Friday Five: October 26, 2024
A Day Late and a Dollar Short
Hi friends! I’m back from my culinary adventures across the pond, still thinking about artichokes, chanterelles (which the brits call girolles), porcinis, maldon salt, and the feeling of being on my feet for hours with endless tasks to be done. Welcome back to the Friday Five, your roundup of mostly joyful and cathartic content across the internet and the things my brain wants to consume over and over again. Also, hi and thank you to the not insignificant number of newcomers who subscribed after I mentioned I would include a celebrity encounter in the newsletter! I’m happy you’re here, please stay a while and get cozy.
Large Scale Cheese Theft: I had to put ‘mostly’ before joyful in the lede today because this story isn’t my typical happy fodder, but I’m completely consumed by it. Neal’s Yard Dairy, one of the world’s preeminent cheesemongers (what a phrase) is a victim of cheese fraud. We’re not talking a few wheels of parm here, we’re talking twenty-two tons of cheddar. Clothbound cheddar to be precise, per their announcement below. The thieves posed as a wholesale distributor, and now I want a whodunit (working titles: Spending Cheese or simply Clothbound) on these savvy stealers. It must be someone on the inside with some direct knowledge of cheese sales — but why these varieties, and why this immense quantity? Does cheese greed know no bounds (only clothbounds?!). Anyway, the people who run Neal’s Yard continue to be their amazing selves and found a way to pay their local cheese producers despite the massive hit to their business.
Song: We’re taking it back today with a golden oldie. This song is perfect for any mood, any time or place, and is a great shower anthem. If you need a good cry, the comments on this YouTube video of the song are intensely emotional, see below for a light preview.
Celebrity Encounter: The moment some of you nosy, new consumers have been waiting for! I got stranded in London this week because of alleged mechanical issues on my flight — there’s nothing like a flight delay to make you believe in conspiracies. I arrived earlier than my usual three-hour normal to try to squeeze onto an earlier flight and failed, so I worked out of the Virgin Clubhouse in Heathrow, which is honestly a delightful place to get stuck. At a more reasonable time before the flight, a Succession star walks in with his wife and two small children; he was in town for his new movie in the London Film Festival. I see this actor and his lovely family in my neighborhood quite often, it was jarring to see him in such a distant setting. The hours drag on and the flight keeps getting pushed back in hourlong increments, we never get a gate, and I realize they must be on my flight since they’re one of a few folks stuck with me in the lounge. Six hours into our lounge stay, I look over to my right and see a tiny baby butt coming down the stairs, not a bit of clothing in sight. Mom rushes to grab them, but it’s too late — the other child has also gone down to their skivvies. For about 30 minutes, I witnessed a Lord of the Flies-style dramatic sequence where these two small humans sans clothing jumped, danced, and moved erratically in their section of the lounge with distraught parents. I imagined it was the sort of scenario of telling children ‘we’ll eat and sleep on the plane,’ the plane never showed up, and all hell broke loose. And to be perfectly clear, I don’t judge any of them for this! Shit happens. If anything, I think a flash mob style interpretive dance led by those babies could have been healing for all of us. Now I’ll have the visual of the two tinies mooning their exhausted parents the next time I have a travel disruption, and maybe you will too.
An Iconic Vine that Just Turned Ten: ‘And They Were Roommates’ turned ten years old this week, according to ‘Know Your Meme’ who I’m going to treat as a reputable source. I’m slightly shocked that the video is only ten, it feels like a foundational text and important lore that I reference far too often. Maybe someday I’ll look up the backstory behind this video, if it exists, and understand what our walker-and-talker was scandalized about.
Joyful Internet Content:
Peep HOW she freaked the ending!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Roya
I’m sorry but the selection of memes is UNRIVALLED x