no-touch sex and begging for death via song

Here’s Smash Mouth’s “All Star” Played On Some Melons

My boss Mat was very excited to show me this Smash Mouth-related content and was even more excited that I had not seen it before. Also, speaking of Smash Mouth, they were so pumped up about their shoutout in BuzzFeed News’ “The 100 Memes That Defined The Decade” that they tweeted about it. “Meme is the new radio,” they wrote. Which, like the song “All Star” is both goofily simplistic and also incredibly astute. It’s easy to forget that “All Star” is actually a song about feeling completely helpless and dumb in the face of world-ending disaster. Judging by the hole in the satellite picture the ice we skate is getting pretty thin. The water's getting warm, so you might as well swim. My world's on fire, how about yours?

Cats Reviews Are In

There’s been a lot of good stuff written about Cats this week. It feels like the internet really rallied together. Great job, everyone. I have not seen it yet because I’m still working out the right dose of magic mushrooms I want to take before I see it. Too many caps and I’ll have a panic attack, too few and I’m not sure I’ll be able to properly follow the movie. Will keep you guys updated on this. In the meantime, here are my two favorite reviews:

An Interesting 4chan Discussion About Street Fighter

A lot to think to think about here.

The Most Iconic Tumblr Post Of The Decade Gets An Update

I’ve been on Tumblr since 2008. It’s like my internet zen garden. I don’t post any original content. There are like three friends I know in real life I talk to on there. It’s where I go for my online me time. In 2012, one of the platform’s most famous posts was published. If you haven’t seen it before, you’re in for a real treat:

Just a perfect post. The photo. The caption. The tags. 10/10 post all around. Luckily for us, Tumblr user petal-metal-blog decided to give us an update before the decade ended. Behold:

Still great shoes. Still soft grunge. No longer under house arrest. We stan a spiked heels queen.

Fuck It, Here’s One More Good Cats Review

Or as Tumblr user the-spoopy-ghost-of-raejin99 put it:

Some Literary Analysis

Back in 2018, a 6-year-old named Nael from Washington, DC, penned a poem titled, “The Tiger”. It’s pretty good. It’s even been dissected by author John Green. Here’s the whole thing:

A Twitter user recently noticed that it has a similar title and theme (tigers) to William Blake’s “The Tyger”. Blake’s poem is much longer, but it’s also pretty good. I guess. Fun Fact: It’s referenced in one of my favorite ska songs, Five Iron Frenzy’s “Every New Day”. The live version recorded at the band’s last concert is particularly good. That’s beside the point, though. The question is which tiger poem is better? According to Tumblr user unknought, it’s definitely Nael’s:

TikTok Kids Are Teaching Each Other To Crip Walk

This was flagged up to me by an eagle-eyed reader named Garrett. I suppose this was almost inevitable. If you create a massively popular video app and then convince every teenager in America that being popular IRL means being popular on the internet, they’re going to start making videos featuring the same problematic shit they would have been doing around a beer pong table in a rich kid’s basement 10 years ago. The trend seems to be based around the song “Fuck It Up” by Kamaiyah and according to YouTube compilations the “New TikTok crip walk dance song” has been trending since November. Cool!

Here’s Juggalo Baby Yoday

A Weird Spongebob Thing I Found

Did you know there’s a YouTube community based around taking Japanese vocaloid tracks and then mapping them out on to Spongebob characters and then turning that into music videos? lol you do now. Also, if you don’t understand what any of that means, I’ll give you a pass once but from here on out, as far as the Garbage Day cinematic universe is concerned, vocaloids are just going to be an understood topic. Vocaloid is a musical synthesizer software that people use to make open source pop stars. The most famous one is Hatsune Miku, who famously wrote Harry Potter. I went on a date with her once.

We’re Back With Some More Folger’s Incest Stuff

I’m really sorry I skipped this last week!!! Do not worry. I promised you four installments and that’s what you’re going to get. Next week, we’ll be wrapping up the Folgers Incest series with something special. Luckily for me (because I’ll be honest I had not thought this out much when I announced I’d be dedicating four issues of Garbage Day to talking about this ad lol), GQ writer Gabriella Paiella put together an absolutely fantastic oral history of the ad. The thing that blew my mind the most is that the actor who plays Peter in the ad, Matthew Alan, plays an incestuous cousin in Castle Rock season 2 which I’ve been literally watching all movie and did not notice! Insane.

Alan does a good job not directly addressing the bizarre energy of the commercial in his interview with Paiella. “It was purely brother and sister at the time. It was pretty surprising when people started talking because this was a brother-sister thing,” he said.

Hmmmm.

The Best Post Of The Decade

My buddy Brian over at New York Mag wrote a really good retrospective of the best singular posts of 2019. He includes some really classic stuff like Vin Diesel singing Rihanna’s “Stay”. Brian doesn’t try and rank them and I’m not sure I could either, but I will say that if you haven’t ever seen “British lads hit each other with chair,” please stop everything you’re doing and watch it. My friend Luke and I went through a moment where we were watching this video once a week, at least.

This video got so popular within the BuzzFeed UK office in 2015 that we started to debate elaborate backstories for it — the consensus was this must have been filmed on the Sunday morning of a house party that started on Friday.

I never got the full story, but I can reveal that I did track down the men involved last year. They were completely bewildered as to why a reporter wanted to talk to them, thought I was super weird for even messaging them, and after a few messages back and forth made it extremely clear they had no interest in talking to me about it. So it goes.

One Last Good Meme

Oh, shit, wait, also, Garbage Day broke 2000 subscribers! It’s honestly super cool that people read this every week and like it. Thank you everyone for supporting this weird little project.

P.S. here’s a cool TikTok.

***All typos in this letter are on purpose actually***