The Top 10 Unlikely Heroes Who Just Might Save Us From The Apocalypse
Making sense of this week, with help from David Letterman
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David Letterman has a special place in my life. Through my freshman year in high school, he was still on at 12:30, so Late Night on NBC was mostly a Friday night delicacy. But when he moved to CBS and the Late Show debuted at the beginning of my sophomore year, it immediately became the way I ended every weekday until I went off to college1. Flash forward a few years, I met my future wife while she was working for Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants2. I will always worship at the altar of Dave.
In my religious devotion, I have preserved several of the sacred texts: three compendiums of Top Ten lists that Letterman and his writers published, one from the Late Night days, two from the Late Show. Each one is amongst the most well-worn books in my library3.
As I looked at the collection of links I had saved this week, they felt particularly Lettermanesque. We’re living through particularly absurd times4 and few, if any, comedians did absurdity better than Dave.
The obvious takeaway? The only suitable way to recap the week is channeling Letterman and the Late Night/Late Show writers' room.
The last decade of entertainment was dominated by superheroes. Nearly half of the top-grossing movies were based on comic books, while franchises like Fast & Furious effectively embued their protagonists with all of the enhanced abilities of a Marvel character, just without the lycra. 2021 has only doubled down, bringing us two Marvel shows on Disney+, the Snyder Cut of Justice League, a Mark Millar’s new animated series Invincible on Prime Video, even Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer are getting the superhero treatment.
We’ve spent and, barring some major societal shift, will continue to spend countless hours watching costumed heroes and villains battle with the fate of the planet/universe5 lying in the balance. While I’m still excited about upcoming shows and movies like Loki, Moon Knight6, James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, Deadpool 3, and most of all Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, I think we’re all ready for something new. We need a different kind of team that can come together to be the light that guides us through the fog of modernity.
Don’t worry, I’ve taken the liberty of putting together just that team. And these brave souls may be the only thing standing between us and the end of the world:
The Top 10 Unlikely Heroes Who Just Might Save Us From The Apocalypse
10. Jenga King
8. The Nanny and Tyler Durden’s Secret Lovechild
7. Jorrit Klein Bramel7
6. The Guy Who Yells “Mortal Kombat” in the Theme for Mortal Kombat
5. Benoit Blanc
3. Megan Rapinoe9
2. Elon Musk’s Telepathic Monkey
1. Dolly Parton10
At which point I was just too busy studying every night to find the time. Yes, that was definitely the reason.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Late Show, but instead the Late Late Show with Craigs Kilborn and Ferguson. Still, she has some great Worldwide Pants swag.
This may say something about both my sense of humor and questionable literacy.
There are no shortage of examples to back this claim up, but this Vogue wedding profile captures the vibe pretty well with passages like this:
“Noah wore a made-to-measure burgundy suit by Browne, the same color of Ruby, his newly launched hibiscus water beverage, and hand-signed by Thom himself.”
Or, in the case of Fast & Furious (in a Dom Toretto voice) “FAMILY.”
Oscar Isaac vs Ethan Hawke, don’t sleep on this one.
This week, Jorrit launched Have I Been Zuckered?, a utility that can tell you if you’re one of the 533 million people whose data was exposed by a Facebook vulnerability. If you’re a Facebook user, you might want to give it a try because Zuck has made it clear you’re shit out of luck if you’re expecting him to help or even so much as notify you that you were breached:
“‘We don't currently have plans to notify users individually,’ a Facebook spokesman told NPR.”
Good news: thanks to the leak, if we don’t like the policy we can now get in touch with Zuck directly.
Zed is the latest entrant in the 2021 NFT hype cycle, creating a modern digital expression of the “sport of kings” that’s sort of hybrid between CryptoKitties and a Tomagachi pet, wrapped in Tron aesthetics. In their own words:
“ZED is a digital horse racing game where players can build a stable of racehorses by buying, breeding, and racing digital racehorses. The ultimate goal in ZED is to create a legacy with a valuable stable full of winning and rare racehorses.”
In case you’re in the market, a prize pony on Zed is going for around $25-50,000 right now, and stud fees to breed with a top stallion are around $100-200.
Rapinoe had a big week: she found time to make an investment in a promising mental health startup while participating in the increasingly popular pastime of clowning on Draymond Green.
Letterman is a good source for sensibility on most issues. Great post, very fun.