Happy Happy Hamster Day!
Or, if you prefer, have happy Grilled Cheese Day instead.
Happy weekend!
Today is Hamster Day, a day upon which we can all take a moment and reflect back on the pet hamsters of our childhood. I only had one, her name was Harriet. She was marvelous and I much preferred her to the gerbils we got a few years later (Moon Unit and Ruby Eyes. My mom and I wanted to name them Moon Unit and Dweezil, but my little sister insisted she get to name one and came up with … that. Lovely girl, terrible at pet names as a child) who, in a bloody and brutal cannibal bloodbath, ate their own babies one fateful day while we were out.
Anyway, allow me to whisk you back to the year 1999, when the internet was a more innocent place, filled with dancing hamsters that were, yes, very annoying, but not explicitly evil like the many Nazis and manosphere creeps we have today.
This was one of the very first internet memes, viral before viral was a thing. It made no sense then and makes no sense now — just a website featuring a bunch of hamsters dancing to a sped up version of the opening song from Disney’s Robin Hood.
Should you prefer to experience the site the old fashioned way, it does still exist — though, sadly, not on a Geocities site. There’s also a very long oral history of the drama behind the site, which somehow has not yet been made into a Hulu documentary.
That’s about all I can say about hamsters. Therefore, your next present is just something I really, really enjoyed recently — drag queen and fashion historian Taipei’s deep dive into the (bad) fashion aesthetics of fascist Italy, beyond the black shirts.
There was a lot of stuff in here that even I — something of a scholar of the feud between Nazi sympathizer Coco Chanel and anti-fascist Elsa Schiaparelli — knew nothing about. I get thinking “why would the sartorial choices of fascist dictatorships matter?” but fashion is a major part of culture, it’s part of the story we tell the world about ourselves, and Mussolini had a very strong interest in controlling that.
Not that this was unique to fascist Italy. After all, today’s MAGA loyalists certainly have their own aesthetics as well.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Have you been struck with a sudden urge to shower us with money and jewels? If so, we are on Substack now so you can just go ahead and click subscribe! Click click click!!
Or if you’d just like to donate just once …
You can also join our Patreon, or buy our merch. Or we’re now partnered with Martie, where you can buy snacks!
You can even send us paper checks to:
Wonkette
PO Box 38273
Detroit MI 48238
Talk amongst yourselves!
O/T I am on day 19 of NO MIGRAINES! The glasses appear to have remedied the problem! YAY!
From an AP article:
Rumesya Ozturk, the Tufts University grad student abducted from the streets of Boston by ICE, told her lawyer that at during a stop in Massachusetts on her way to detention, one one of the men said to her "We are not monsters", and "We do what the government tells us."
Those are the worst kind of monsters.