We Now Resume Our Scheduled Programming
Hello my babies, hello my honeys, hello my home-town gals - the pickling poison has subsided from infecting my lungs with Hogwartsian whimsy, and I am back to work and excited to talk to you. We are in what I believe is known as the “dog days” of summer…
When the weather is hot and sultry and my hair looks like a woven basket coming apart. If you you didn’t know (as I didn’t) the term comes from Greek and Roman astronomy, indicating the heat that would come when the constellation Sirius (known as the Dog Star) rose in the sky. Further associated with the Dog Days of Summer…
Are, according to wikipedia:
heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck.
So, just, watch out for those things.
But Squids Are Fine
Do you ever see a social media post where you know, deep inside, that it will be worth your attention? Such was the case when I saw this post of tremendous foreshadowing yesterday, by Squid Doctor (yes) Sarah McAnulty:
To begin with, let us talk about the panache and the gumption of a woman who instructs her party guests to come dressed as squid. I throw excellent parties, and if I instruct my guests to do anything more than, perhaps, bring dip, panic ensues. And all of this is taking me on a detour of remembering THE MOST AMAZING VIDEO ABOUT A PARTY SCENARIO I HAVE EVER SEEN:
The Letter in question is exactly the letter you are expecting that almost-human seeming AI above to have written. I know I promised you pictures of people about squid, I know I did, but it is the Dog Days of Summer…
So detours are right up there with the lethargy and fevers. YES, I’m going to make you read an unhinged Thanksgiving letter from the most marvelously alien woman the Internet has found:
The insanity contained in that letter cannot be parsed as finely as I want. There is clearly many years of Thanksgiving passive aggressiveness and many decades of being a very strange person that went into creating it. I will say that the detail that really makes me howl is despite the regulation tupperware, the dismissal of “store brand” ice creams, and the obsessive spoon policing, the two beers she has on hand are….Coors Light and Corona??! It’s right there that the simulation breaks down and you realize this is in fact a very fussy standard poodle in a human suit.
(You know how Mike is. )
Now here are your squid:
Sarah’s own costume as a firefly squid was top of the line:
This is marvelous, and I would like to see more squid parties, please.
And Now, Important Facts About Pizza
I’ve been thinking a lot about pizza for the last….five hours, because I am having pizza for dinner. But despite my diet of mostly pizza, and having several years of pizza making under my belt, I don’t know a lot about pizza. So here are some very fascinating pizza facts you may not know:
Italians Really Like Claiming They Invented Pizza
When I looked up “Amazing Pizza Facts” for you, the first thing that came up was pizza.com, and the second thing, because I like an underdog, was Deniro’s Pizza’s Amazing Pizza Facts page, which makes this interesting claim:
I mean, we’re splitting hairs, but this seems to suggest that pizza only becomes pizza when tomatoes are added, which hey yo, Naples, are tomatoes from there? No. Tomatoes are a New World crop, which means that for thousands of years, Greeks, Egyptians, and Indigenous American people separately held the magical ingredients for creating pizza, and that actually just makes Italy the, to put it bluntly, honeymoon suite the ingredients humped in.
The Last Thing Hawaiian Pizza is is Hawaiian
Hawaiian pizza, which is a TOTALLY VALID FORM OF PIZZA, haters, is delicious (especially with goat cheese.) But what it isn’t, in any way, is related to Hawaii, except in that it has pineapples, which, btw, aren’t Hawaiian either. It was invented by a Greek-Canadian in the 1960s, his name was Sam Ponopoulous, and he was inspired by Chinese sweet-and-sour food. So just to clarify, pizza is a Native American-Greek-Egyptian-Chinese food, popularized in Italy and Canada. It is the “We are the World” of foods.
There Are International Pizza Dough Tossing Competitions
With choreographed freestyle tossin’ routines!!
That’s not like…a small amount of people watching. That is a very medium-to-large amount of people who got up,bought tickets, and went to a pizza dough tossing competition. That happened, and apparently happens, annually.
Ways I Would Describe The Smell Of Ripening Blackberries On A Summer Day
-Like a dusty wine bottle uncorked to reveal glory
-The beckoning siren of the woods
-The perfume of a woman who went missing near the ruins
-The closing aria of summer
-Worth the jagged bite of untold thorns
-The sharp sweet ache of a lost summer love
-Like stumbling on a gnome’s picnic
-Deeply, richly embarrassed by its love affair with the sun
When You Should Maybe Sue Disney Before They Sue You
So, as you know, I made a movie recently. And it’s a very good movie, I think, and we’re getting almost to the point where we can announce very exciting news about said movie.
One of the things we were planning to do when we announced this good news on Labor Day weekend was drop a poster for the film online. We commissioned a truly splendid artist, Chamisa Kellogg, to design the poster for us.
Chamisa’s beautiful artwork immediately drew me in back when we were looking for an artist to draw the maps that feature in the film, especially after learning that she was also Sonoma County-born. She was our first thought when we wanted a poster, and she designed one for us back in March of 2019. So, to summarize, we’ve spent five months now eagerly awaiting the right moment to drop it, because it feels so emblematic of our film’s tone.
In fact it’s such a cool poster, we’re sharing it exclusively with you right now!!
It’s everything we wanted in terms of color and scope and atmosphere. It’s DREAMY. Those beams of light… oh there are moments in this process where you feel like everything is just working. We’ve been so excited to share it on Labor Day Weekend.
AND THEN THIS FUCKING WEEK…DISNEY DROPPED THIS—
Now obviously, we didn’t steal from them and they didn’t steal from us. But the compositional similarities and the FACT THAT THEIR BACKPACKS MATCH THE FROZEN DRESSES makes me want to put my head through the wall. Sigh, sometimes the irony gods just pull your number out of their baseball caps and giggle.
We love, love, love our poster, and when we drop it on social media this weekend, I would like you all to come together, as a mob, to tell the first person who points out it looks like the Frozen 2 poster to take a flying leap.
Some Dogs You Just Know Are Good Boys
Since a couple of you BLESSEDLY heeded my calls to send in dogs (some of you would NEVER bring regulation casserole dishes, apparently) I now have a featured pup to share!! Beautiful magical mermaid reader Amelia sent in this EXTREMELY good dog-in-training, Rogerson:
Rogerson was found in a shipping container with his litter, because some people are MONSTERS, and luckily, Rogerson has forgiven all of them. He’s got a rather perfect name, because I’m definitely getting some Captain America vibes off this little fella:
Yup, that’s a puppy with great things ahead, no doubt. He already understands the value of self-care and rest.
Sleep well and dream big, Rogerson. You’ve got a big world to take care of.
Welp, that’s it for this Monday. I hope you are all surviving the Dog Da—-
—um, late August without too many droughts or fevers.
Please remember to like and share this post as much as possible, and consider subscribing at the $5 level to get your weekly (uh, mostly) dose of this + my extensive movie deep-dives and other bonus content. Your support makes this newsletter possible, and your reading it makes this writer very, very happy!