The Supernova, the Crack Whore, and the Hitler Goldfish
Astronomers noted this week that VY Canis Majoris—a red hypergiant in the Canis Major constellation, one of the largest known stars—is approaching the end of its life and will eventually detonate in a hypernova large enough to be visible from Earth in daylight. The timeline is, in astronomical terms, imminent. In human terms, we probably have a million years. Still: nice to have something genuinely enormous to worry about while the rest of the news is what it is.
What the rest of the news is: Whitney Houston died eight days ago, and within the week a radio host at KFI in Los Angeles went on air and called her a crack whore. He was suspended. He’ll be back. Someone will hire him. These things always work out for the person who said it, never for the people who had to hear it. Houston was fifty years old. She’d been in the ground less than a fortnight and the discourse had already cycled through grief, retrospective, and ugly punchline. The internet moves fast.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney gave an interview in which he announced he’s quit smoking weed. He is sixty-nine years old and has smoked marijuana since before most of his listeners were born. He described it as enough is enough, which is either wisdom or just what happens when you’re almost seventy. I don’t judge. I do wonder what he’s doing with his dealer’s number.
The FBI, it emerged, has circulated a document suggesting that paying for coffee in cash—rather than by card—is a behavioral indicator worth flagging in terrorism investigations. Cash. For coffee. This is presumably the same FBI that has missed several actual terrorism events because the warning signs were too obvious to register. The document also lists taking photographs and drawing diagrams as suspicious behaviors, which means that being a tourist is operationally indistinguishable from planning an attack.
Somewhere in all of this, a goldfish surfaced on the internet that looks, undeniably, like Adolf Hitler. Someone demonstrated that completing Super Mario World with the lowest possible score requires a specific, perverse brilliance that I find genuinely admirable. An Adele sex tape was reportedly circulating—a claim that has "don’t open it" written all over it and that I treated accordingly. A PR agency sent out silicone hand gloves shaped like human hands, purpose unclear, suggesting a brainstorm session that went somewhere no one should have followed.
It was that kind of week. The kind where you end up face-down in a pizza on Friday night, running through all of it and trying to find the thread connecting a dying star and a dead pop star and a bewildered ex-Beatle and a goldfish with a tiny mustache. There isn’t one, obviously. That’s always the internet. The star will explode eventually and none of this will matter. Until then: another slice.