Hi hi! Andy here! I’ve missed you. Hope you’re doing well!
I thought I’d revive this newsletter, but make it fun?
Back in the summer of 2020, I started a newsletter about the climate crisis called The Melt. But it really sucks writing about the climate crisis over and over and over again. So I thought I’d do something maybe more fun? At least fun for me, ha!
You can still read the archives of The Melt, but don’t torture yourself, darling.
Now, on with the show…
Andy’s Newsletter: Tomato Season is wrapping up and Spooky Season is up next!
Summer’s over! School is back in session, the Harvest Moon hits this weekend, Tomato Season is wrapping up, and Spooky Season is up next!
Halloween is by far my favorite holiday. This year I am especially excited to dress up in costume with my wife Jenna and our baby daughter who will be 16 months come October. We’re thinking of going as psilocybin mushrooms, all white with big, round, red hats. Initially, I had suggested a Captain Phillips group costume — if you remember the 2013 biographical action thriller film about that merchant mariner who was taken hostage by Somali pirates — but Jenna isn’t into the idea of dressing up our baby like a Somali pirate.
I mean, I get it. But to be honest, an armed and dangerous marauding baby declaring “I’m the captain now” ordering “Look at me, look at me!” feels, I don’t know… accurate.
Parenthood is weird. It really fucks with your head.
Maybe Jenna would be more into it if I was the Somali pirate and the baby went as Captain Phillips? It’s certainly not a bad film. It won some awards and has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. People would recognize our look. I’m pretty sure.
Pirates used to be a thing. Remember when everyone was into pirates, in the early 2000s? Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl came out in 2003 — 79% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And zombies? Zombies were huge! Shaun of the Dead? (92%) That was 2004. Simpler times. Halloween was easy — sexy zombie, sexy pirate, sexy Tom Hanks.
This Halloween everyone’s just gonna wear a white shirt and a blue apron and scream at people about Italian beef sandwiches. Spare me. The Bear is overrated and so is Chicago.
For Halloween, I wanna see someone dressed up as the alien in Nope dragging around a multicolored pennant banner. Maybe Jenna will let me dress up Marigold like the chimpanzee Gordy: yellow sweater, bloody fists and face. If you’re gonna do something, do it right, go all out — especially when dressing up toddlers like a vicious, vengeful, murdering animal.
Speaking of, did you hear about the jailbreak from this zoo in Africa? More than a few animals have escaped over the course of several weeks from Hluhluwe iMfolozi Park, which is about 170 miles north of Durban, South Africa. Six lions, four elephants, two white rhinos, one buffalo, one black rhino, and a pack of African wild dogs — are you kidding me? — are now roaming free. I guess a few cows have been eaten. But maybe it’s cool, maybe we're ok with it. Ya know, maybe we just let them be, like, don’t go rounding them up. Just leave them. Maybe they go around town to town fucking shit up, sure. But maybe that’s ok too.
That’s it! We got the winning Halloween family costume right here — escaped zoo animals! Or even just a pack of African wild dogs. A baby sexy African wild dog and her sexy African wild dog parents.
Three other things:
In Memphis, a tractor-trailer crashed and spilled Alfredo sauce all over I-55 where it cooked in the hot summer sun all afternoon before authorities could clean it up. And, ya know what? I’m now done with Alfredo sauce.
The psych-rock band GOAT from Sweden have a new song out, “Under No Nation”, check out the animated video. I fucking love this band. They claim to be from Korpilombolo, Sweden which allegedly has a history of voodoo worship. Anyway, the whole band is anonymous, everyone wears really cool kinda bedazzled-looking masks. Back in 2014, Jenna and I went to Stockholm, Sweden and she’ll tell you all about how I dragged her across town in the middle of a snowstorm to some record store to buy this band’s record. And when I was checking out and chatting with the clerk, I asked him if he had anything else like GOAT and he said, deadpan as hell, “There is nothing else like GOAT.”
Alligators! In July, an 80-year-old woman was killed by two alligators after she fell into a pond near her house in Florida. In May, alligators killed a 53-year-old man retrieving Frisbees from a lake — he made a living by selling the Frisbees to people who played disc golf at a course that runs parallel to the lake, which I just gotta say, bravo — and in June, an alligator “took hold of a neighbor” and dragged him into a pond and killed him. Not to harp on this whole vicious animal theme too much, but goddamn! The alligators are even going cannibalistic! Watch this big alligator get eaten by a much bigger alligator.
Excellent