End Times Update 5/22: John Mulaney, Billy Porter, and UFOs
One clone's perspective on pop culture.
Each week one of Popdust's disposable clones — grown in a vault deep beneath the Mojave desert — is exposed to the outside world through a relentless feed of news, pop culture, and social media.
The arduous process accelerates their dissolution back into an amorphous clone slurry. But before they go, they leave behind a document of what they've absorbed and what they've learned — a time capsule preserving a single moment in the slow-motion collapse of civilization. We call these, End Times Updates...
Transcript: Oh, hi! Welcome to another End Times Update, presented by Popdust! I'll be your clone host for this week, Cradley Booper.
[Bradley Cooper]: I'm not who I thought I was, okay? I'm not.
As always, we'll be taking a dive into the deep end of the cultural insanity, to inspect the evidence of societal dissolution in the latest news, pop culture, and social media. So if you find yourself overwhelmed at any point, just pause the video… long enough to smash that like button! And don't forget to subscribe for more existential dread.
[Bradley Cooper]: You're gonna love it! You're gonna love it!
We've had a real barnstormer of a week in terms of harbingers of the world's imminent fragmentation. For a start, shortly after announcing his divorce from artist Annamarie Tendler, rumors began to swirl that comedian John Mulaney has started dating Newsroom star Olivia Munn.
Considering the fact that Munn has long been seen as a nerd sex symbol, while Mulaney has described himself like this —
[John Mulaney]: Whoa! That tall child looks terrible!
— they might just be the most surprising pairing we've ever heard of.
[John Mulaney]: Marty McFly is a seventeen-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist.
Well, maybe it's not that surprising —
[John Mulaney]: Like, this might as well happen. Adult life is already so g***amn weird.
— especially since Munn spoke in a 2015 Huffpost interview about her awkward fangirl experience of meeting Mulaney at a mutual friend's wedding, saying that she was, quote, "so obsessed with hanging out and talking with him," and that he didn't return her email afterward. Ouch.
Still, considering some of Munn's previous boyfriends, including Chris Pine, Greenbay Packers lead quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and a rumored affair with Justin Timberlake, it's hard not to see John Mulaney as kind of a step down…
[Olivia Munn]: I know, so I'm back to being the disappointment in the family.
In other news, this week Pose star Billy Porter revealed that he has been HIV positive since 2007, but had kept it a secret out of a sense of shame he'd internalized from his pentecostal upbringing. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Porter said, quote, "The truth is the healing. And I hope this frees me."
[Billy Porter]: I'm looking forward to living a truly joyful life, a truly peaceful life. I'm on the road to healing myself. There's nothing better.
Singer Demi Lovato shared their own truth this week, announcing through social media that they're non-binary, and will be using they/them pronouns from now on.
[Demi Lovato]: I feel that this best represents the fluidity I feel in my gender expression, and allows me to feel most authentic and true to the person I both know I am and still am discovering.
In California this week, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Gwyneth Paltrow's health and wellness brand, Goop, after one of their "This Smells Like My Vagina" candles allegedly burst into flames on Texas man Colby Watson's nightstand. And it turns out this isn't the first time one of these candles has had an alleged flare up.
Back in January, Jody Thompson of London reported that the same type of candle had exploded with half-meter-tall flames just minutes after she lit it. At the time, Thompson posted an image of the scorched candle to her Instagram with the message, "yeah, thanks Gwynnie, stuff your flaming vagina."
But the big news this week has to be the 60 Minutes report on UFOs, which featured former Pentagon officials and navy pilots discussing their experiences, theories, and concerns with the strange things that have been spotted and recorded zooming around the skies at speeds far in excess of any jet.
[Luis Elizondo]: Imagine a technology that can do 6-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that, uh, it can evade radar, and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And, oh by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces, and yet still can defy the natural effects of earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.
[David Fravor]: The tic tac's still pointing north-south. It goes boop, and just turns abruptly and starts mirroring me, so as I'm coming down, it's coming up.
[Bill Whitaker]: So it's, it's mimicking your moves.
[David Fravor]: Yeah, it was aware we were there. So, I go like this, and it's climbing still. And when it gets right in front of me it just disappears. There was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes.
[Bill Whitaker]: Seconds later, The Princeton reacquired the target 60 miles away. Pilots speculate they are one of three things: secret US technology, an adversary spy vehicle, or something otherworldly.
While it's hard to know whether these anomalies are enemy vehicles, bizarre natural phenomena, or something far stranger than we have yet to imagine, I for one certainly hope that they're aliens. That way, if they're friendly, they can use their advanced technology to clean up the horrible mess humans have made of civilization. And if they're not friendly… at least at will be a quick end.
Speaking of the end, that does it for this week. If the world survives longer than I do, we'll send another clone with more updates…in a few weeks… Clones need vacations too.
[Bradley Cooper]: You got a ****ing problem with that?
Until then, byyyye...