I finished hiking the Appalachian Trail btw. If you even care. So who died while I was gone? | 1. Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney | War profiteer and mass murderer Dick Cheney died on November 3rd, far too late to make any difference. His passing was roasted by, among many others, Defector’s Albert Burneko: | No one has ever welcomed their firstborn child to the world with greater joy than that with which the American reactionary greets a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, a dead cop, an assassinated YouTube bigot. Dick Cheney's celebration lasted more than 20 years; by the time it ended—to the extent it ever did—a crucial portion of American civil liberties had gone with it. More than half a million Iraqis were dead. |
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| Cheney was predeceased by half a million Iraqis who are lined up to waterboard him for eternity in hell, if any justice inheres in this universe, and Henry Kissinger. He was not known to have been related to any members of the seminal early-oughts emo band Fall Out Boy. | 2. PornosexualGooner101 | Here’s a list of words: Daniel Kolitz wrote a long feature about gooning for Harper’s Magazine. Regrettably I know many of you don’t know what “gooning” is. Even more regrettably I know several of that number are members of my own extended family, so I will just very quickly tell you that gooning is the name for a kind of marathon porn-assisted masturbation currently (arguably) in vogue online, and we will never speak of this again. Like most times a talented writer tackles a lowbrow topic for “the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States,” the story is an entertaining read that nevertheless left many of us feeling like there was something wrong with it that we couldn’t quite put our fingers on, or, given the subject, didn’t quite want to put our fingers anywhere near. Fortunately Danny Lavery convened a panel of sickos to get deep into this “very silly and entirely too credulous” story and really tease out the nut of what’s wrong with it: | Eli: I feel so crazy about how people are responding to this article, specifically the sort of florid tone of Doom (a tone that Kolitz also slips in and out of). Like, I fear the extremely online, particularly extremely online men who frequent Discord, but I haven’t seen any particular reason to fear the gooners. I don’t think the subculture is very big and I think the people engaging in it are directly incentivised to lie that they definitely do it all the time, and it’s definitely melting their brains… […] Danny: Right, there’s this phantasmagoric character called “PornosexualGooner101” that a few of Kolitz’ interview subjects keep claiming to know, although no one is able to get in touch with him or provide any evidence of his existence. He’s an erotic urban legend – he never pisses in a toilet, only in his own bedroom; he’s taped all the windows shut to block out the sun, he owns fifty sex toys and never cleans them…I kept waiting for someone to say that he actually died 35 years ago “this very night!!!” |
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| Aidan Walker, an internet culture theorist and the author of the Know Your Meme gooning explainer (there’s another list of words for you), also had some thoughts about it: | The image painted here seems to be of a form of bourgeois respectability, a more “normal” life that gooners, and the rest of us whose psyches have been distorted by the internet, could choose instead of what we’re living now. But is such a life actually real nowawadays? |
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| Without disagreeing with Walker’s assertion that the “economic, cultural, and political foundations for a normal life have eroded,” which is plainly true, or valorizing bourgeois respectability over any of the numerous other lifestyles one could pursue, I would still like to answer: …yes? Yes, a non-gooning life is still very much real, even nowadays. I haven’t personally run the numbers but I’d be willing to bet “bourgeois respectability” is still absolutely crushing “24/7 gooncave dweller” in the rankings. But R.I.P. PornosexualGooner101. |  | Good to see that the New York Times is still having an extremely normal one every day. |
| 3. James Watson | James Watson became one of the most famous biologists in history in 1953, when he discovered Rosalind Franklin’s notes. In the 72 years that followed, Watson also discovered “The Bell Curve,” and left biology to build an enduring legacy for himself in the adjacent field of racism. He died on November 6th. Watson was predeceased in 2021 by legendary science journalist Sharon Begley who nevertheless arranged to roast him from beyond the grave in an inspired act of haterism that will live on long past Begley or Watson or Watson’s footnote in the annals of Rosalind Franklin’s too-brief but remarkable scientific career. Begley wrote: | One formative influence was Watson’s making his one and only important scientific discovery when he was only 25. His next act flopped. Although “Watson’s [Harvard] lab was clearly the most exciting place in the world in molecular biology,” geneticist Richard Burgess, one of Watson’s graduate students, told the oral history, he discovered nothing afterward, even as colleagues were cracking the genetic code or deciphering how DNA is translated into the molecules that make cells (and life) work. |
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| This is a good reminder that if there’s anyone you really despise, you should take a moment right now to write down exactly how much and why, because you might not get a chance to later. | 4. The Line | Financial Times’s Alison Killing wrote the obituary for Saudi Arabian dictator Mohammed Bin Salman’s idiotic boondoggle The Line, an imaginary and impossible to build linear city in the desert that kept a legion of wire-rimmed architectural grifters busy generating science fiction novel cover illustrations for five extremely profitable years. Kate Wagner described it as a “stupid, brutal, and improbable vanity project” in The Baffler back in 2023. The only question about The Line from the start was how many vast and trunkless legs of stone it would leave in the Arabian desert, and the answer now appears to be about 6,000. But alas, after spending a mere $50 billion the dream of piling millions of dead migratory birds at the foot of a 170 kilometer long mirrored wall is over… for now. | | 5. The Farmer’s Almanac | Not The Old Farmer’s Almanac, with its yellow filigreed cover familiar from childhood bathroom magazine racks far and wide. This is other Farmer’s Almanac, the one you didn’t know about until a few days ago when they announced they were shutting down. And that is probably why they’re shutting down. The Old Farmer’s Almanac would like you to know that it’s doing fine, and that there might be some snow on Thanksgiving this year. | | Today’s Song: “People Who Died,” The Jim Carroll Band |  | The Jim Carroll Band - People Who Died (Official Audio)[From Suicide Squad] |
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| ~And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others, this tab is for you my brother~ | If you’re surprised the song today isn’t Bomb the Music Industry’s “5 Funerals” I want you to know first of all that you’re cool, and secondly that I just don’t like that song very much. Big BTMI fan though. | And hey welcome back to Tabs! For those of you who have been funding my hiking habit despite that not being what you’re paying me to do here at all, I am truly grateful for both your subscription support and your patience. I don’t think I’ll need to do any more long-distance hiking for somewhere between “a while” and “the rest of my life” so let’s lock in. |
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