Fucked-Up Friday came back this week with a guest, three horrors, and a through-line nobody planned: in every one of these stories, a step that was supposed to happen simply didn’t.
Our guest was ProfessorMeredith of Bitchy History, joining from Norwich, England, and she is exactly the kind of brain this show exists to hand a microphone to. She turned in her second master’s thesis on Wednesday. The first one was twenty thousand words on how Star Trek metabolized the politics of its own era. The second is on how 1950s sitcoms trained American girls to want less, and her corpus includes a Father Knows Best episode called “Betty, Girl Engineer,” in which Betty does not become an engineer, because everyone mocks her, and goes on a date with one instead. In October she starts a PhD on how medical dramas handle women seeking abortion care, funded by a three-year fellowship at the American Library in Norwich. She also makes amazing t-shirts. Go subscribe.
Then we got to it.
Lawrence brought arcade.gov, the five games the White House put on a federal domain Thursday. In Rio Run, a Snake clone, you play a Border Patrol agent and score points for catching people. None of the caught figures is white, they all have black hair, and the instant you grab one the game drops them into an orange jumpsuit. Build the Wall is Tetris with a horde. A White House official called all of it “a culture of fun and winning,” as against “the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.” They lifted the mechanics so brazenly that Japan’s government has now formally objected twice to this administration’s habit of taking things that aren’t its.
Meredith brought the ballots. A Postal Service rule would impose new envelope standards and make states hand over voter data before any mail goes out. Judge Indira Talwani blocked parts of it on August twenty-seventh. The administration ran to the Supreme Court on September third. Responses are due Tuesday morning. North Carolina and Alabama start mailing ballots today. Winning the case was never the objective. Making the results arguable is the objective.
Dana brought the meat, again. Corte Argentino USA recalled 29,628 pounds of Argentine beef out of Florida and Texas because the shipment skipped its mandatory import reinspection and went straight to the shelf. Class I, the highest risk category USDA has. They caught it in an audit of import logs, not because anyone got sick, which is a hell of a way to find out your food is safe.
The chat voted. Lawrence won with the arcade, and Meredith said she’d have voted for it too, which is the closest thing to a landslide this show has ever certified.
Thanks for listening!
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