Shut your damn pie hole. If we ever find ourselves needing your advice again, it’ll be the surest sign yet that we’re irretrievably in the shitter.
To the rest of you: good morning.
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Note: Hey, wanna become 20 percent sexier in three easy steps? Just print out this page, clip out the beauty mark inside these brackets—[ • ]—and glue it to your cheek, upper lip, or tuchus. Hello, gorgeous.
Days 'til the start of the 94th Scripps National Spelling Bee: 6
Days 'til the 32nd annual Chowderfest in Waterville Valley , NH : 4
Number of House Jan. 6 Committee public hearings that are scheduled for next month: 6
Number of them (the first and the last) that will happen during prime time: 2
Number of nations that just announced new security assistance packages for Ukraine : 20
Number of pay phones in New York City in 2014: 6,000
Avenue in Midtown Manhattan on which the last surviving New York City public pay telephone was removed Monday to be replaced with a Wi-Fi hotspot: 7th
Mid-week Rapture Index: 187 (including 4 volcanoes and 3 RuPaul Dolls full of eeeee-vil). Soul Protection Factor 12 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
Puppy Pic of the Day: Dance!
CHEERS to the morning after. Whoa—what a primary day yesterday was, huh? The fisticuffses in Texas , Alabama , Georgia—my god, Georgia!—and Arkansas were brutal, expensive, and legendary. And now that they're over, we've condensed hours of copious note taking and number crunching to summarize just what the hell we saw last night in excruciatingly-fine detail right down to the precinct level. Here we go…
Content removed because obviously the winners were not Mr. Spock, Captain Morgan, Papa Smurf, or the ghost of Betty White.
We apologize for the dissemination of this inaccurate information via all the network broadcasts, the AP, UPI, Reuters, and The New York Times before we could pull this down. Actual results can be found here.
Congrats to all the winners. Next week: on to California , Iowa , Mississippi , Montana , New Jersey , New Mexico , and New South Dakota. And once again we'll be on it like paste on glue on double-sided tape.
JEERS to weather's windbags. Not meaning to be Debbie Downer or anything, but the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season starts a week from today. National forecasters, who seem to be fairly accurate about these things, say we'll likely have to deal with 14 to 21 "named storms, with 6 to 10 hurricanes between June and November.
And in other news, Pat Robertson's latest conversation with God about the gays, feminists and pagans reveals that we can expect 1-3 meteors, 6-8 poisonous-frog showers and another season of The Masked Singer. Oh, the humanity.
CHEERS to the visionaries. 235 years today, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. They came to blows over their first order of business, but after much quill-stabbing and cane-beating, they finally agreed: We hereby resolve that Cheesesteak shall not be considered Cheesesteak without Cheez Whiz. It was mostly smooth sailing from there.
pic.twitter.com/P3NvMLnIxA
JEERS to monkeypox. Look, I know there's concern about the monkeypox. I know we're all wondering if we'll be ready with a monkeypox vaccine if a monkeypox pandemic breaks out…or, at minimum, if Ivermectin or UV light "in the body" or bleach injections "almost like a cleaning" will be available if monkeypox becomes an issue. I know we're scared of monkeypox-related toilet paper shortages. I know that monkeypox may require us to wipe down all our groceries, not to mention wash our hands for two stanzas of Happy Birthday To You every five minutes. But here's the thing I want you to know that will set your mind at ease. Until you see the word "Monkeypox" in C&J, monkeypox simply is not an issue. So hold off on the monkeypox hysteria until you actually see it mentioned here. At the moment, I have no plans to say monkeypox, scribble monkeypox, sky-write monkeypox, meme monkeypox, gif monkeypox, or introduce thoughts of monkeypox via nanobots in the Covid vaccine. So relax everybody. I got this.
CHEERS to looming leisure. The summer season officially starts in 48 hours, and the #1 way to kick it off is, of course, by battling traffic. This weekend’s forecast from AAA is back to “Horn Honky”…
The unofficial start to summer will be a busy one this year as AAA predicts 39.2 million people will travel 50 miles or more from home this Memorial Day weekend.
This is an increase of 8.3% over 2021, bringing travel volumes almost in line with those in 2017. Air travel continues to rebound, up 25% over last year, the second-largest increase since 2010.
Air travel volume, which began to rally last Thanksgiving, will hit levels just shy of 2019 with 3 million people expected to take to the skies this Memorial Day weekend. Despite historic gas prices, breaching the $4 mark in early March, 34.9 million people plan to travel by car, up 4.6% over last year.
If you're planning an excursion to the beach or the mountains or the vaccinated in-laws (lucky you), please follow our usual safety guidelines: drive with care and be sure to flip people off responsibly.
Ten years ago in C&J: May 25, 2012
CHEERS to …[Click!]…the couch potato's…[Click!]…best friend. C&J bids a fond farewell to Eugene Polley, who died at 96 . He invented the TV remote, whose main purpose, of course, is to drive your spouse stark-raving mad. After an elegant funeral, he'll be laid to rest between two sofa cushions.
CHEERS to doing the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. Today is the 45th anniversary of the release of Star Wars, a movie that had me square in its demographic sights (I was 13 in '77) and hot-wired my brain for the duration of the rest of my life. First time I saw it I was on a school field trip in Berlin, Germany, and I have to say Darth Vader was scarier when he was speaking German ("Gibt mir die plane, Mädchen, oder Ich will in deine kopf das kopfmitteldammer uberungenscheide gefurhen Schweinhund").
It's estimated that over $35 billion has been spent on Star Wars merchandise, and I believe I have half of that in the attic. And now we're in a renaissance of streaming spinoffs like The Mandalorian and Obi Wan (starts streaming Friday!) that embrace the roots and gritty feel of the original that was nominated for 11 Oscars and won seven. As long as they keep pumpin' 'em out, I'll always be 13, as evidenced by the thought that just popped into my head: Booger balls.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Only fools and Frenchmen think Bill in Portland Maine is anything less than a real life Tony Stark.