Bob
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Tag: days
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Best Photos of the Week! (100 Photos)
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7 Days in Hell did Challengers before Challengers — threesomes and all
It sometimes seems surprising that tennis doesn’t inspire more movies. Its one-on-one gladiatorial clashes are inherently dramatic and psychological, while the devious scoring system means no match is ever lost until it’s lost. Nail-biting climaxes and last-minute turnarounds are baked into the design. On the other hand, the fast-moving, seesawing action is technically difficult to frame in a way that’s both exciting and legible — and that same scoring system might drastically confuse anyone who doesn’t follow the sport.
Or maybe there are only so many tennis stories to tell. It’s certainly true that after watching Challengers, the torrid, wildly entertaining new tennis melodrama starring Zendaya and directed by Call Me by Your Name’s Luca Guadagnino, I was struck by some surprising similarities to an earlier film. Only this film isn’t a proper sports movie, or even a pseudo-serious bit of prestige pulp like Challengers. 7 Days in Hell is a profoundly silly 43-minute HBO mockumentary from 2015, starring The Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg and streaming on Hulu and Max.
It’s tough to prove my point without comprehensively spoiling either film. You should watch them both; they’re both lots of fun. Let’s just say that both feature a hotly contested, emotionally (and maybe sexually) charged match between rival male players that goes the distance — and far beyond. Both movies also feature varying degrees of hot threesome action; an absurdly extended, physically impossible rally at the net; and a certain gesture that takes things up a gear. And they both end in strikingly similar ways, even though the actual outcomes are very, very different.
Image: HBO
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Image: HBO
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Photo: Niko Tavernise/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
Above: Andy Samberg and Kit Harington in 7 Days in Hell. Below: Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in Challengers.
Perhaps the key to both films’ success is that they recognize that tennis, with its strange rituals, hourslong matches, hushed intensity, and soundtrack of echoing pops, grunts, and smacks, is actually pretty ridiculous. Guadagnino’s movie spends more than two hours edging along the border of high camp, urged along by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pounding gay-club score. 7 Days in Hell is an all-out parody; it has no such restraint, if restraint is the word.
7 Days in Hell spoofs an ESPN 30 for 30-style sports documentary. Its subject is the longest match in tennis history, a first-round clash at Wimbledon that lasted for seven days. The top seed is Charles Poole (Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington), a tragically dim Brit carrying the nation’s hopes on his shoulders. The wild card is Aaron Williams (Samberg), a washed-up “bad boy of tennis” in the Andre Agassi mold who happens to be Venus and Serena Williams’ adoptive brother. (In one of many talking-head cameos from famous real-world tennis figures, Serena explains that her father, Richard, adopted a white boy off the streets and turned him into a tennis pro in a “reverse Blind Side.”) Aaron is on the comeback trail after killing a line umpire with a 176 mph serve in the 1990s.
7 Days in Hell’s prime target is the absurdly extended matches that the Grand Slam tournaments are known for — particularly Wimbledon, where rain often delays play into the next day, and tie breaks weren’t used in the final set until 2019, making endless matches theoretically possible. The movie delights in the absurdism and masochism of both playing and watching this sport, as rain, streakers, traffic accidents, conjuring tricks, and more conspire to imprison the two players and their audience in an agonizing weeklong death spiral.
The fun comes from 7 Days in Hell’s extremely broad, even crude, humor (you’re going to need to enjoy dick jokes — this is a Samberg joint, after all) mixed with its savage parody of both the tennis world and the sports-documentary format. The film’s best gag is a brilliantly sustained digression into the history of Swedish courtroom sketch art, delivered with completely straight faces by tennis legends John McEnroe and Chris Evert, as well as the film’s stacked cast of comic actors. It’s a sly satirization of the way docs can use celebrity and misappropriated expertise as a vehicle for all kinds of barely relevant, unexamined information.
Among those self-mocking talking heads, McEnroe is particularly good value throughout. (His best line delivery: “Aaron probably should have forfeited after killing a guy. But he didn’t, because he’s an asshole.” McEnroe remains undefeated at cursing.) David Copperfield also sends himself up beautifully. The pro performers are great, too, with Fred Armisen as All England Club chairman Edward Pudding, MCU veteran Karen Gillan as Charles Poole’s supermodel ex-girlfriend, Mary Steenburgen as his overbearing mother, Lena Dunham as a fashion CEO, and an unforgettable turn from Michael Sheen as Caspian Wint, a pervy, chain-smoking British sports broadcaster. The smooth narration comes from Jon Hamm.
Before things come to a head on day seven of the match, the two players hold a joint press conference. A dispute starts, and they square up against each other, hurling insults, in an argument that briefly turns into a confused, thwarted embrace. Fundamentally, 7 Days in Hell and Challengers are saying the same two things. One: Sport may be about competition and dominance, but it’s a thin line between dominance and desire. And two: Tennis is absurd.
7 Days in Hell is streaming on Max, Hulu, and YouTube (with a subscription) and can be rented on Apple TV, Google Play, and other digital platforms.
Oli Welsh
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Austin Pets Alive! | A Personal Look Into Volunteer Life
In honor of Volunteer Appreciation Week, we asked a volunteer, Anish
K. to share their own personal experience as an APA! Volunteer. Anish’s
APA! Volunteer journey began 1.5 years ago! -
Snapped Out Of It
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Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land
Ten years ago, I stood in the back of a large room at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump ramble. The celebrity billionaire had been loitering on the fringes of American politics for a few years, but this was my first time seeing him give a proper speech. At least, that’s what I thought he was supposed to be doing. Speaking at the Politics & Eggs forum is a rite of passage for presidential aspirants, and Trump at the time was going through his quadrennial ritual of noisily considering a bid for office. Typically, prospective candidates give variations on their stump speech in this setting. Trump was doing something else—he meandered and riffed and told disjointed stories with no evident connection to one another. The incoherence might have been startling if I had taken him seriously. But the year was 2014, and this was Donald Trump—the man who presided over a reality show in which Gary Busey competed in a pizza-selling contest with Meat Loaf. Nobody took Trump seriously. That was my first mistake.
Over the past decade, I’ve told the story of what happened next so many times that I can recite each beat in my sleep. The ride to the tarmac in the back of Trump’s SUV. The phone call from his pilot with news that a blizzard had shut down LaGuardia Airport. The last-minute decision to reroute his plane to Palm Beach, and his fateful insistence that the 26-year-old BuzzFeed reporter in the car (me) tag along. What was supposed to be a short in-flight interview turned into two surreal, and oddly intimate, days at Mar-a-Lago, which I spent studying Trump in his natural habitat.
The article I published a few weeks later—“36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump”—cannot exactly be called prescient, in that I rather confidently predicted that my subject would never run for office. But my portrait of Trump—his depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval—has largely held up. I described him on his plane restlessly flipping through cable news channels in search of his own face, and quoted him casually blowing off his wedding anniversary to fly to Florida. (“There are a lot of good-looking women here,” he told me once we arrived, leaning in at a poolside buffet.)
Trump, suffice it to say, did not like the article, and he responded in predictably wrathful fashion. He insulted me on Twitter (“slimebag reporter,” “true garbage with no credibility”), planted fabricated stories about me in Breitbart News (“TRUMP: ‘SCUMBAG’ BUZZFEED BLOGGER OGLED WOMEN WHILE HE ATE BISON AT MY RESORT”), and got me blacklisted from covering Republican events where he was speaking. It was a jarring experience, but enlightening in its way. I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the years, mining the episode for insight into the improbable president’s psyche and the era that he’s shaped.
As the tenth anniversary of my Mar-a-Lago misadventure approached this week, much of the conversation about Trump was focused on his mental competency. There were political reasons for this. Democrats, hoping to deflect concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and memory, were circulating video clips in which Trump sounded confused and unhinged. Trump’s Republican primary opponents had suggested that he’d “lost the zip on his fastball” or was “becoming crazier.” Nikki Haley had called on Trump (and Biden) to take a mental-acuity test. On social media and in the press, countless detractors have speculated that Trump is losing touch with reality, or sliding into dementia, or growing intoxicated by his own conspiracy theories. The sense of progression is what unites all these claims—the idea that Trump is not just bad, but getting worse.
To test this theory, I went back and listened to the recording of my hour-long interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2014. Half-convinced by the narrative of the former president’s worsening mental health, I expected to find in that audio file a more lucid, cogent Trump—one who hadn’t yet been unraveled by the stresses and travails of power. What I found instead illustrates both the risks of returning him to the Oval Office and the futility of trying to prevent that outcome by focusing on his mental decline: He sounded almost exactly the same as he does now.
This is not to say he sounded sharp. He struggled at times to form complete sentences, and repeatedly lost his train of thought. Throughout our conversation, he said so many obviously untrue things that I remember wondering whether he was a pathological liar or simply deluded.
Take, for example, our exchange over Trump’s embrace of the “birther” conspiracy theory. Trump had notoriously accused President Barack Obama of forging his U.S. citizenship and, near the end of the 2012 election, had offered to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choosing if he released his college transcripts.
Here is what Trump said to me, verbatim, when I asked him about the stunt:
Well, I thought it was good. I mean, I offered $5 million to his charity if he produced his records, so—to his favorite charity if he produced his records. Uh, and I didn’t want to see his marks; I wanted to see where it says “place of birth.” I wanted to see what he put on there. And to this day, nobody’s ever seen any of those records. Uh, they have seen a book that was written when he was a young man saying he was a man from Kenya, a young man from Kenya, ba ba ba ba ba. And the publisher of the book said, “No, that’s what he said,” and then a day later he said, “No, no, that was a typographical error.” Well, you know what a typographical error—that’s when you type the word, when you put an S at the end of a word because it was wrong. You understand that. The word Kenya versus the United States—okay. So he has a book where he said he was from Kenya. Uh, and then, uh, they said that was a typographical error. I mean, there’s a lot of things. Um, I mean I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. Uh, but I have a whole theory as to where he was born, uh, and what he did. And if you noticed, he spent millions and millions of dollars on trying to protect that information. And to this day, I’m shocked that with the three colleges that we’re talking about—you know, Columbia, Harvard, and, and Occidental—that somebody in the office didn’t take that file and say, “Hey, here it is.” I just am shocked. But—and by the way, if it were a positive thing, I would say that it’s something he should’ve done. Because there were a lot of people that agree with me. You know, a lot of people say, “Oh, that was controversial.” A lot of those people in the room loved me because of it. You understand this. You know, there’s a group, a big group of people—I’m not saying it’s a majority, but I want to tell you, it’s a very strong silent minority at least that agrees with me. And I actually said that if he ever did it, I would hope that it showed that I was wrong. And that everything would be perfect. I would rather have that than be right.
A couple of minutes later, I asked Trump about the charges of racism he’d faced as a result of the birther crusade. His response:
Don’t forget, Obama called Bill Clinton a racist, and Clinton has never forgiven him for it. Um, uh, many, they called many—anytime anybody disagrees with Obama, they call him a racist. So there have been many people called racists. No, that didn’t, it never stuck in my case, uh, at all. It’s something I was never called before, and it never stuck. At all. But if you notice, whenever anyone got tough with Obama, including Bill Clinton, and including others, they would call him, they would call that person a racist. Uh, so, it’s, it was a charge that they tried, and it never stuck. And you know why it never stuck? ’Cause I am, I am, I am so not a racist, it’s incredible. So it just never stuck. As I think you would notice.
What do you do with an answer like this if you’re a reporter? On a substantive level, it’s objectively detached from reality: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no record of his having called Bill Clinton a racist. On a sentence level, the remarks are incoherent, confused, repetitive, and syntactically strange. Transcribing Trump is a nightmare. So is fact-checking him. In the end, I quoted eight words from this rant—“I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”
Maybe that was a failure on my part. For years, a contingent of Trump’s critics have argued that journalists fail to show this side of the former president—that we sanitize him by extracting only his most coherent quotes for our stories. And I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to capture Trump’s rambling rhetorical style in print.
But does anyone believe that publishing those comments in full would have meaningfully changed the public’s perception of Trump, then or now? There may have been a time—in the 1980s and ’90s, perhaps—when he sounded more articulate and grounded in reality. But that Trump was long gone by the time he announced his first campaign. It was not a secret. We all watched those rallies on TV; we all saw him in those debates. And he was elected president anyway.
There’s a simple reason coverage of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and general octogenarian confusion is more damaging to Biden than it is to Trump. Biden ran for president on a platform of stability and competence, and that image is undermined by suggestions of mental decline. Accusing Trump of going crazy doesn’t work because, well, he has sounded crazy for a long time. The people who voted for him don’t seem to mind—in fact, it’s part of the appeal.
After listening to the old recording of my Trump interview, I called Sam Nunberg for a gut check. A former political operative with a thick New York accent and a collection of shiny neckties, Nunberg was the prototypical Trump acolyte when I first met him. But his relationship with his former boss has been rocky since he arranged for my access to Trump in 2014 and accompanied me on that trip to Mar-a-Lago: Trump theatrically fired him after my story came out, hired him back, fired him again, then sued him for $10 million, before eventually agreeing to a settlement.
The two men haven’t spoken in years, according to Nunberg—but that hasn’t stopped reporters from calling him up for quotes about Trump’s mental state. “They’re wanting me to say he’s not the same,” Nunberg told me. “But I don’t see it, at least publicly. I think he’s the same guy.”
And what kind of guy is that? “He’s reckless, and he’s a narcissist,” Nunberg said. But that’s not exactly news. He’s always been that way.
McKay Coppins
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7 days sober
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Not Healthy
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The Fruit Aisle Is Getting Trippy
On a recent visit to the supermarket, I found myself terribly disturbed by a carton of fruit. There, among the raspberries and blueberries, were ghostly white strawberries. They were the inverse of every strawberry I had ever seen—fully ripe berries with pale flesh bleeding pinpricks of red. Their seeds called to mind clogged pores in need of a nose strip. Rattled, I pivoted my cart toward less haunting produce.
The little freaks, I later learned, are pineberries, a cultivar named for their supposed subtle pineapple flavor but far better known for their spooky hue. Slicing one open reveals an interior that is unnervingly white. They aren’t the only wacky-colored fruit in the produce section these days: Other strawberries come in pale yellow or creamy blush, pink-pearl apples are a shocking magenta inside, and there are now kiwis to match every color of a traffic light. You can get yellow watermelon at H-E-B, pink pineapples on Instacart, and peach-colored raspberries at Kroger.
This is the era of bizarro fruit: Unusual colors are “a clear trend in the produce section,” Courtney Weber, a professor of plant breeding at Cornell University, told me. The variations in color sometimes come with a subtle flavor shift, but the difference is primarily aesthetic. People don’t buy peach-colored raspberries because they taste peachy. They buy them because they look cool.
Fruits that are the “wrong” color are not new. Some, like the Arkansas Black apple, arise spontaneously in nature. In other cases, breeders develop them by crossing different-colored fruits. But these haven’t historically made their way to your supermarket, because growing them at the volume necessary to serve large chains is risky and expensive. Typically, produce found in big stores must be grown in huge quantities, packed and shipped long distances, and sold quickly enough to not rot on the shelf. To tick all of those boxes, breeders developed hardy supermarket stalwarts such as the Gala apple, the Cavendish banana, and Thompson seedless grapes. In many cases, breeding efforts aimed to bring out appealing and uniform color—a major reason the Red Delicious apple came to be so popular.
Now things are getting goofy. Although breeders largely still use traditional techniques, such as cross-pollination and grafting, to produce fruit with certain traits, the process is now more efficient because of advances in genomics. “If you understand how the trait is inherited, it’s easier to make the appropriate genetic combinations to get what you’re after,” Weber said. He previously developed a purple strawberry; these days, he’s working on raspberries in sunshine hues.
The appetite for bizarro fruit has led some big companies to invest in creating new varieties. Driscoll’s, the berry giant, developed pale-yellow “Tropical Bliss” and baby-pink “Rosé” strawberries over decades of breeding in-house. Fresh Del Monte has gone a different route: The company’s coral-fleshed “Pinkglow” pineapples have been genetically engineered to accumulate lycopene, the compound that turns tomatoes red. The fruit is sold only at a smattering of retailers in certain states (notably not Hawaii, which restricts pineapple imports). But it has been so popular that Fresh Del Monte recently suggested that the pineapple has boosted the company’s bottom line.
You can’t go into just any grocery store and find these kinds of weird fruits. They are stocked at some mid-priced stores—Trader Joe’s, for example, sells pink-fleshed oranges—but they are far more likely to be found at higher-end groceries. At least for now: Fruit innovation beyond ghostly berries and colorful kiwis is “on the horizon,” Lauren M. Scott, the chief strategy officer of the International Fresh Produce Association, told me. To a lesser extent, the vegetable aisle has gone kaleidoscopic too, with candy-striped beets, violet-colored green beans, and cauliflower in shades of lavender, marigold, and lemon-lime. “People love new things, but they’re also creatures of habit,” Scott said. That is, they don’t want things that are too new. For the average customer bored of regular old fruit, the barrier to entry is lower for a pink apple than it is for, say, a rambutan.
For consumers who stumble upon them, the experience can be trippy. The new colors can come with tastier fruit—a red kiwi is sweeter than the original tart green. But color shapes our expectations for flavor, which weird-colored fruit can thwart in a way that feels novel and exciting, if not nonsensical. White strawberries look unripe, but don’t taste it. Yellow is usually associated with tropical flavors such as citrus and pineapple, so people expect a yellow watermelon to taste “like banana popsicle,” Weber said. But it just tastes like a watermelon. Likewise, he said, a yellow raspberry tastes like a raspberry.
The golden age of golden raspberries is what happens when advances in plant breeding coincide with a cultural obsession with aesthetics that also gave us indigo-hued Empress 1908 Gin and the pastel-colored nightmare that is the Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino. Color makes food fun, even when it doesn’t make any sense. People do it for the ’gram—or, at least, to satisfy the same craving for visual excitement that social media fosters. Even though I’m weirded out by white strawberries, I have to admit that they make a fruit platter look super chic.
In time, the grocery store could become a bounty of blue bananas and purple mangos, and in the process, bizarro fruit may reshape our basic conception of produce. Ask an American child to draw you an apple, and they’ll sketch a Red Delicious. They will paint grapes purple. But maybe someday, they’ll consider some other colorways because of what they see in the produce aisle. Fantastical as that future supermarket seems, it would be one step closer to nature—where fruit colors are far less predictable than a clamshell of perfect berries would have you believe. Yes, white strawberries are weird. So is the fact that we expect all strawberries to be red.
Yasmin Tayag
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Audio: Vivek Ramaswamy Says He Wants ‘the Truth About 9/11’
This summer, I set out to write about Vivek Ramaswamy because I thought that his public-speaking skills set him apart from his GOP presidential rivals. Whereas most candidates were struggling to find their lane, Ramaswamy knew exactly what he was offering: a message that seemed to be libertarian at its core, paired with views that were consistent with more extreme corners of the right. Ramaswamy’s team agreed to participate in the profile.
Ramaswamy let me shadow him over the course of three days at the end of July. I visited his Ohio campaign headquarters and got a behind-the-scenes view of several of his media appearances. He brought me to his home and introduced me to his family. I flew aboard a private jet with him and rode on his campaign bus in Iowa.
Over the three days, Ramaswamy and I had regular conversations—sometimes in short bursts, other times in longer sit-down sessions. Last night, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he used the phrase free-flowing to describe our interactions. Our discussions were often challenging, but they were always respectful. With Ramaswamy’s permission, and in keeping with standard journalistic practice, I recorded all of our interviews.
During our final interview aboard his campaign bus, I brought up one of his more explosive claims—a suggestion that we don’t know “the truth” about January 6. I asked him: What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to? His answer went down a curious path, invoking the investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, among other topics. At one point, he said this to me: “I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right?”
Yesterday, after The Atlantic published my story and his comments about 9/11 and January 6 drew attention, Ramaswamy told Semafor that the quote we published wasn’t “exactly what I said.” Last night, asked by CNN’s Collins about the same quote, Ramaswamy said, “I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually.”
The quote is correct.
Here is the unedited audio and a transcript of our exchange about 9/11 and January 6.
John Hendrickson: When you talk about all the things, We can handle the truth about X, you know, and you list off a bunch of stuff—one of them that you said last night is: We can handle the truth about January 6. What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to?
Vivek Ramaswamy: I don’t know, but we can handle it. Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?
Hendrickson: You mean like entrapment?
Ramaswamy: Yeah. Absolutely. Why can the government not be transparent about something that we’re using? Terrorists, or the kind of tactics used to fight terrorists. If we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks on the day that they were, that they were—I mean, look …
Hendrickson: Well, there’s a difference between entrapment and a difference between a law-enforcement agent identifying—
Ramaswamy: I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of. And there can’t be hush-hush, separate, it shouldn’t be outside the commission, leaked to some media personality the hours of footage. No, this is transparent. These are the doors that were open. Here are the people that opened the doors, to whom? Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who were unarmed. What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right? There’s very little evidence of people being arrested for being armed that day. Most of the people who were armed, I assume the federal officers who were out there were armed. And so, I don’t know the answers. We deserve to know the answers, right?
We did a Jan. 6 commission. There are certain questions you can ask. We did a 9/11 commission, and if there are federal agents on the plane we deserve to know. And if we’re doing a Jan. 6 commission and there are federal officers in the field, we deserve to know. Just tell us the truth. Tell us what happened.
And it’s not just that, right? I think it’s also the reflective, the reflection on the truth about the underlying motivations of people. What were the sources of the frustration? Right? Is it really just, Donald Trump riled them up in an eight-week period? Or are these people who have been lied to and suppressed for a longer period of time? I think it’s clearly the latter, right? And I think that the failure to recognize the whole truth—we want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s, that’s really, when I say we deserve—and I don’t think we’ve gotten it on any of those questions. On the Jeffrey Epstein client list, on unidentified flying objects, on January 6, on vaccine—on COVID-19 vaccine—on the origin of the pandemic, which we now know, by the way, systematic efforts by people who had no idea what the origin was to shoot down the origin. And I remember this at the time there were people in sort of the, uh, like, in the sort of the greater Harvard/MIT space, the Broad Institute and otherwise, who were sort of talking about, Well, there’s a decent chance it could have, but we should be careful about talking about this or It could undermine, erosion of trust in science. There’s no such thing as a noble lie. That’s my view. The noble lie is nonexistent. No lie is noble.
Hendrickson: I think it’s interesting to compare and contrast 9/11 and January 6.
Ramaswamy: Oh, yeah. I don’t think they belong in the same conversation. I’m only bringing it up because it was … I am not making the comparison. I think it’s a ridiculous comparison—
Hendrickson: I’m not comparing—
Ramaswamy: But I’m saying that I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the Jan. 6 commission.
Hendrickson: Of course. What I’m saying, though, is that I think Democrats and Republicans would agree that 9/11 is a day that’s like Pearl Harbor day, where there are good guys and bad guys and America was attacked. I mean, I think that’s very clear—
Ramaswamy: I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11. I mean, I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.
John Hendrickson
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UPDATE
A few days ago I posted this photo. Some brave souls ascended a peak above town in the middle of the night and cut in a thousand foot dong visible for miles.
Welp, the decided risk a heli drop ski patrol to wipe it out. But after several hours at max altitude they only managed to give it hairy balls and a dick vein before admitting defeat.
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Austin Pets Alive! | Ready, Set, Rally!
Feb 13, 2023
As one of Austin Subaru’s 2023 “pillar partners,” APA! has the opportunity to attend several events hosted or sponsored by the philanthropic company throughout the year!
Ready, Set, Rally was the first of these events, which took place on February 4th. Austin Subaru recently welcomed a “dealership dog” and used this event to welcome Rally to the team!
Taking place just days after one of Austin’s historic winter weather events, this event was welcomed with the warmth of the sunshine and the event hosted 250+ people who were, no doubt, excited to meet Rally and enjoy the sun after several days of navigating ice covering the city.
APA!, along with Austin Subaru’s six other 2023 pillar partners, took the opportunity to connect with event-goers to share more about our organization and how we serve this community. In addition, we hosted a pet adoption!
Several dogs, including Elastigirl and Mr. Bane came out with their fosters to enjoy the event. One of our puppers even found their loving home! Getting to show off our foster dogs is always a ton of fun, but even better when they find their adoptive homes!
We’re looking forward to a full year of partnering with our friends at Austin Subaru and are grateful to be one of their pillar partners!
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The basics
After some seriously hard days and lean weeks, God does it ever feel good to open the fridge and see fruits in the drawer, eggs on the shelf and even some hot sauce. (Valentina black label if anyone’s interested, highly recommend).
Feeling thankful. Can’t wait for my first pay cheque from the new job. I got a little advance Friday just for food.
Huge thank you to the FJ users who helped me out with a bike lock, and a pair of boots that will actually fit. You guys rock. I’d tag you but I’m not sure if that would be cool. Happy Sunday, faggots. Find something to be thankful for. -
Fauci Addresses ‘The Pandemic Is Over’
Several days after President Joe Biden declared that “the pandemic is over,” Anthony Fauci weighed in on the president’s controversial remarks during an interview at The Atlantic Festival, an annual live event in Washington, D.C.
“He was saying we’re in a much better place with regard to the fulminant stage of the pandemic,” Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said. “It really becomes semantics and about how you want to spin it.”
By “the fulminant stage,” he meant the phase of the coronavirus pandemic during which we saw sudden, unpredictable spikes in disease and death. Thanks in large part to vaccines and antivirals, Fauci explained, we are now in a new phase, one in which even as case counts and hospitalization numbers fluctuate, death tolls hold fairly constant. The United States is no longer seeing thousands of deaths a day, and for many Americans, the risk of serious illness has declined dramatically.
Still, the idea that declaring the pandemic over is truly a matter of semantics is a fraught message coming from the nation’s top public-health communicator. Especially during the rollout of the country’s first Omicron-specific boosters, some experts and insiders worry that the declaration could have real consequences: Six administration officials told The Washington Post that the president’s comments would likely make the tasks of persuading Americans to get shots and securing funding from Congress even more challenging than they already were.
Watch: Atlantic deputy editor Ross Andersen in conversation with Anthony Fauci
Fauci is not the only administration official who has walked back the president’s remarks, which came just a few days after Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said, “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.” According to Politico, Biden’s remarks caught senior administration health officials off guard, and indeed, in the following days, the White House clarified that the president was referring to public sentiment, not epidemiological reality. “The president,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told Yahoo Finance, “was reflecting what so many Americans are thinking and feeling.” (In today’s interview, Fauci built on Ghebreyesus’s sentiment with a trademark Fauci-ism: Easing up on our efforts to fight the pandemic now, he said, would be like saying, “Just because I see what the finish line is, I’m gonna stop and get a hot dog. No, you don’t want to do that.”)
Fauci himself is no stranger to the delicate art of discussing the pandemic’s end. In a late-April interview with PBS NewsHour, he said that the United States was “out of the pandemic phase,” only to reverse course the next day and say that the country (along with the entire world) was “still experiencing a pandemic.” Last month, when he announced that he would step down from his government position by the year’s end, Fauci said that he was not satisfied with this state of affairs. “I’m not happy about the fact that we still have 400 deaths per day,” he said. “We need to do much better than that … But I hope that over the next couple of months, things will improve.”
So far, they have not. Statistically speaking, not a whole lot has changed since last month—or, for that matter, since late April: Average daily cases, which Fauci acknowledged are an underestimate, are up slightly, from about 50,000 to just under 60,000. The numbers of people hospitalized and in ICUs rose to a peak in late July and have slowly declined since. Death tolls have held fairly constant, as Fauci said, at about 400 a day. And modelers think they may remain there for a while yet. “I’ll say it even today,” Fauci repeated. “Four hundred deaths per day is not an acceptable number as far as I’m concerned.”
Meanwhile, America has done away with nearly all of its pandemic precautions, and Congress has declined to renew funding for vaccines and therapeutics. Whether or not the pandemic really is behind us, many people are living as if it is. An Axios/Ipsos poll released last week found that nearly half of Americans have returned to their pre-COVID lives, and 66 percent only occasionally or never wear a mask in public indoor spaces—by far the highest percentage that has given that answer since pollsters first posed the question in May 2021.
In his wide-ranging interview at The Atlantic Festival, Fauci touched on a number of other topics, including his decades of work on the HIV/AIDS crisis, the politicization of public health, and how during the pandemic he’s become something of a larger-than-life figure—to both those who adore him and those who despise him. He laughed about the Dr. Fauci–themed candles, bobbleheads, and other paraphernalia that are sent to him. “That is as unrealistic in many respects as the craziness of people who want to decapitate me because I’m ruining the economy,” he said.
Fauci also addressed the origins of the coronavirus, repeating his oft-cited position that while he keeps an open mind to theories that the virus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, evidence points toward natural spillover from animals in a market in the city. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever get definitive proof in either direction, he said, but one thing that would help is greater transparency from the Chinese government, beginning with answers to the question of what exactly happened at the Wuhan wet market to which some of the earliest COVID cases have been traced.
“The thing I think would be the best thing to do would be to open up those markets,” which are now closed to investigation, Fauci said. “If we were able to go and do surveillance easily in China, we would get a lot more information than we have now.”
Jacob Stern
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Austin Pets Alive! | Overnight Lifesaving Support Needed
Dec 07, 2021
In September of this year, a fire at a pet boarding facility north of Austin tragically took the lives of 75 dogs in the middle of the night.
Just days earlier, an overnight fire took nearly two dozen feline lives at a shelter in Florida. As much as we wish they were, these are not isolated cases. From natural causes like lightning and heat waves to accidents like electrical shorts, the causes of fire are innumerable.
At Austin Pets Alive!, we are ever vigilant and hyper-aware of the devastating effects of fire. We know that the number one way to prevent these catastrophic events is proper sprinkler systems and alarms. We have installed alarms that alert leadership upon activation, and cameras that enable us to view our facilities remotely, but we are not able to install an automatic sprinkler system due to the low water pressure available for us.
The next best thing is for us to have someone onsite 24/7 to monitor for any warning signs of fire and act immediately so that we don’t lose time moving animals to safety. The Humane Society of the United States agrees, recommending that “the shelter is left unmanned as little as possible.”
This is where we need YOU! We are in need of adding staff willing to work overnight 3-4 days a week. Ideally, we would love to have someone onsite who can assist with basic medical care as well. We are willing to train you! Apply to join our lifesaving operations and help protect APA! animals overnight by clicking here or emailing [email protected].
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Austin Pets Alive! | Fostering Saves Lives Like Zucchini’s
Jul 20, 2021
An absolutely adorable pup, Zucchini was heartworm positive and shy around people when he first arrived at APA!.
Despite his timid nature, he displayed signs of wanting to be close to people. There were clear signs when he was in playgroup that he wanted to give his love to someone, he just had to find the right person. Before Zucchini could be ready to do so, he needed a home to feel safe in. Shelter staff determined that placement in a foster home could really help Zucchini open up and manage his anxiety, so Zucchini found a temporary home with Bailey!
Bailey is a seasoned foster, and she wanted to help Zucchini adjust to living with people and grow his confidence. Bailey shared that, when considering potential adopters, she knew “he needed a low-traffic household with adopters who would be patient with him and give him time to settle in.” With this in mind, Bailey “made a point of selling his potential because he hadn’t quite fully opened up to [her] in the home” by showing adopters videos of Zucchini playing with toys. This sold his adopter, who was determined to give Zucchini a home and everything he needed to thrive. Zucchini has found his forever home and is now receiving treatment through APA! for his heartworms. He has opened up and continues to work through his anxiety with the help of his people.
When asked why she decided to foster, Bailey explained that fostering gives her a way “to help save these dogs, especially the undersocialized and fearful ones, and give them a safe and less stressful place to learn that people are not all bad.” Fosters are essential to helping the dogs at APA! overcome their behavioral challenges and match them with their forever home. Thanks to Bailey, these days you can find Zucchini basking in the sun at his forever home.
Do you have it in your heart to open up your home to a pup who just needs some time to recover? Become a foster today to help improve the lives of dogs just like Bailey: https://www.austinpetsalive.org/foster/dogs
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