Tuesday, August 9: A Messy Anniversary
Dave Matthews Band will answer for their crimes, in this life or the next
I’d like to start this edition with a combination correction/apology. Yesterday marked the 18th anniversary of a historic Chicago event, and I neither mentioned nor explained the significance in yesterday’s edition, that’s on me. Special thanks to Dutch & Toosie, two diligent Mourning readers who helped me realize my mistake.
On August 8, 2004, in the greatest city in the Midwest, a rock & roll band was traversing through the streets on their chartered bus when, for reasons unknown, the urge to empty the latrine hit. These charter buses can store hundreds of pounds of excrement, and this is exactly what was evacuated from the bus by way of dumping onto the road below them. As fate would have it, the bus was stopped at a red light on the Kinzie Street bridge, with the Chicago river flowing beneath it. Now, Chicago in August is prime-time for families and tourists looking to see the city from a new perspective, maybe even taking a river tour, traveling under bridges and buses.
This is how it came to pass that Dave Matthews Band ‘accidentally’ dumped approximately 800 pounds of human waste on a tour boat full of sightseeing passengers. Historic times like this call for eyewitness accounts and testimony from survivors, and after some research I was able to uncover this post, from August 9, 2004, which appears to be an account of a deck-hand on the fateful tour boat. 18 years ago yesterday, those passengers learned a valuable lesson; never cross under a bridge with your mouth agape in wonder.
Shoutout Regina Spektor for showing us all that you don’t have to be relevant or intelligent to reveal your true donkey colors. Madam Spektor, who apparently lives in Israel by choice, was once semi-famous mostly for folksy songs that I’ve never heard. The formerly-respected artist found Twitter the appropriate forum to share her thoughts on the crisis unfolding in Palestine, and her thread really emphasizes how little sympathy she feels for the victims of blockade, persecution, and extreme violence. Sara Bareilles was always more talented anyway
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, FBI agents descended upon Trump’s Florida sleaze-shack, Mar-a-Lago, and conducted a search on his ‘home’. The agents were purportedly searching for documents with classified information that Trump may have illegally removed from the White House. I won’t be holding my breath on a conviction anytime soon though
Record-setting rain has hit the streets of Seoul, South Korea, resulting in at least nine deaths and many flooded homes, swamped streets and subway stations. Almost 17 inches of rain were recorded between Monday and Tuesday, with more heavy rain expected later this week
Judges in four states have found that the voting maps drawn by Republican officials are illegally gerrymandered, and yet somehow they’re going to use those maps anyway. Further evidence that laws aren’t actually real, they’re just used as justification to punish certain people