Meme Report 3/31/26
It's a Rock Sauce, which is our version of a Zip Sauce
Happy Holy Week! Over the weekend, I invented a new Holiday so if you don’t or never did have plans for religious Easter, that’s ok. #seculareaster is here.
Casino Butter Waitress
I know the cadence of a waitress monologue well. I’ve had to do one myself. A series of hitting certain syllables so they trigger your brain to remember what syllable comes next. I’ve worked with the girl in the video. Not really, but I know her type. I’ve listened to her personal dramas when it’s slow and wanted to kill her when it was busy, and she was in my way, and forgiven her by the end of the shift. We’re all just doing our best. Of course, outside of sitting at a table waiting for your food, this cadence sounds ridiculous. The silly words they make you say sound wrong, and the rules they make you explain are unenforceable in a court of law. The waitress being forced to perform this song and dance is the most extreme example of this. Somewhere between sex work and hibachi. It’s ripe for memes because half the audience recognizes themselves in her, and the other half can’t believe a person would be forced to say those words in that order.
Amanda, Ciara, and West
Ok, so, on Bravo’s Summer House, Amanda was married to Kyle, the show’s patriarch, and they recently separated. He cheated on her constantly and used money from her trust to fund his failing hard seltzer company. We all wanted Amanda to leave that man. Ciara is gorgeous, amazing, talented, gorgeous, and has been having a thing with West for 3 years now. There’s no other way to describe it. On Tuesday, in the middle of the day, Amanda and West released a joint statement that they are dating or whatever. This is why we do this. The point of a reality show is for the apparatus around drama. The show is great, but the reality is incredible. Everyone who cares is losing their minds. We are all waiting with bated breath for a verdict to come from Paige De Sorbo et al. I spent all afternoon glued to my phone waiting for more information to come. I needed takes. Obviously, we’re all #teamciara, but how hard are we going to turn on Amanda? It remains to be seen, and I’ll be there when we decide.
Mets vs Yankees
Opening Day was Thursday and ignited one of the great debates of Baseball, which team is the most pure of heart? In New York City, there is a divide between the Mets and the Yankees. I grew up in New England, and I remember when the Boston Red Sox broke the curse and won the World Series. There was nothing like it. I could never ever root for the Yankees because to me, they represent the ultimate evil. They never wrote a Broadway musical about how evil the Mets are. Obviously, the Yankees are the most evil team in the League. Perhaps in all of sport.
Whose Pussy is This?
We’ve been arguing about feminism for 5 straight days on Twitter, I think because of Lindy West, but as always happens when talking about feminism, everyone’s mad and wrong. The ideas are more complicated than can be summarised in a handful of posts. At least on tumblr we would link to PDFs or pull whole passages from texts. On Twitter, no one is citing their sources. Mostly because their sources are half remembrances of other posts. This led to a discussion over the weekend of Andrea Dworkin, everyone’s favorite, and the ethics of blow jobs. The grizzled Tumblr veterans among us went straight to retakes on “whose pussy is this?” jokes, which are relics from the first time we did this discourse across many years and websites. We condensed 5 years of discourse into a week. Next week we’ll do it all over again.
TikTok
Fruit Love Island
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Don’t waste my fucking time with this brainless bullshit. I think real Love Island is beneath me.
Email Me
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An under-discussed place for content on TikTok is the comments. As much as everyone wants to hand-wringing about the videos themselves and what they say about culture, there’s an equally fascinating culture in the comment sections. The comment section is a Greek chorus down to their scripted lines. A funny comment section is less filled with original jokes than it is with people hitting their marks. You know what to expect, and someone from the userbase finds themselves cast in the role of saying “it’s ok, take your time” when someone makes a video where they can’t get their point out fast enough. Rarely do we get new bits in a comment section. “Email me” is the first new bit I’ve seen in a while.
I like “Email me.” I like that it’s conspiratorial and a little bit abstract. I like when we all play pretend together. It’s a little bit corporate espionage, a little bit Deep Throat. “Email me” implies a paper trail, so it can’t be totally surreptitious, but commenting “we can’t talk here” on a strangers tiktok is still funny even if it strays from the original bit. “Involve me” is also a fun take that people are bringing to the table. I love the command of “involve me,” and I hope people start saying it in the real world. I foresee a migration to Twitter shortly if we can pull it off, but it lacks the pizzazz of “mogging” and “maxxing.” Maybe Email Me has no global reach beyond this. That’s ok, I like it as is as one of our TikTok plays.
Edit of the Week: Clavicular and Woah Vickey
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I’m calling it now because I don’t want to fight it anymore. It’s the year of Clavicular. We might forget about him by the summer, but I doubt it. I hope I win a Peabody for my reporting on the boy and his year in the spotlight. We’re going to parade him around to various people and places and hope that we can get him to break or develop him further. The most recent iteration of this is his pairing with Woah Vickey, a clavicular of her era. There’s an undeniable spark between them, and what would be better than these two tragic figures finding each other as the world gawks? Hope it all works out for these crazy kids, and may God forgive us.