Not every week lends itself to a column. Sometimes I’m not doing anything of note, nothing in the news is new or novel enough to work as a topic, and anything I could use has already been done. I’ll look at a calendar for obscure holidays and see if that gives me anything, but this week all that taught me is that Tennessee has a state holiday for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

You might be expecting me to complain about this, but no, I see this as an opportunity to not bother pretending this column isn’t just a bunch of songs I like while I ramble about tangentially related topics. It’s freeing—an excuse to be my truest self, even if that self is Grandpa Simpson with better taste in music.

Long story short, here are five things from the last week or two I thought were funny.

Tom Petty — “Free Fallin'”

Twitter’s implosion has accelerated in recent weeks. First, the server bill came due so they limited the number of tweets people could see in a day. Then, they broke TweetDeck, which may not be as big but certainly annoyed all of our editors. (Gokhman is pulling out his remaining hair about whether to pay Musk or someone else because he can’t tweet without scheduling them in advance). Then Mark Zuckerberg released a Twitter clone that seems specifically designed to annoy me but was briefly very popular (though I haven’t actually heard anyone mention it in about a week).

Most recently, a bunch of far-right lunatics tweeted screenshots, boasting of Twitter sending them five-figure payouts as a cut of ad revenue. Some were weirdly round numbers to be a percentage of anything, which means either they were lying or Musk is just sending cash to his favorite fascist influencers. Most hilariously, there’s another tier of fascist influencers who thought they were top-tier but didn’t get checks, causing them to throw an absolute fit and demand money.

And where is that money supposedly coming from? People who pay for blue checks seeing ads in replies to tweets. That suggests that, rather than paying to not see ads, the rubes are paying to see more ads and have their money redistributed to “alleged” sex trafficker Andrew Tate. That doesn’t strike me as a great deal.

Anyway, I added my BlueSky handle to my tagline at the end of stories if you got an invite to that.

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AC/DC — “Big Balls”

In case you mercifully missed it, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—son of former Attorney General and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy—is running for President on a platform of being an absolute raving loon.

That’s not an exaggeration. You name a conspiracy theory, and he’s 100-percent on board. Vaccines causing autism? Check. COVID being some sort of nefarious plot? Check. All sorts of scientifically impossible nonsense about 5G? Check. He’s even into some deep cuts like various plots by the government to control our minds. But a certain segment of lunatic is wholly on board, in large part because he apparently takes more steroids than Mark McGwire did in 1998.

This past week was a great example of how his campaign has been going. There was a fundraiser dinner at the home of a former gossip columnist named Doug Dechert. Things went sideways when Dechert went on an unhinged rant about climate change being a hoax, which woke up 86-year-old art critic Anthony Haden-Guest (that’s not a joke, he was reportedly asleep for most of the dinner) who began arguing back. The shouting match culminated with Dechert loudly farting while shouting, “I’m farting!”

That is a real thing that happened. We live in quite possibly the stupidest time in human history.

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Pete Seeger — “Talking Union”

The Writers Guild of America has been on strike for a couple months now, and the producers haven’t even come to the table. Why not? Well, an unnamed executive at a production company went out of their way to tell the press that their plan is to refuse to negotiate until October because that’s when they figure the writers’ savings will run out, and they’ll start losing their homes. Their negotiation strategy is to make their employees homeless so they take an exploitative contract. Which is charming.

But things got worse for the producers, because the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike as well. Because movie producers are shallow and not very bright, that one really stung. They love meeting and name-dropping movie stars. But the actors have an excellent reason to be angry: One proposal by the producers is that they should be allowed to pay a background actor for one day of work, a couple hundred bucks, to do a full body scan and use an AI version of them as a background actor forever without paying any additional wages or royalties.

This strike will probably be going for a while if that’s what they consider a fair deal.

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Childish Gambino — “Telegraph Ave.”

In A’s “relocation” news—I still stand by my opinion that John Fisher and Dave Kaval can’t build a stadium anywhere—Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao flew to Seattle ahead of the All-Star Game to meet with MLB Commissioner and loathsome weasel Rob Manfred.

If you’re behind on the saga, Manfred flat-out said in a press conference that there was no Oakland offer. Except that there was, and it included more public money than was approved in Las Vegas. So Thao went and presented Manfred with the information and the offer, and explained exactly how wrong he is.

Will it make a difference? Probably not. He’s going to continue to be a jerk, and Fisher will continue to fail until the other 29 billionaire team owners get sick of it and force him to sell, if not with a formal vote, then with some well-placed threats. I mean, the team needs $1.1 billion in private money, which is roughly the value of the entire team, for their current Vegas stadium proposal. Good luck.

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Asia — “Heat of the Moment”

Finally, there’s a national heatwave going on. I’ve written more than enough columns whining about heatwaves, and I definitely need to stop because apparently we’re on the verge of the whole concept of a “heat wave” being a quaint throwback to a time when it got cooler than that.

Last week, it was the hottest day, in terms of global average temperature, since we’ve had the ability to track that sort of thing. That’s bad, but that’s not the half of it. It was the hottest day on record four times. Think about that: It was the hottest day ever, then the next day it was slightly hotter, then the day after that it was even hotter, then the day after that it was hotter still. The top four spots are consecutive.

But don’t tell that to Doug Dechert. He’ll just fart at you while shouting, “I’m farting!”

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and tweet column ideas to him at @BayAreaData on Twitter or @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.