1. I dropped Ace off at school at 6:20 am, and they wanted to listen to Friday on the way there. Fun. Fun. Fun. Fun. Looking forward to the weekend!

The lyrics are still astonishingly bad, and I (yet again) felt bad that Rebecca Black was just 14 in 2011, when it came out.

Then YouTube automatically went on to the next song, and it chose Sugar Water Cyanide, which is a Rebecca Black song from 2024. I am thrilled to announce that it is passable! It is not the worst. She embraced her lifestyle and here she is, 13 years older. Success.

2. Daniel Lavery asks his friends, "What's the worst thing your mother ever said to you?" and the more mild answers made me realize (anew) that I have definitely deeply wounded my kids without realizing it, because you are a parent for so many days in a row, and it's impossible to go for that long without massively screwing up. (But I'm also not the worst! Thank god.)

(Then later, the follow-up: "What's the worst thing you ever said to your mom?" Lavery's family of origin seems to be awful and he's 100% estranged from them.)

How's your weekend look? You don't have to share the worst statements you ever exchanged with your parents unless you really want to.

First off, when I heard this story on NPR, they kept pronouncing Macklemore as "Mac Lemore" and not "Mackle More". What a world!

Second: so Sheeran invites Macklemore to join his tour. Macklemore has a big Free Palestine! thing at the first show. Macklemore is careful to say how he's anti-Israel but not anti-Jewish people.

I feel like I need a term to refer to those people who hear that - "I'm criticizing Israel, not the Jewish people" - and refuse to entertain any notion besides "this is definitely anti-Semitism". It's old school Jews plus rabid Christians? Plus bloodthirsty militants? (What a world.)

Venue owners started calling up Sheeran and saying that Macklemore wasn't welcome at their venue anymore. So Sheeran kicked Macklemore out for those venues. (On NPR, Macklemore was very clear that they're old friends and Sheeran was in an impossible situation.)

Now everyone else (besides Sheeran himself) has also dropped out of the tour, out of solidarity with Macklemore! What a world.

Sometimes the criticism of Netanyahu has a side-helping of antisemitism! But I keep coming back to how we don't have a label or any way to concisely refer to people who refuse to ever separate criticisms of Netanyahu from anti-Semitism. If the language caught up, maybe it would be easier to disentangle these dynamics that we all see all the time, but find too exhausting to wade into.

Finally: I wrote the post and then read this very excellent link from NickS on Macklemore, because I'm daft about doing things in the right order. It's on Macklemore's earnestness and corniness, his history of standing up for Palestine, and this Ed Sheeran concert business.

Charlie W. writes: "This was just needing to go and once I had gone I was fine," said Paula Radcliffe, after she went during a marathon in 2005.

And after she recently went during a (so-called) Hyrox competition, the Australian (why is this important?) athlete Joanna Wietrzyk said “go hard, or go home”.

I suppose my question is the obvious one: what are the ethics of going in sport, as opposed to going into sport (which seems fine). Does the athlete who went (but didn’t stop) express grit? Or something else?

Heebie's take: I only heard about this incident this morning! It's so gross. So, at the Hyrox competition in Beijing, she poops herself and kept going, and the people running the event didn't stop her.

She ends up winning the competition, but (according to the people at my gym who watched the videos or made it up) the poop got everywhere and it affects the other athletes.

Obviously people get the squirts during long distance races, but I think the indoor/outdoor distinction and the sharing equipment is where you have to draw the line.

Finally, this would never happen during the World Humanoid Robot Olympics. Just saying.