The World Ends Saturday
December 2012, and the Mayan calendar was running out. The internet spent humanity’s final days, with characteristic precision, watching a pony navigate the public transit system while commuters stared at their phones.
There was something fitting about that. Not the pony specifically—though a full-grown horse riding the subway is as precise a summary of civilization as anything—but the general principle that the collective human response to apocalypse is to compile a catalog of beautiful idiocies. Celebrities had apparently started going bottomless; bottomless was the new topless, in case anyone was still catching up. Somewhere in nature, there was an assassin bug that killed its prey and wore the corpses as armor, which someone had decided counted as news, which I was now relaying to anyone who’d listen because it is genuinely the most metal thing in the animal kingdom and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The "no time to explain" supercut was forty seconds of gold followed by the quiet realization that every action film has the exact same beat in the exact same place. Which is either a joke or an indictment, depending on how long you let it run. The frozen soap bubble was just beautiful—no comment needed, nothing to add.
Ali G came back. Sacha Baron Cohen dusted off the tracksuit for the first time in roughly a decade, and whatever the consensus on Borat or Bruno, the argument that Ali G was always his sharpest creation isn’t hard to make. The targets were never really the interview subjects—the politicians, academics, the occasionally baffled expert sitting across the table. They were props. The joke was always about the character himself: the particular suburban delusion of performing a streetness assembled entirely from music videos. It still landed when he came back. The type it describes hadn’t gone anywhere.
The world was supposed to end on the 21st. It didn’t, obviously. But before it wasn’t going to: sleep with your best friend, quit the diet, try sex with a Freddy Krueger mask. Introduce yourself politely to every large vehicle you pass. Buy everyone you know a Nyan Cat hoodie—your mother, your father, your aunt, your uncle. Including Ferdinand, whoever Ferdinand is.