Well, we see that all-the-time-on-the-news LeBron James has signed with some NBA team, and now, all that angsty discussion about all things LeBron all the time in the real world will end. We can return, happily ever after, to all the angsty discussions in the unreal world.
Well, we can dream, anyway. That’s not illegal. Yet.
(But just wait until researchers discover that dreaming causes cancer. Soon afterward, there’ll be Dream Wagons roaming the urban landscapes at night, shooting ion streams into residences to catch a little illicit brain waves engaging in a bit of REM hanky-panky. And we ain’t talking some Athens, Georgia, band going Out of Time here.)
So, yes, the LeBron signed with the Lakers. Not just some NBA team. That’s for the few of you who have yet to have the ESPN app surgically implanted into your brains, à la some parts of William Gibson land. (And if you don’t have that app surgically implanted, Kawhi not? As NBA hipsters say.)
Meanwhile, back in the unreal world (the Unreal, as NBA hipsters call it), it turns out that Yelp can be “weaponized.” To use a term employed by <em>The Hill</em>, a reasonably reputable news outlet that mainly covers, you guessed it, topography.
Well, no. The Hill covers Congress and politics, but you have to admit, that’s pretty much topography.
In this case, Yelp, of all things, wound up in the middle of a political imbroglio involving a certain Virginia restaurant that we’ll call the Red Hen and a certain White House press secretary we’ll call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You remember. The Red Hen refused to serve Sanders because she carries water for her boss, the Emperor of Fake News. Whatever.
Well, of course, a major brouhaha ensued on the right-wing corner of the Unreal. To the extent that you would have thought that once again, Mary and Joseph had been told there was no room at the inn.
The brouhaha even extended to Yelp. Yep, Yelp. The Hill reports that right-wingers swarmed Yelp, by the several thousand, apparently, and swamped the Red Hen’s page with seriously negative reviews. As the paper reports, “Some online trolls even posted swastikas and pornography to deface the page.”
Classy. As usual.
The Hill goes on to note that there were so many negative reviews that the restaurant’s rating plummeted from not quite five stars to one.
Well. That’s showing off your muscle. Do you suppose those guys were wearing brown shirts?
Just asking. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the Unreal.
Speaking of which, remember when Our Great Buffoon promised that once the U.S. levied tariffs against friendly nations, neutral nations, unfriendly nations, that none of them would respond with tariffs of their own against U.S. products? No new tariffism.
Well, they responded with tariffs of their own against U.S. products. Yep. The Art of the Deal and all that.
The Art of the Deal seems to be cozying up to thuggish dictators, say, Kim and Putin, and giving the cold shoulder to longtime allies, say Canada and Western Europe. Hell of a thing, that Art of the Deal. (Do you suppose that book was ghost-written? Just wondering.)
And speaking of deals, did you notice that according to U.S. intelligence, North Korea is now in the process of upgrading one of its nuclear facilities? Yeah.
Not to disparage the great and wonderful Singapore Summit or anything, but is that what denuking the Korean Peninsula looks like?
No wonder this is called the Unreal.
Can we go back to all LABron, all the time?