange root beer.” Discernment and taste are good things.

3. Long-sleeve underwear

Miya Acacia, whose Instagram bio reads “professional forehead smoocher,” shared a fun post about the joys of granny panties and did a follow-up where she describes them as long-sleeve underwear, lol.

She also addresses commenters’ fears that men won’t find granny panties sexy. Based on decades of personal experience, my thoughts on that are: Please. Men will take any opportunity to get in there. We could wear shredded boxer shorts, granny panties up to our shoulders, or a soggy paper grocery bag from our last Taco Bell order; it doesn’t matter—you’ll still get some.

4. Broad-billed Motmot

Continuing my working theory that the people who name birds do lots of interesting drugs, we have the Broad-billed Motmot. These little mountain-forest dwellers are found near the Andes Mountains in Central and South America. Motmot is very fun to say, and they sure are gorgeous:

Photo by Dulce Wilson on Unsplash

5. Meat conspiracy

Matt Stoller’s newsletter, Big, which covers antitrust news, is a great source of information for making sense of our current enshittified society. When Stoller recently covered the Amazon price-fixing case, which is W-I-L-D stuff, he mentioned a meat conspiracy price-fixing case.

Researching this led to even more great phrases. The incredibly-named National Hog Farmer reports on lawsuits known as in re Pork dating back to 2018, which allege that American pork producers are engaging in a price-fixing conspiracy. Because of course they are. At some point, the business world needs to start comprehending the concept of “enough.” If you have to cheat to win, you’re losing. Well, they’re not losing but the rest of us sure are. And some of us are researching DIY guillotines.

6. The Mummy’s Thumb

My brother, a 55-year-old man with Down Syndrome, is obsessed with Svengoolie, a campy pre-MST3K show that’s been poking fun at classic horror movies since the late 1970s. On a recent phone call, he mentioned an upcoming movie called The Mummy’s Thumb.

Is the mummy hitchhiking? Writing movie reviews? Or is this what my middle kid described as a Monkey’s Paw scenario, where grave robbers dig up a thumb and bad things happen to them?

I asked my brother if he meant The Mummy’s Tomb, and sure enough, that movie exists. But! Svengoolie is also featuring a film this month called The Mummy’s Hand. Is the Mummy’s Thumb some form or shrinkflation, where we only get the thumb instead of the entire hand? How many mummy body part movies are out there? This is where my research ended, because frankly, I don’t want to know.

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Bonus Bits

1. Tired: AI is inevitable. Wired: AI is mid.

Lyz Lenz wrote about AI this week, quoting sociologist, author, and documentary filmmaker Tressie McMillan Cottom in I hate the whole idea of this - another essay worth your time. As a sociology professor whose industry is greatly impacted by AI, Dr. McMillan Cottom has argued that AI products are mid at best from the get-go. Yes, there are good use cases for when speed (but not accuracy) are needed, but they don’t hold up compared to the scale of what we’re being sold. And we are being sold something here.

If you find value in using AI, I get it. It’s very fast at some things, like scanning lots of documents or images, or vibe coding as a starting point, or image editing, or summarizing meetings. It can quickly organize your notes or convert a document into a table. Personally, I find note taking by hand/keyboard helps me remember much more (science seems to back me up here), but I understand that everyone’s work and workloads are different.

But none of its current benefits or use cases negate that LLMs are being oversold as more useful than they actually are, overhyped as “inevitable,” and propped up by a circular economy that’s likely gonna crash, hard. And I haven’t even touched on the environmental impacts, data center controversies, or employers using it as an excuse to fire people in this post - but all of those things are part of the picture, too. I think we need to have hard cultural conversations about whether all of these downsides are worth it.

2. Wordpecker stickers are here!

Wordpecker 3” vinyl sticker designed by Charlie Trotter

Way to bury the lede, Toni. OMG OMG OMG! I’m so excited about this. I . . . don’t have an online shop yet, though I’d like to set one up for some of my extremely silly offerings including zines, infographics, and stickers. Let me know if you’d like a sticker - they’re available for free to paid subscribers, who help keep the lights on here at Wordpecker HQ - if that’s you, send me your mailing address!

3. Help PanCan.org find a cure for pancreatic cancer

Please consider donating to PanCan.org in honor of my friend Jennifer, who lived a full life filled with laughter and love. Pancreatic cancer currently has a 13% survival rate, and with the federal government arbitrarily slashing funding, research is threatened. As I keep saying these days, “It’s not much, but it’s not nothing.” Small actions add up.

4. I would totally watch a movie about

Whatever this is:

That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird and stay furiously curious.