The 62 things you need to know right now 🚩
On red flags, a national divorce, Dry January, Mel Brooks, engagement photogs, Ram Dass, NFTs, Leo, Betty White, Sidney Poitier, Saul Bass vs. Stanley Kubrick, Fela Kuti, John Madden, and lots more.
📰 This is the Rubesletter from Matt Ruby (comedian, writer, and the creator of Vooza). Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly.
I’ve got thoughts!
🌀 My red flag is people who have red flags. Get over yourself, egomaniacs. Your addiction to ground rules and unwavering insistence on how things SHOULD be instead of how they ARE make you an undesirable partner.
🌀 I feel kinda dumb for never realizing before pandemic that the real purpose of schools is day care, not education. We should start calling ‘em “Kid Warehouse.”
🌀 Imagine how screwed up the Golden Globes people must be to get a bunch of actors to refuse to show up for an awards show. That's like being so dog you get a bunch of cats to turn down a Mice That Want to be Killed Show.
🌀 Fun fact I learned recently from a journalist: When a celeb profile discusses what they're eating, it's a tell the reporter didn't actually spend any significant amount of time with the subject. Ya don't spend 20hrs with someone and then waste space mentioning how they like their asparagus cooked.
🌀 You know someone's been rolling the dice when they've got no clue where they got Covid: "I coulda got it at a bunch of places." They're like one of those moms on Maury who's like "Look, there are a lot of dudes who could be the father."
🌀 The past two years musta been infuriating for people who understand statistics. If you know any stats profs, send 'em a Xanax.
🌀 We associate the word "professional" with success, but really it's just a way of saying whether or not someone got paid. And if getting paid is how we define success, then prostitutes are the most successful at sex.
🌀 How to survive in the wild: Act really crazy your first day there. Walk up to the biggest, baddest looking bear you can find and punch him in the face. That way, you'll develop a reputation.
🌀 That quick cut shower scene from Psycho is how every video is edited now. What was once horrifying to our sense is now our visual default mode.
🌀 Wish I could just have my therapists talk to each other and sort it all out. Would save me a lotta time.
🌀 Re: NFTs, so you think fans are gonna own a % of your art/music/whatever and then simply go along with whatever you want to make? Um, I don't think you get how shareholders behave.
I’ve been approached several times to ‘make an NFT’. So far nothing has convinced me that there is anything worth making in that arena. ‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be an artist. NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist a**holes as well.
🌀 Snowy day in Brooklyn = Definitely the highest per capita rate of dogs wearing tiny shoes.
🌀 If you’re sane and society is ill then society will try to convince you that it’s you that is ill.
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🌀 National divorce, eh?
🌀 Never knew: The adjective gullible comes from the verb to gull.
The adjective “gullible” comes from the verb “to gull,” which used to mean to cram yourself with something, as well as to cheat or dupe, to cram someone else full of fictions. “Not doubting I could gull the government,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1701, and Hannah Arendt used the word “gullible” repeatedly in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951. “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility,” she wrote. That is, among those gulling the public, cynicism is a stronger force; among those being gulled, gullibility is, but the two are not so separate as they might seem.
🌀 NYC 1/22: Come see my meditative comedy show in a yoga studio all about death, therapy, and psychedelics mixed with a live ambient soundscape and visuals and a free yoga mat and drinks so what are ya waiting for? $5 off with code “breathe” here.
🌀 Friend doing Dry January followed up by Frugal February (i.e. where you don’t buy anything you don’t 100% need). So basically he’s recreating what it was like to be alive during 1930. I wish him the best with his Great Depression cosplay.
🌀 New York City’s back, baby! *
* Assuming you never have to ride the subway after midnight. Which I do. If hopscotching between subway cars to avoid undesirable travel partners was an Olympic sport, I’d be Michael Phelps by now.
🌀 The Washington Football Team should be called Washingteam.
🌀 Laughter = ⚰️😱
🌀 Goop sounds like a porn category.
🌀 Important life lesson: Just because people you hate think what you said is dumb, it doesn't mean you're smart.
🌀 Remember when Tom Friedman was bullsh*tting us into bombing Iraq? Well, he’s still got the touch; his advice now: "I think our last best hope is the leadership of the business community." Corporations will save us? Suuuuuuure. Dude needs to go back to chatting up cab drivers in Riyadh because “the business community” he’s pinning hopes on is out here screaming, "We're going to run 3,000 empty flights to keep our take-off slots, climate change be damned!"
🌀 Since we just did the anniversary thing for sieging the Capitol, here were my 10 hidden reasons for the Capitol mob from a previous Rubesletter. This one feels sticky:
They are men who don’t know what masculinity means anymore.
They feel “real” men are being squeezed out of society. They grew up watching John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Rambo and learned that’s how a man should behave. Now, they’re constantly being told that form of masculinity is toxic. They think society has become feminized and they’re being emasculated (see their odd obsession with “cucks”). When testosterone has nowhere to go, it comes out in violence. Men used to fight wars, work at factories, and do manual labor. Now, they conduct remote control drone attacks, collect unemployment checks, and sit behind keyboards all day. They talk a lot about “pride” but, deep down, they don’t respect themselves; and they fear the women in their lives don’t either. Now women can do anything they can do. They have lost their manhood and any sense of being a provider. That pain eventually warps into anger.
🌀 The problem with ego loss is that you constantly want to tell everyone about it and voila, you’re right back where ya started.
🌀 Sad to see the end of Die Hard joke season.
🌀 Grifters gonna grift:
🌀 Engagement photographers weird me out. They’re sanctioned peeping toms. How is that romantic? Wannabe grooms: "To celebrate this special moment sanctifying the bond between us, I've hired this stranger to follow us around, hide in the bushes, and sneak photos without you knowing. It’s like the surveillance state of love!"
🌀 New year, new ‘do for me…
🌀 Ram Dass: “My life is my message.” Terence McKenna: “My message is my message, my life is a mess.”
🌀 Peter Sagal’s Rules of Twitter. Especially like the idea of asking, “Would you say it to their face?”
🌀 "In COVID-19 protocol" is such great/mysterious phrasing. Let's use it everywhere: "Do you have chlamydia?" "All I can say is I'm 'in STD protocol.'"
🌀 Our Vooza team produces funny vids for startups/tech companies/others. If you ever feel like a collab, reach out to me via email.
🌀 The right gets what it wants because it’s proud of the things it wants. For example, the right wants guns so they put on gun shows. So what I'm trying to say is: It's time for the left to start having abortion shows.
🌀 They really should tell you upfront that making it as an artist is 95% being an entrepreneur and only 5% actually making art. And that's if you're lucky.
🌀 People misunderstand meditation. They think it calms your mind down. Nah, it just makes you realize your mind is wild and untamed. And that helps you stop taking it so seriously.
🌀 This Madison Cunningham track: Incredible singing, prickly jazz chords, and neat guitar dynamics. Giving me Jeff Buckley doing “Hallelujah” vibes…
🌀 Bad news: I need the light on my phone to read the menu now.
Good news: At least I haven’t increased the font size on my phone yet.
🌀 I hate how on LinkedIn people post, "Congratulations on your work anniversary." I won’t stoop to that level. Instead, I ask a person out to coffee and DO IT IN PERSON.
🌀 Impressive attention to detail on this Leographic (below). There should be an infographics class that just uses celeb stuff like this for the content.
🌀 Don't Look Up would have been a way better movie if it had 1/10th of the budget. The bigger the budget, the worse the comedy.
🌀 Betty White was funny. I get why she's being celebrated. But the last decade of her performing life was uncomfortable to watch. It was dorky comedy writers making her say sex stuff constantly – because the "joke" is old people get horny. It was repetitive, lazy schlock. She deserved better.
🌀 I used to understand money. But now the government can print however much it wants, crypto dudes get rich making nothing, and somehow everyone's unemployed yet no one needs to work. Hmm, is this the new math?
🌀 Tell me how much you pay attention to cable news and I'll tell you how depressed you are.
🌀 “I’ve got this client who won’t stop micromanaging the design process.”
-Saul Bass, probably 👇
🌀 Roger Ebert and John Madden offered a great lesson for experts. Just because you know more than others, it doesn't mean you can't act like a regular guy and explain things with enthusiasm as opposed to condescension. Their success shows how you can have way more impact if you meet people where they are.
🌀 Also, it helps to be fat. Seriously. You’re instantly more likable. You see it all the time in standup: When a chunky comedian yells at audience members, the crowd thinks it’s hilarious. When a skinny one does it, people just think he’s a jerk.
🌀 Fela Kuti did with songs what comedians do with jokes: work ‘em out live, tape 'em, and then never do ‘em again.
Most musicians first record songs in the studio, then go perform them in concert. Fela Kuti did the opposite. He performed only new unrecorded songs in concert. Then once he recorded them in the studio, he’d never perform them again. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity. It’s as if to him, the recording was the end of the life of a song, instead of the beginning. It makes just as much sense if you think about it that way.
Up ahead (for paid subscribers): Thoughts on Insecure, Don Jr., Larry David, long distance calls, Wordle, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Poitier, the TV show that beat Don’t Look Up to the punch, and more. Plus, you’ll get exclusive content in the future and support the Rubesletter. It usually takes me 8+ hours to write these so I’d appreciate it.
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