Justin Bieber ludicrously challenged Tom Cruise to a battle…so it’s a thing now. You have to pick a famous person who is 31 years older than you to a fight. That’s getting a bit tricky in my case, since I’ve got to find someone who is 93 years old. Fortunately, I have a contender: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. She’s 93 years old, exactly right.

I think I can take her. Pretty sure, anyway. If I win in a trial by combat, do I get to take over her throne?

Behold, the surly grilled cheese sandwich truck.

I also can’t decide whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I’m certain, though, that now I want a grilled cheese sandwich.

Turn off the bat-signal, he’s gone.

The best time to watch Batman is when you’re 9 years old and spending the night with your grandma and uncle, drinking pop and eating ice cream. I guess that’s gone now, too.

YouTube has made a serious mistake. They usually try to pretend to be above all the petty bickering going on in their medium, intervening only when “objective” criteria are violated, but they slipped and openly ignored their own rules in the case of popular asshole, Steven Crowder. He’s been spewing bigoted bullshit for as long as he’s had a channel, and one could argue that that is the source of his popularity. Now, though, when he’s called on his use of incessant racial and gay slurs, YouTube punted.

Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video "debunking" Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity. Here's a sample: pic.twitter.com/UReCcQ2Elj

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019

I don’t know what to say.
@YouTube has decided not to punish Crowder, after he spent two years harassing me for being gay and Latino.

I don't know what to say. https://t.co/EFvWCNvPms

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) June 4, 2019

To add to the irony, it’s Pride Month, and YouTube has put up their logo in rainbow colors…while the constant assault against LGBTQ creators is in full flood, unchecked by any rules or authority.

“I think controversy and the very aggressive communities that can exist similar to Crowder, I think that drives engagement, and that drives views, and that drives advertising revenue,” he said.

YouTube, Amer said, knows exactly what it’s doing.

“When you have a platform like YouTube does, you have a choice. You can make the world a better place or you can manipulate it to make as much money as possible, and YouTube is staunchly in the place of making as much money as possible,” they said.

Is anyone surprised? That’s always been the goal of the companies that dominate social media. They aren’t altruistic in the slightest.

However, the decision to support only combative content isn’t the only way to make money, it’s just the easiest, least mindful way. It’s the same decision made by proponents of reality TV; why put any effort into quality writing, good production values, or interesting and educational content when you can throw a couple of idiots in an arena, prod them a bit, and people will contentedly watch them flail at each other?

I saw the new movie, and it was classic stuff: ever more gigantic monsters trample on cities, while po-faced humans project their gnomic interpretations of the monsters’ intents on them, and while the monsters thrash at each other and go “GROOONK” as they stand atop rubble. If that’s all you need, you’ll enjoy it. It brought back memories of old Saturday matinees with Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah, all awful, but all marching through the same schtick, just like this one.

What did Boston do to deserve to be the locus of monster destruction, though?

Here’s a site calling itself “A People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.” It’s a concept that might have some promise, except that instead you discover a list of celebrities in politics, movies, and most of all, sports, where the connection to the location is often extraordinarily tenuous. For example, here’s my region of West Central Minnesota.

I didn’t recognize any name, except Westrom — he’s the Republican representative for my district, I can’t stand him, but it’s fair that his name is up there. For Morris, on the other hand, it’s some guy named Aaron Schock. I never heard of him. He’s never in any of the local papers. I looked him up, and learn that he was born here and moved to Illinois at a young age. So what is he famous for?

Schock resigned from Congress in March 2015 amid a scandal involving his use of public and campaign funds. A subsequent congressional ethics investigation “revealed that he used taxpayer money to fund lavish trips and events”. In November 2016, a federal grand jury indicted him in connection with the scandal. After he pled not guilty, prosecutors reached an agreement with him in March 2019 whereby all charges against him were dropped. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee, Schock for Congress, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.

He got into Wikipedia for being a crooked politician, and the Wikipedia entry mentions where he was born, and that’s it. Now this map tars the town with him, because it has such sloppy criteria for inclusion.

Oh, well. Take a look at your hometown, maybe you’ll be lucky and discover some worthy who actually has some substantial connection to the place. Probably not, though.