People with interesting brains:

This one was clearly ripped off the Ashley Madison hack, with a weird reference to Rohinie Bisesar (the woman who stabbed a stranger to death in the PATH Shoppers Drug Mart). The latter is even name-checked in the show, which I'm kind of surprised is legal.

The plot is needlessly convoluted. A hacker gets the database for Not!Ashley!Madison Dot Com, and appears to be blackmailing either the owner or someone in the database. People in the database include a well-regarded judge and a pastor of a megachurch. She's about to reveal the identity of someone in the database to her married best friend, but will only do it in person. They agree to meet in their usual spot in the PATH, but the hacker, who arrives first, is being followed. She makes her way to a Shoppers, where she's stabbed to death by a masked assailant.

( you know the drill )

You asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.

But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!



As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.

And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.

Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:

My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."

It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.

So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?

( I promise I'll get to art, I promise )

Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!

P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten: