It’s my wedding anniversary today, so I’m zooming through this one. I’m sure you’ll understand. Here’s today’s five!
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben head toward retirement: Because 2020 is the year when companies finally realized brands explicitly referencing slavery times and/or peddling racially submissive stereotypes are just not cool. Which, I mean, yes? Good? It would be easy for me to be snarky and say “was anyone really asking for Aunt Jemima to go into retirement?” but as it turns out, yes, they have been, and for some time now, so this is another place where my privileged white ass meant I had a blind spot in my understanding of the world. Funny about that. I’ll be interested to see what brand name replaces both items — I don’t see either PepsiCo or Mars, the companies retiring the brands, being all that keen to relinquish market share for these products.
Covid is spiking in 21 states: again, funny how when you don’t actually solve your virus problem before you open back up, the virus comes back as if you didn’t actually solve your problem. So strange! Also, it does seem the current political solution for this is “(shrug) guess people will die, then.” So, yeah, if you were hoping for this all to be over with quickly, at least here in the US, I’ve got bad news for you. And I hope you weren’t planning to do any international travel any time soon. Krissy and I had big plans to celebrate our 25th anniversary in Iceland. At this rate, we might be considered lucky to make it there for our 27th or28th.
Juneteenth an official holiday? It’s happening in Chicago, and there appears to be some momentum to make it a national holiday (if you’re going, uhhhhh, whatteenth now?, here’s a backgrounder for you). Personally I’m totally down with making Juneteenth a national holiday; some people want to swap it out for Columbus Day, and while I’m not opposed to that I think it’d be fine to have Juneteenth and take the current Columbus Day spot and make it a National Indigenous People’s Day/Enrico Fermi Day joint celebration.
“Homegrown”: If you were randomly thinking to yourself that you wanted to listen to a never-released 45-year-old Neil Young album, then today’s your day. Also, you have weirdly specific desires. I’m listening to it right now, and, yup, it sure sounds like Neil Young at his most Neil Youngish. As the kids say, if this is the sort of thing you like, then you’ll like this sort of thing. The direct link to the album stream on Young’s site is here.
Next July in Disneyland: In case you were wondering when the Happiest Place on Earth was planning to dip its toe back in. It’s also worth noting the things Disney plans to make their resorts safe, which include full masking and reduced capacity. Since Disney is a corporation intensely aware of its potential liability, it’s probably not out of line to suggest that Disney’s best practices here are probably a good minumum standard for other places to follow. Especially about the masks. Wear your damn masks, people!