Hello again
Pink houses, purple bathrooms, and bad boyfriends
You know, the problem with taking six months off from my infrequently-updated-in-the-first-place newsletter is that I have overthought this reintroduction to the point of paralysis about five times now. I guess part of my problem is that I am now reading several quite professional entertainment substack newsletters and feeling bad that I definitely do not have the time/brain to write anything of…a caliber. Like, y’all will always be getting the first draft. Sorry. On the upside, it’s free!
Ok, apologia out of the way. Here’s a reel about estate sales that three people have sent me, because my brand is strong. A few weeks ago, I went to the estate sale of one of the former co-owners of Upstairs on the Square, a restaurant that looked like this:
Well, speaking of having a strong personal brand. Here are some photos from her estate sale,1 which I attended as much for gawking as for purchasing2.
Bless her for really living her aesthetic. May we all be so bold in our lives and decorating choices.
Hilariously, since I started writing this post, the listing for her house has gone viral. (Here’s the OG Zillow Gone Wild post if that one is paywalled.) My one tiny bit of insider information is that the house is not staged with the actual furniture that was there. Granted, all of it was in the process of being sold when I was there, but it certainly felt more cohesively decorated than those real estate photos. I guess the stagers just didn’t have any furniture that complemented a pink-purple-green color scheme.
More real estate stuff
You know how on House Hunters when there’s a 1960s bathroom, the buyers say, “Well, this is obviously a total gut?” That’s when I do this:
I love those bathrooms! Which is why this bathroom makeover was so satisfying—they made it look older! But nice old, not grody old. Kudos to them, because I would not have put in the kind of effort with the floor tile that they did.
I also saved this photo of the bathroom (in a local house for sale) as “goals”3:
Taylor Swift’s midlife crisis
Recently, I learned that there exists a real-life human woman with the real-life human name Tree Paine. I suspect many of you already know this, and I suspect the ones of you who don't are as confused as I was.
I started seeing her name when the news emerged that Taylor Swift and the World's Blandest Man were no longer a couple, in the context of comments like "Tree Paine does it again," so I made the only logical conclusion and assumed "Tree Paine" was some sort of pseudonomic alter-ego of Taylor Swift. Like Sasha Fierce but specifically for breakups. This made perfect sense to me and, having no desire at all to gain more insight into the minds of Taylor or her acolytes, I did not explore any further.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only is Tree Paine an actual person, but Tree Paine is her actual name. I googled "Who is Tree Paine?" and found multiple articles explaining that she is Taylor Swift's famously aggressive publicist, but none of them explained to me how the fuck she wound up with the legal name TREE PAINE.
Is it a nickname? For...Treedy? Treemily? Anastreesia? Swifties know, right? I'm sure the subliminal messages in Taylor's songs told them the whole story of how this woman wound up named Tree.
Anyway, I digress. Poor Tree Paine must really be up to her ass (trunk?) in annoyances now that it has been revealed that Ms. Swift is dating Matty Healy, a man who can most generously be described as a “massive wanker.” Look at this man:
He’s 34 years old. He goes by "Matty." He almost certainly does not bathe regularly. He cards fans to make sure they're of-age before kissing them onstage.4 He was on a podcast whose hosts called Ice Spice "a 'chubby Chinese lady'" and saw nothing wrong with that, to the point where his apology was “I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.” Oh, well, as long as the one specific woman whom he finds attractive was not offended, there's no problem, duh.
To be clear: I fucking hated this guy long before he started dating Taylor Swift. In fact, let me give you a list of things I called him before even knowing he was swapping spit with Miss Americana: Douche-canoe. Fuck-knuckle. Twat. Trashbag. Aging hipster. I’ve seen sites calling him “problematic.” He’s not problematic; he’s just a dick. He is far past the Get Your Shit Together Line (age 30) and still acting like a teen.
…which is probably why Taylor likes him. That woman has a broke-ass man-picker. Poor boring Joe Alwyn was probably the least disastrous of her choices. I guess after a half a decade with him this could be a rebound, a mid-life crisis5, or a return to form. I just hope she's ready to disinfect herself and everything Matty Healy touched after breaking up with him, but she probably already has a protocol in place for all that from John Mayer.
Twitter did something…good?
If you read that header and thought, that seems unlikely: yeah, I thought the same. But it’s true. In these last trashfire days of the bird site, something pure and sweet managed to break through the toxic smoke. It started, obviously, with a tweet.
The tweet, thanks in part to the original poster’s followers and in part to This is How You Lose the Time’s War’s small but rabid fandom, exploded. Then—and this is the really weird part; pay attention to this—the book started selling. Things have been going viral on the internet for nearly two decades now, but virality has never correlated to sales or money making. But somehow, somehow, this particular confluence of tweet, fandoms, and book actually moved the needle. This is how You Lose the Time War, a book released in 2019, rocketed up the Amazon bestseller list.
Its run on the bestseller list (it’s in spot #9 right now) may have been prolonged by the many articles written about the phenomenon, many of which,I am not afraid to say, probably got approved solely due to the original tweeter’s monicker: Bigolas Dickolas Wolfhard. Would we have gotten all of this coverage if the Trigun fan account that started this all was just named “Nicholas Wolfhard”? Probably not. But because fandom is (still, thank god) an inherently lawless and absurd place, we got this:
“Goodness, it's quite a silly story. I made a poll titled, "Is Wolfwood's dick big?" and someone responded, "Well they don't call him Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood for nothing.” Bigolas regards on the origin of their online handle.
Mr. Bigolas Dickolas talks about Time War, Trigun, and fandom in general with a level of enthusiasm that I vaguely remember from being 20 and wish I could get to again at my advanced age. Frankly, just knowing that there are people out there still reaching such absurdly earnest-slash-horny heights for their favorite media warms my cold, dead heart. This week, let’s all try to be the Bigolas Dickolas we want to see in the world.
although I did quite a bit of the latter too—thank god I limited myself to a budget or I might have gone home with a hot pink ottoman.
You know the funniest part?My house actually has a 1960s half-tiled bathroom like this. You know what color it is? Beige. BEIGE!
Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ewewewewewewewewew. Oh my god, the germs. THE GERMS.
When you start your career at 15, you’re allowed to have a mid-life crisis at 33.