It’s going to be really difficult to write something uplifting here, guys, regardless of the fact that it’s Friday. Ebola has come to New York and everybody is being so dumb about it. Amazon is getting what it deserves and losing money, which is fine, but what will we do if Bezos’ behemoth crashes and we have to go to the store for something? That sounds like the apocalypse to me. True horror. This is also horrible, but luckily fictional: Someone has cut together all of these nice, awful cinema deaths for you to watch and be conveniently grossed out over.
But, amidst all the terror and the persistent dreariness, there is this: We can hug one another.
See, even President Obama is hugging an Ebola survivor. (Though I am sure, behind the scenes, he totally went and got scrubbed, sanitized, tested, and then sanitized again.) Sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art, ya dig?
In the most recent, much more lighthearted incidence of the latter, Hewlett Packard has hired rapper (the really buff) Flo Rida to perform at a launch event for a new cloud computing platform. You’ll recall — if you’re one of us cretins who still watches television — that Flo Rida performed at a similar function on HBO’s Silicon Valley. (On a different note, that same show officially cast its second major female character! Congrats, show about the male-dominated San Francisco tech culture!)
Speaking of culture, and TV, or whatever tenuous thing we need to “speak of” in order to get where we need to be, have you noticed that the main characters of romantic comedies have gone from being totally rich to totally broke? I mean, we’ve gone from families with butlers to single, jobless gals getting (and handling) abortions! Meredith Haggerty breaks it down over at Medium, and it’s an interesting revelation of a trend I had no idea was occurring right before my very eyes. (Interesting thought: sitcoms’ subjects seem to be trending in the opposite direction.)
Something else I was not aware of: Jim Carrey, who was a cast member of In Living Color and who has built a career out of being a not-so-versatile elastic man, tried out for Saturday Night Live. Several times. And now he’s hosting the thing. Who’s laughing now, Lorne? (Probably not SNL‘s viewers!)
Good luck this weekend, everybody. Be careful of what you tweet. Should the world end, we will most likely all be judged by Twitter, the great equalizer. Don’t be like this guy.