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Tremendously Intriguing Topical Subjects - 7.12.24

It’s news. It’s sports. It’s commentary on weird shit from around the internet.


It’s Tremendously Intriguing Topical Subjects, our weekly digest of curated links designed to keep you abreast of very important news!


We will deliver T.I.T.S. (a coincidental acronym) to your inbox every Friday if you subscribe to our blog!

 
Very Important News!



Margot Robbie and Alexandra Daddario announce pregnancies in the same week? Two stunning Hollywood actresses, in their prime, put their careers on temporary hold to embrace motherhood? Is this the much ballyhooed "Project 2025" responsible for this? I kid. I kid.


While Daddario's political leanings probably reside somewhere to the left of Karl Marx, I cannot be anything for this raven-haired starlet with piercing blue eyes. She's 38 years old and revealed that she miscarried a prior pregnancy. Having experienced that tragedy myself, I can relate to what Ms. Daddario means when she said, "Those kinds of losses and trauma are very hard to explain unless you’ve been through them." Very true.


Daddario's career has sputtered a bit as of late, but she does have impressive credits on her resume. After starring in a few bit roles here and there, this NYC-born actress was thrust into stardom back in 2014 after nabbing the role of Lisa Tragnetti in season one of HBO's True Detective. While Daddario appeared in only four episodes, her massive talents might be what most fans remember most from that of limited-run series. In episode 2 of that series, we learn that Daddario is Woody Harrelson's mistress during a fairly graphic scene where Daddario disrobes, restrains Harrelson, mounts and rides him. It's an iconic scene, that put the rewinding capabilities of early-era DVRs to the test. Observe:



The show was popular in its own right, but that scene took the internet by storm. People were mesmerized by Daddario's Daunting Dairy Doozies, making her a household name overnight. Reminiscing on the role back in 2021, Daddario said that her manager called the night after that episode aired and told her that ‘the phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning. And all of a sudden, everyone in town wanted to meet with me.'


Daddario would go on to star in several more films, including San Andreas and Baywatch, but for my money Daddario's best work came in The White Lotus, where she plays Rachel, a newlywedded struggling journo. In this role, Daddario perfectly captures the tragedy of the modern AWFL - she's unhappy, she's made a poor career choice, and is unwilling to accept the love of her husband. Daddario's somber journey of self-realization highlights the brilliant writing of that show.


Daddario's next career move appears to be motherhood. Which should be her best role yet. Congratulations to her and her husband. They're going to get soooo big.


Thank you for taking this walk down Mammary Lane with me.




The people commenting on the tackiness of this bridal shower dress are correct. It's very tacky. Extremely tacky, even. There is a tackiness line and that dress twerks over that line on its way into a kid's birthday party at a Chuck-E-Cheese where it proceeds to get into a brawl with other adults. You know what I mean.


Look, I support women enjoying the fruits of hard labor invested into perfecting their physiques. There is nothing inherently wrong with wearing that lacy coverlet, but it's not suitable for a bridal shower. Grandmas go to bridal showers. You don't want Grandma to discover your piercings or that regrettable tramp stamp you got during Spring Break at Myrtle Breach in 2006.


Actually, that dress perfectly exemplifies my thotty-vacation-grace-band rule, whereby typical standards for appropriateness are loosened by 20% while on vacation. That "dress" is perfectly suitable to wear while getting hammered and walking around a beach resort. In fact, many would strongly encourage you to adorn yourself in such attire in such a scenario!


But not at a bridal shower. That's tacky.




The premise of this article is that a porn star is unphased by someone leaking her sex tapes on the internet. This has to be one of the biggest no-shit-sherlock moments ever posted online. I'm not even sure a porn star can have a sex tape leaked . . . it's more like her resume was posted on the internet.


Look, to my mind, you can't be just a little bit of an adult performer, once you go cloth off for money - you've crossed a Rubicon that cannot be undone. And if you've made fuck-fuck films for money, then you're kind of always going to be a porn star. You can stop making porn for money, but then you'll just be known professionally as ex-porn star, <insert your name here>. I don't make the rules, I just observe them and share them with the class.


So yeah, I would hope this porn star isn't ashamed of people finding her work online, because it's a life choice she has to live with. My bigger fear is that countless women on OnlyFans will one day regret their decision and that the already complicated modern relationships between men and women will only become even more difficult as a result.


Finally, don't sit on the hood of your car. Your ass will end up leaving dents and the buttons and rivets on your jeans will scratch the paint. Auto Bodywork is not cheap, so you'll end up having to do even MORE pornography to pay for repairs!



Not smart! Do not do this!


House of the Dragon is the best show on television



After the disastrous end of Game of Thrones, many assumed that George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire franchise was finished. The final season (but really the final three seasons) was so poorly written and mystifyingly dumb that what had been arguably the biggest show in television had become detested by fans.


When HBO announced that they were producing a spin-off, based on a thinly outlined history of the Targaryen Dynasty, there wasn't much hype. Many assumed it was going to suck. Many assumed it was going to flop because of the confusing nature of the repetitive names, unknown characters, and unknown families. I counted myself as part of both camps! I have read the books, including Fire & Blood, the fictional history book for which House of the Dragon is based (yeah, yeah, nerd alert). I did not think the writers would be able to adapt about 120 pages of dialog-free fictional history into an enjoyable television show.


I was wrong. This show fucks so hard. It captures all of the best parts of Game of Thrones - the politics, the backstabbing, the familial drama - and improves upon them. The battles in HoTD are vastly superior to GoT. The dragons are better. The acting is better. The sets are better. The production, on the whole, is better. The latest episode, A Dance of Dragons, adapted from about 10 pages of GRRM's book, featured one of the best battle scenes ever put to screen and far surpassed

the heights that GoT ever reached. This was the best episode of the series thus far. I am purposefully not including spoilers about the story, but trust me when I say that while HoTD is not perfect, it is the best show on television.


The showrunners on HoTD, Ryan Condal, and Miguel Sapochnik, inherited a tainted franchise from their predecessors. They were given 100 million dollars to make ten episodes after their predecessors had been given 90 million to make six. They had a fraction of the source material to work from. They didn't care, they loved the material and brought to life a complex story about a fictional civil war over a fictional dynastic inheritance that highlights the perils of war and the risks of deploying the in-universe equivalent of nuclear weapons on the battlefield.


Despite the odds being stacked against them, these dudes succeeded in reviving the franchise - which only makes GoT showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' failure look that much worse by comparison. Fuck those guys. Go watch HoTD.


**thick Scottish accent** "That's all I've got for today. Go away now."


 
Regular News!



The DNC / Corporate Press regime that shapes most mainstream narratives in this country fucked up on this one. They watched Biden's debate performance, panicked, and decided he needed to be replaced without considering what would happen if he refused to step aside. Journalists woke up and suddenly discovered that Joe Biden was almost 82 years old and started doing their jobs. They gave 'Ol Joe the Trump treatment - running articles with damaging claims from unnamed sources to pressure Biden to step aside.


Except he didn't step aside and says he won't.


Consider this: what if the media pretended that Biden’s debate performance was just mediocre instead of "he needs to step aside” level bad? Or, put another way, what if the media kept doing what they've been doing for the past 4 years? Do you think we'd still be talking about Biden's cognitive decline 2 weeks after the debate? Do you think any members of the Democrat Party would be publicly calling him to let someone else run?


I think not. I think if the corporate press just did what they normally do (ignore stories that are detrimental to their ideological goals), Biden's disastrous debate performance would have remained as stuck within the right-wing media bubble. They would've just called our reaction "an exaggeration from the far right" and most people would've moved on to the Hawk Tuah girl's new reality TV Show.


Instead, the media did the thing it refused to do for years - tell the truth about Biden's cognitive issues. They reported on how he forgets names of longtime friends and has met with a Parkinson's expert at the White House eight times since August 2023. By doing so, they have given Trump a powerful cache of liberal media-reported claims to unload on Biden over the next five months. Think about this - Trump can run ads of basically every liberal commentator calling for Biden to step down from now until election day. The media can try to pretend this never happened, but the damage has been done.


I'm not complaining about any of this, mind you, all of this reporting was LONG overdue. I'm more just shocked at how undisciplined the DNC / Corporate Press has been over the past two weeks. Biden was always going to have a difficult time winning this election, but his allies made things much more difficult for him by failing to keep their powder dry. This was a rare L for a regime that's usually very adept at picking the right battles and getting what they want.


Oh well, fuck 'em.


The Polls: Trump extends his lead basically everywhere.

If you look at the topline number, it may not seem like Trump has seen huge gains from Biden's disastrous June 27th debate performance, but the polls in most battleground states have moved decidedly in his favor.


Since June 27th, Trump has extended his lead in Nevada (+1.2), Michigan (+.4), Pennsylvania (+2.5), and Wisconsin (+2.2), while maintaining his leads everywhere else (Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona don't have much post-debate polling to report on). If we assume that Trump will carry North Carolina in 2024 (he did in 2020) and no other surprises outside of the battleground states listed above, then Trump can get to 270 electoral votes with Pennsylvania plus nearly any combination of two other remaining battleground states (NV and AZ would get him to 269 . . . which would result in a tie and would be very 2024).


Pair this with Biden's dismal 39% approval rating and . . . things don't look good for ole Amtrak Joe.



The one in which Robert Stacy McCain shares wisdom on the current state of corporate media meltdowns:



"The reason Stewart (and George Clooney, and everybody on CNN) is now urgently demanding that Joe Biden step aside is because (a) everybody saw on June 27 that Biden is cognitively dysfunctional, (b) they know Biden will lose to Trump, and therefore (c) BIDEN MUST QUIT TO SAVE DEMOCRACY FROM TRUMP!


Never mind all those primary votes who voted for Biden — Democratic voters are a herd of stupid cattle, obediently doing whatever the media tell them to do, and their votes can be ignored if necessary. That’s not me saying that; I’m just paraphrasing Jon Stewart who, up until June 27, seemed perfectly OK with the stupid cattle nominating an 81-year-old incumbent for another four years."


When you watch that clip above, it feels like an outdated format. It's on cable TV in the age of social media clips. It's staged, and stilted and you can see the jokes coming from a mile away. But there was a time when the host was one of the most influential men in America. If I had to name the root causes for why media has become so insufferable, I'd point to The Daily Show and The West Wing. I don't want this blog to extend past 10,000 words, so I'll leave The West Wing and its overwrought dialog and cringe storylines for another day. So let's briefly talk about Jon Stewart.


If you watch or read any corporate media personality under the age of 40, they were influenced by Jon Stewart. They try to imitate Stewart's sardonic self-righteous tone on Twitter, every day. Jon Stewart ruined an entire generation (my generation) who stopped reading and took The Daily Show's framing of issues as gospel. Stewart himself would always say that he "wasn't a journalist" and that his show aired after "puppets making crank phone calls" on Comedy Central to shield himself from serious scrutiny. But make no mistake, Stewart fully believed he was the fucking Edward R. Murrow of his day.


He wasn't. He was a tortuous libtard who rose to prominence at the perfect time - when George W. Bush bumbled about the White House and led us into two extremely unpopular and misguided wars. Stewart's sanctimonious delivery of his version of "the news" instilled in millennials a belief that OF COURSE THERE IS ONLY ONE VALID WAY TO LOOK AT THIS VERY COMPLEX ISSUE - a toxic, self-absorbed, uncurious way to search for truth that most still function by today.


Fuck that guy. Fuck that show.



The one where David asks for your help to keep the lights on over at Thompson, Blog. He may be British, but he's "one of the good ones". Check out his work and if you have the means to contribute to his fundraiser, I encourage you to do so.



 
Sports! Sports! Sports!

NFL Jersey Tier Rankings

This is the definitive NFL Jersey tier list. I am an expert in pro sports uniforms aesthetics. I study them. I know which ones look good and which ones look dumb. Most jerseys designed after 1997 have sucked but have been getting slightly better during the past few years.


ELITE: My Chicago Bears might suck, but they always look good while breaking my heart in navy, white and burnt orange. The Chargers' powder blues are unique and iconic. The Chiefs, Cowboys, and Browns all rock a timeless look that they should never change.


Good: The Seahawks are the only "modern design" that doesn't look like a "create-a-team" from Madden 2006. They actually found a way to incorporate chest striping and not have it look totally out of place. The Lions have finally returned to their Barry Sanders 90s look after decades of fucking around with the fonts. The Bengals have an iconic look. The Packers suck. Fuck the Packers.


Decent: I have never liked the Steelers number font and am generally not a fan of black and yellow as a color scheme. The rest of these are meh. If the Giants returned to the Parcells/Simms/LT era uniforms, they would be ELITE.


Bad: The Broncos elevated themselves from awful to bad with their latest iteration of their uniforms, but they're still ugly. The Jaguars, Ravens and Texans' uniforms have always been ugly.


Awful: The biggest crime in NFL uniform history was committed by the Dolphins' when they destroyed their iconic logo and uniforms in 2013. They desecrated a timeless look in favor of a sterilzed Arena Football League design. To make matters worse, the team wears the peak throwbacks a few times a year to tease the cocks of their fans, but the franchise refuses to make them their primary kits. Observe:



The Eagles helmet is one of the best in the game, but the franchise fell victim to the "lets choose deep, lifeless colors" craze of the mid 90s when they ditched Kelly for Hunter Green. A vibrant look that popped off the screen, replaced with an amalgam of dark, barely differentiable dusky tones. Observe:



The Redskins had ELITE uniforms and an iconic logo, but ruined both because they bent the knee to white liberals angry on behalf of Native Americans who didn't care that much. The Commies new look is much more offensive. Observe:



The Titans uniforms have always been ugly. What's worse is that the Titans replaced the Houston Oilers, still own the Oilers IP, and have deprived fans of one of the coolest designs ever conceived. Observe:



You just read the definitive NFL Jersey tier list. I am an expert. This is what happens when there are no good sports to watch - I resort to list-making.




You know where I am going with this one, right? This is an elite display of supportive significant other ("SSO") love, loyalty, and lavishment. The three Ls! This is what an SSO does to celebrate the accomplishments of her man (or woman), they buy helium balloons at Party City that spell out something sweet and tape them to the wall as a surprise. They probably did fun sex stuff later that evening. Not of the churlish "hawk tuah" variety, but tender, SSO, lovemaking.


Are you so naive to believe that gestures of this kind have no effect on player performance? When Paul Skenes wakes up the following morning, he will walk into his kitchen (after taking a long, erratically aimed, piss) and see those balloons still taped to the wall. He will smile to himself, knowing his SSO, still embraced by sweet slumber in his bed, cared for him so much that she made the effort. He will take the mound later that evening with a little more confidence and a little extra oomph on the 103 MPH fastball he pumps by opposing hitters.


That little extra "oomph" is the difference between winning and losing. Between livin' and dyin'! And I know if I’m gonna have any life anymore, it’s because I’m still willin' to fight and die for that little extra oomph. Because that’s what livin' is! The oomph, supplied by your smoking SSO after you make your first all-star game.



Folks, , , , let these young lovers serve as an example to us all. Make time for each other. Remember that gestures, big and small, matter. Strive to be that little extra "oomph" for your spouse's day.




Paige Spiranac, the Greatest eGirl Sports Influencer of all time, is an American Patriot and recently revealed herself to be a feminist icon. This week, Spiranac posted the above slow-motion video of her golf swing. It was ELITE eGirl posting, but it was also a public service announcement for the trials and tribulations endured by big-breasted women in athletics, specifically golf.


In the caption that accompanied Spiranac's video, she said "in all seriousness it’s wild seeing what my chest has to do through the swing so my arms can clear lol I can totally understand why women with larger chests who pick up the game feel stuck and uncomfortable". Did you know why women with Large Luscious Liberty Bells feel intimidated by golf? Well, you do now, thanks to Paige Spiranac.


My hope is that the millions who viewed this video will gain an appreciation for the barriers of entry that exist for Women with Winsome Watermelons in sports. This is important work because as I've always said - Big Naturals Need Your Support.



Thank you for all you do, Paige Spiranac.




Did you know that Kayla Simmons is still recovering from a torn ACL? Yet, there she is, swimming with sharks and continuing to pump out some of the best eGirl sports influencer content on social media.


Did you know that Kayla Simmons recently surpassed the 1 million follower threshold on Instagram? You probably wouldn't because she hasn't even bragged about it on her account.


Kayla Simmons is a hard hat, lunch pail, type of player. She's a Grinder with Gorgeous Glands. She is Darrin Erstad, the plucky lead-off hitter who may never win MVP, but puts her body on the line to dive for a line drive or break up a double play. She is Julian Edelman, a slot wide receiver who isn't afraid to return punts, throw blindside blocks, and catch the high and hard ones over the middle. Kayla might not get the plaudits of her contemporaries, like Mikayla Demaiter, but she does the things necessary to win the game. A team full of Mikayla Demaiters might win awards, but a team full of Kayla Simmonses will win championships.



I can't wait until real sports return. I can only continue inappropriately analogizing eGirl sports influencers to common pro sports tropes for so long.


 
Meme of the Week!

This week's honors goes to OG Flappr contributor, @apparentlysteve, for this very apropos take on the Democrats' attempt to make something out of the Heritage Foundation's whitepaper policy plan. Literally, the only thing counter-attack the DNC/Corporate press has come up with since the debate is this "Project 2025" narrative slop. It's actually kinda sad. It reminds me of when Trump talked about "the laptop from hell" during one of the 2020 debates, but most people didn't know what he was talking about because the media refused to report on it.


This meme was so good that a similar version was posted five days earlier by Mount Rushmore memer, @grandoldmemes:

This happens sometimes. You think of a great idea. You make the meme. The meme does well and someone lets you know that you were beat to the punch - usually by literal meme making machines like @grandoldmemes, @richard_harambe and @midnightmitch, among others. Many such cases!


I asked @grandoldmemes for his thoughts on this alleged case of unintentional meme theft and he shared with me the following for publication:

Likewise, I reached out to @apparentlysteve for his response to @grandoldmemes statement and he said the following:

So, it would appear that @grandoldmemes actually, sort of, won the award this week . . . but since @apparentlysteve didn't intend to steal the meme from him, let's just say they'll share the honor. Well done, gents.


 
Some Flappr Blogs!



3 Comments


You lost me for a bit with DragonTV, but the rest of it pulled me back in! Thanks!

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It's the Lions year. This seals it.

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PizzaCzar
PizzaCzar
Jul 12

As a Dolphins fan we’ve been screaming at the organization to revert the uniforms. I’m pretty sure that company hates its fans.

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