the Sex Weasel edition

NF, One L
​Issue #18

1. Yeah, I laughed too when I saw these people get nailed by Chris Martin. How hilarious that their true punishment was willingly attending/enduring a Coldplay show, personal and family considerations be damned.

2. I once attended a Coldplay show. To be fair, it was also halftime at Levi's Stadium during that Super Bowl where ninety-six-year-old Payton Manning completed two passes, both ducks, and Denver still crushed Carolina, mainly because Von Miller was the best player in the NFL at the time, and Cam Newton spent four quarters fleeing in terror or flat on his back with Von Miller (football slyly 29% gay) on top of him, inhaling the man's breakfast fumes, probably onions and raw steak.

3. For reasons too boring to explain, here is a short list of the people sitting in the Levi's box (got the tix for free) on either side of me: Pat Riley, Cal Ripken, Condoleeza Rice, Roger Goodell, Adriana Lima (19 foot legs, mini-skirt), Vincent Chase (whatever his real name is), Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Wiz Khalifa, Jeremy Renner (utterly hammered, took my seat and started talking up Cathy, thought I might have to punch him for a minute there, not kidding), and a large number of other people I vaguely recognized or have subsequently forgotten about.

4. I went to the bathroom, mainly to avoid Coldplay (Weaselly Executive's Hack: total go-to if you don't want to be flashed on the Jumbotron with your illicit squeeze) and relieved myself at the urinal next to Terry Bradshaw, who was talking either to himself or me, still unclear, the Men's was otherwise empty and I had zero clue what he was blathering about. On the way back I stood in line with Michael Irvin, who was pretty hilarious. We shook hands and, with not one iota of exaggeration, the dude's mitts were GARGANTUAN. I have big, square Flintstone hands and his effortlessly wrapped around mine like three times. It actually felt really nice, they were warm and lotioned-but-leathery-soft (football slyly 44% gay) and I could see him having a seriously lucrative post-baller career charging bank for Deep Emotional Palm Therapy, just by enveloping your hand while you quietly wept. It would be a life-changer.

5. On the rare occasions that I have been in tight spaces with celebrities of whatever variety, my working behavioral model is to pretend they don't exist (it's possible, on a quantum level, that they don't.) Some seem to appreciate this angle, while others not so much. Like, I was once at a wedding where the bridesmaid's date was Chris Isaak. He was hugely popular at the time with that warbly-falsetto surfer tune "Wicked Game", and my daughter was maybe two and climbing all over me and it was hot as hell in my suit and Chris and I were standing next to each other talking about the brutal traffic on the way in, and I said, just because I was cranky with the heat, "So what do you do?" and he gave me an evil look and pretty much just walked away. Which even my two-year-old thought was hilarious. Amazingly, later the wedding band called him out, and after demurring for a while (way too long), got up and sang "Wicked Game" while I scrolled through the remaining shrimp/bacon hors d'oeuvres with a yellow toothpick.

6. I once had dinner with Jeff Bezos. That is a true sentence.

7. So, back to the Super Bowl: in this corporate box PACKED TO THE GILLS with celebrities, the only person I really talked to was Wiz, and he was cool, a sweet dude who seemed to appreciate that I neither wanted an autograph or to talk about hip hop. Which is good because I don't particularly enjoy hip hop (except Wu-Tang and Pete Rock. Also Eric B. and Rakim and Death Grips. And Slum Village) and also I don't know a single Wiz Khalifa song.

8. Adriana Lima's legs are 30-feet high, and she could probably end hostilities in Ukraine (brutal illegal invasion by lunatic megalomaniac poisoner who should, right now, be in the same dark site cells in Uganda where they sent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) simply by walking out onto the battlefield in a modest skirt, thereby forcing all combatants to realize that life is very short and killing one another is a poor way to spend their precious and waning time.

9. So here's what I'm thinking: Sure, it's hard to have sympathy for Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and "Chief People Officer" Kristen Cabot (deserves none just for holding that title alone), and they'll have to live down the shame and embarrassment for the rest of their lives, not to mention the coming wreckage in store for their families, but while no one loves to revel in the schadenfreude of wealthy white tech-bra Coldplay lovers more than me (seriously, if you flashed her picture and offered $1000 to pull her name out of the pure ether, I bet it would have taken me less than five guesses to come up with "Kristen Cabot") what's all this crap about them having to leave their jobs/investigations/legal ramifications?

10. I have no idea what Astronomer even does, and it's too boring to look up, but how is that in any way related to an affair? Investigate what? Okay, they're fucking around. Happens all the time. In companies and out. All across the world, in every country, class, wealth level, ethnicity. Half of all literature and cinema is about illicit love/career-climbing sex, so why is this any different? Because of Coldplay?

11. Which is to say, why do we, as a culture, want to pillory these people on social media for getting unethically busy, but are totally fine giving the Rich White Tech Bros and Hedge Funders and Mortgage Repackagers and Petroleum Executives and Pharmaceutical Murderers and Insurance Murderers a pass for DOING THEIR EVIL JOBS. Why aren't Elon and Peter Theil and Tim Cook and Zuckerberg and tools from Comcast and Chevron and Goldman Sachs and Coinbase up there having tomatoes thrown at them every day, just for being them?

12. What do we talk about when we talk about how wholly and deeply puritanical we still are, as Americans, that we'd rather be screwed by corporate overlords in private than allow them to screw each other in public?
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Next Week: How, mercifully, through the intervention of small government, PBS is no longer destroying our children.