Fuggaliciousness For All, Pt. 2: Heather!
Now It’s Heather’s Turn!
Everything Jessica said in her issue last night, I second.
Just kidding! Sort of — I, too, am soothing my spirits with the return of sports, which feel like a reward that our country has not earned, and which may end in disaster. But right now, I am whooping my way through the Major League Soccer tournament, devouring the WNBA, debating whether I need to start caring about the Clippers, and marking my calendar with the hockey schedule. (Jessica, you DO need to get into hockey, because they’re starting with the playoffs which means it will be frenzied and fantastic — although your hometown Kings are one of only FOUR teams in the NHL who were deemed Too Terrible To Play On, so you shall have to adopt another, and it cannot be the hated Ducks or Sharks. I have thoughts. CONSULT MEEE.) I’m also wishing that my family’s favorite sport, Battlebots, would figure out how to do a bubble season so that it can bring us some good old-fashioned robot-fighting. The 2018 and 2019 seasons on Discovery did a great job mixing actual mechanical intel with sports tension, its signature wit and whimsy, and, yes, fire. It’s like Eurovision, but with science! I highly recommend streaming them on Discovery Go, if you can. I mean:
Smashy smash! So satisfying!
Strangely, I haven’t done as much catching up on TV as I expected, because all this spare time people seemed to anticipate — the hours celebrities encouraged us to use to learn a new language, or slow down and marvel at the beauty of a simple life — simply has not materialized. Early on, I did manage to binge HBO’s Barry — two seasons, and only half-hour episodes — which was the perfect mood: It’s deeply funny, and deeply dark, and so it managed to scratch two divergent itches at once. If for some reason you are an even later Barry adopter than I am, please treat yourself. The entire cast is brilliant. We’ve since mostly tried to amuse my kids with dinnertime screenings of the new Man v. Food, and season 1 of the NBC nerd-spy show Chuck, which holds up extremely well even with the thinner eyebrows of 2007. (Bias alert: My husband edited, and later also directed, on that show. But I would have enjoyed it anyway, I swear.) But my extremely, sweetly naive 11-year olds haven’t watched much of anything with lingerie or seduction, so when confronted with both in an early hour, Dylan furrowed his brow and asked, “Why is she wearing a bikini?” Then, later, with a matter-of-fact sigh: “No man can resist a woman’s bikini.” Indeed, Dylan. Indeed.
I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? Bikinis & beachy waves will get you every time
Apparently I am extremely basic (raise your hand if this surprises you) (yeah, I don’t see any hands), so I scoured the Internet for a lot of the things people all rushed for when Covid forced us indoors. Interlocking workout mats to baby my sad joints! Barbells! Yeast! Colorful plastic taco holders so that the shells don’t fall over! (Wait, was everyone else NOT ordering those? Whyever not?) And I got back in touch with my love of puzzles — something fostered at a young age by my older sister Julie. We would bend our heads over a jigsaw for hours while she spun a yarn inspired by whatever was in the picture, and I became a person who prefers to do them without consulting the box because she taught me, in her own way, to just let the story unfold before me. So, when our May plans to see David Kwong’s Enigmatist stage show were scuppered, my husband bought me a jigsaw puzzle that Kwong — a magician and mentalist — had put together to tide us all over. It depicts the stage, in a non-spoilery way, and has the word ENIGMA coded into it fourteen different ways. Once you assemble the very challenging (but hella satisfying) 1000-piece puzzle, you then get to try and solve that part.
We cracked 9 of the 14 codes before conceding defeat and looking up the others. I mean... sure, never quit, yadda yadda, but we were COMPLETELY correct to do so. We were never gonna get those other five. Sometimes quitters DO win! Don’t tell anyone.
Sometimes, and I know this will sound like I'm torturing myself, I check out webcams from all over the world — Rome, Venice, Mexico City — just to see what it's like out there now, in a world without quite so many tourists. Instead of depressing me, it's oddly reassuring, as if proving to me that the world is all still out there and will be waiting for us when we get our collective acts together. Lately I've especially enjoyed trying to see what the elephants and zebras are up to on the savannah in Kenya, because they can still chill out and socialize and go out to dinner and don’t appear to be having rage blackouts.
The other day I wrote a post on our website in which I suggested Celine Dion and Meat Loaf needed to do a double album on which they record each other’s songs, and ONLY each other’s songs. No duets (at least, not with each other), and no new pieces. Just the classics. Think about all the Celine songs that Meat Loaf would overperform, and IMAGINE how Celine would out-bombast even Meat Loaf himself. Can we use our powers to manifest THIS, please?
Have we ever learned what THAT is?
Oh, and I bought a truly dumb game for my Nintendo Switch (though it’s available on other platforms) that absurdly delights me: Rock of Ages II: Bigger and Boulder, which was on sale for $5 at the time but maxes out at $14, I believe. It literally involves rolling boulders down increasingly bizarre courses and through weirder and weirder defenses, to try and bust through a castle wall — all with Monty Python-esque animations and computer opponents in the form of famous artworks or characters from history (William Wallace, Joan of Arc, and some Daliesque stuff). I have only had a couple days here and there to get used to it, and there are charmingly few instructions so I started with an impossible level and then had to hit up Google to see if I was in the wrong place or merely hopeless (yes to the first; jury’s out on the second). Should you need a video game distraction, including on a computer via Steam, give that one a whirl. It’s WEIRD. Maybe we can multiplayer-roll together.
And Don’t Forget: Enter to Win The Heir Affair!
Honestly making a woman get “photo ready” this shortly after giving birth — it should be outlawed in the Geneva Convention!!!
If you, like Dames Margaret and Sophie, found The Royal We to be an utterly delightful and enthralling read, today is your lucky day: fill out this handy dandy Google form, and you might be one of the lucky readers who wins a copy of the equally glorious sequel —The Heir Affair, released earlier this month. It was such a treat to spend more time with Nick, Bex, and — of course — Freddie.
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