But Wait!
Before we get to our Top 5, here’s a few bonus Things That Didn’t Suck that we couldn’t find space for elsewhere:
- Lists
- Snow Plow Drivers
- Building Codes
- Pet Cameras
- Cher
- ShopGoodwill.com (a Cousin Danielle addition)
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6. Foraging (Featuring: Cousin Danielle)
The most common things I have been accused of in my life: a) loving a good deal, and b) having old-person hobbies. There’s an extent to which, of course, the pandemic lockdown affected all of our hobbies and the way we define ourselves, and for me, like many, that involved diving deeper into “cottagecore” hobbies. One may argue that this is Gen Z & Millennials’ attempt at taking back a bit of control in an era where they feel over-marketed and overwhelmed. For me in my lockdown, this involved sewing, embroidery, gardening, and most prominently, foraging.
Foraging, if you’re unfamiliar, involves identifying and picking wild plants or mushrooms to use them for crafting or eating. I’ve been mildly interested in mushroom foraging for a number of years because my mind loves a goofy little puzzle. Pre-pandemic I would attend the Minnesota Mycological Society (I was easily the youngest member by 35 years) where we’d spent 2 hours looking at mushroom pics on an overhead projector. It was a freaking hoot. In recent years I’ve been spending more time deliberately harvesting, processing, and often freezing plants for cooking use throughout the year.
Why you should consider foraging:
- It can be anti-capitalist and sustainable. I don’t need to buy gifts at Target, I made everybody cute little bottles of elderberry syrup this year.
- It gets you outside on a relaxing and exciting adventure. It’s like a silly little treasure hunt and when you find something, it’s so satisfying!
- People are very impressed. If you bring ingredients for cocktails to a dinner – cool that’s whatever. If you bring an elderflower simple syrup from elderflowers you foraged, you’re an elven queen, baby. My long-term plan is to start old-people hobbies now, so when I eventually reach retirement age and my peers start discovering these hobbies, I will be a god amongst men.
One of the most beginner-friendly ways to begin foraging is app/website fallingfruit.org. Think you live in an urban concrete wasteland that bears nothing except melancholy? Think again, dumdum! Falling Fruit uses crowdsourced data on edible fruits, tree nuts, and veggies growing on public lands – and the community is very active. Let’s take a look at Uptown, a densely populated Minneapolis party zone. You can just plug the neighborhood name right in the search bar, and you’re greeted by a map with thousands of data points, each with a foragable (word?) plant on public land. You can even filter by plant or plant type of interest.
Hackberry is a small berry with a hard nut in its center – it’s known for creating delicious nut milk or ground up and dried for granola or baked goods. In Uptown, you can find thousands of them.
Clicking on an individual dot gives you specific address info, and sometimes even info on finding the plant. We can see this plant was initially documented by the Minneapolis Board of Parks & Recreation. Now it’s as simple as cruising down to that address in late summer and filling on up.
Be careful!! Most of the primo stuff that is worth targeting in the Midwest can have look-alikes that will give you a not-so-rip-roaring tummy-time. Use a book, use Google, and have as many identification details on lock as you can. What do the leaves on the tree look like? Do the berries cluster in groups of 3 or 4? Do they have any dots on them? Et cetera.
Don’t destroy things or leave trash. Appears obvious, but people are maniacs. Don’t take anything that involves destroying the plants or those around it. If you’re going to do it on private land, just ask first.
Do not take everything!! Keep in mind that you are not the only one enjoying these tasty goods – the ecosystem around it is as well. Taking every last berry or spinach leaf or onion prevents them from coming back the next year, and you played yourself out of a guaranteed foraging spot in the future.
In late summer, you will find me spending entire weekends tromping around with a basket and a sunhat gathering blackberries and plums like the queen of the harvest moon. It’s my pitch for a cute, good time. So take it or leave it! If you don’t, more wholesome goodness for me, babe.
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5. Coach K’s Farewell Tour
Editor’s Note: Brett really hates Duke
Coach K has been annoying for as long as I can remember. Literally. He’s been coaching at Duke since before I was born. While Coach K does, in fact, suck, one thing that didn’t suck this year was his farewell tour.
It all started in the offseason when Coach K announced his retirement; this would be his final season coaching. While I was excited for his upcoming departure, I knew he’d be going on a Kobe style farewell tour where opposing fan bases have to lavish praise on him and give him gifts and act like they haven’t hated every team he’s trotted out for 40 years. Gross.
Duke was annoyingly good all season and Coach K was his typical annoying, smarmy, preachy, self. Actually, he was even worse than normal. Everything culminated in Coach Ks final home game of the season vs North Carolina. Duke had destroyed UNC by 20 points on the road in the teams first matchup. This was going to be an easy win against a mediocre UNC team and a coronation for Coach K as the GOAT. They brought back every Duke player you’ve ever heard of to honor him with both pre AND post game ceremonies.
And unbelievably, UNC somehow pulled off the upset win! The crowd was in shock. People were weeping. The past and present Duke players didn’t know what to do. They still had to go through with the post game ceremony they had planned for his final victory over their hated rival. There was a stunned silence and none of the celebration they expected. Coach K even had to apologize to the crowd for the loss. It was the best comedy of the year.
However, I was still worried about the NCAA tournament. Duke was one of the favorites. Someone had to stop this man from winning the title. Each game that Duke won I grew more and more nervous. I had disturbing flashbacks to 2015 when Duke beat Wisconsin in the championship game.
Inevitably Duke clinched a spot in the final four, and to everyone’s surprise, the 8th seeded UNC team did as well, setting up the first ever meeting between these teams in the NCAA tourney.
It was setup perfectly for Coach K. He would be able to get revenge for the embarrassing home loss and win the biggest ever game between the teams. The game lived up to the enormous hype and was an absolute classic. There were 12 ties and 18 lead changes, and the game was back and forth going into that last minute. With UNC clinging to a 1 point lead, Caleb Love drilled a dagger 3 point to win the game and send Coach K into retirement. The dragon was slayed. Disaster was averted. Coach K was no more. He’s just Mr. K now.
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4. Hemp-derived THC Product
A new phenomenon has recently swung into Minnesota.
I’ve never been so grateful for the Bureaucratic incompetence of a certain political party! I kid you not, this certain political party (which has stood in the way of marijana legalization, decriminalization, and just generally not locking black people up for smoking a joint), passed a resolution legalizing THC in edible form, as long as it’s derived from Hemp. Only moments after passing it, did they realize what they’d done — essentially legalize pot by accident.
Was it just a matter of time? Yes. The tailwinds of legalizations are sweeping the country, one state at a time. 39 States have medical. 21 have full legalization.
So while the joints may still be in the cupboard in Minnesota while we wait for full, intentional legalization, this particularly unique path Viking country has taken has resulted a truly delicious wave of innovation. The weed-seltzer!
It should be noted, Minnesota is a wonderful state for brewing beer. My wider neighborhood has 14 breweries alone! Recently many of these breweries had taken to creating seltzers and in particular, CBD seltzers, hoping to capitalize on the trend. Apparently the shift from CBD to THC is minimal, because with a month of legalization, over a dozen had flooded the market.
Have a Saturday afternoon to kill? Planning a day trip from Wisconsin? Wondering where to start? Our friends over at The Racket have got you covered. Our friend Michael recommends Tint from Modist. Our friend Gasperini recommends tetra from Bauhaus.
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3. Ukrainians
We try to keep it only lightly political here at Giltner Bros, but in 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered the real life equivalent of the Fuck Around Find Out meme:
Putin fucked around in Ukraine, and boy is he finding out. 310 days after the invasion, not only has Ukraine not fallen, it is rapidly pushing Russia back and reclaiming territory lost in the early days of the fighting. Ukrainians are doing the dirty work of all the world’s democracies. They’re sticking it in the eye of world’s biggest pigheaded fascist. To the tune of:
But this isn’t about all the embarrassing Russian losses, this is about the resilience of Ukrainians. It should not have come to this. But it has. Seven millions refugees already. And as the long winter sets in on a country largely without power thanks to constant Russian airstrikes, we can only hope they can keep the momentum and push the pathetic Russian military back where it belongs.
We’d say more, but I think a few pictures, captioned by an English Language Ukrainian news organization The New Voice of Ukraine, can say it better than I can.
Photo: Press service of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS. July 7, 2022. The New Voice of Ukraine.
Photo: AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko. Aug. 20, 2022. The New Voice of Ukraine.
Sept. 17, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Gleb Garanich. The New Voice of Ukraine.
Oct. 14, 2022. Photo: AP Photo/Kostiantyn Liberov. The New Voice of Ukraine
Dec. 3, 2022. Photo: AP Photo/Libkos. The New Voice of Ukraine.
Consider donating to the Ukrainian relief efforts.
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2. The Normalization of Mental Healthcare
In recent years there has been a normalization of talking about mental healthcare. BetterHelp advertises on your favorite podcast. Your favorite athletes have gone public with their personal mental health struggles. And if you’re like me, your friends have posted their own mental health journeys on social media.
Sure, there are potential downsides to this new trend. As with any new trend, we must contend with the limits to which any good thing remains good. It’s an important line, the point at which we shift from personal health empowerment to therapy-based social currency, and thank god there are smarter people engaged with the conversation.
So for this particular moment, we’re going to celebrate the individual actions of many that have helped lead us from stigma to – as some might call it – social currency. Because for this thirty-two year old, it sure as hell wasn’t cool to admit mental shortcomings until very recently.
By the time that I ran headfirst into a battle with anxiety earlier this year, the stigma was gone. As I mentioned my struggles to family, then friends, all I found was support. And as a matter of fact, I found a slight echo. For example, when I asked questions about medication, I found a network of family and friends with their own personal experiences and recommendations. “I tried abc but now I’m on xyz.” And far from being confusing, this collective network brought reassurance – reassurance that I wasn’t alone, or weird, or hopeless – reassurance that I was essentially boring.
My own personal experience is that I ended up in urgent care on multiple occasions with urgent medical needs that were not, in fact, urgent medical needs. They were anxiety-induced blood pressure spikes/maybe hallucinations? And it took me a full year of experimentation and failure to find the right mix of medication, professional help, and personal habit that has me in a better place today. Now I’m one of those people that asks which meditation app do you use? as a way of starting a conversation about the meditation app that I use and how I think you should try it out sometime.
My confusing reality was this: things were going extremely well. I bought a house, I made an exciting career change, my partner and I became cat people. Life was as good as one could ever expect. For a while, this kept me from seeking help, because I felt guilty. I felt like the stereotype of a spoiled, American, millenial: the entire world at my fingertips, abundant everything, but yet I’m sooooooo sad. And there’s an endless stream of ideologues who would love to tell you why that’s the case. But at the very least, through 2022, it’s less scary to say it out loud, to admit that you don’t feel okay. That’s progress, if nothing else.
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1. Cartoons
Cartoons are this year’s #1 thing that didn’t suck. A fact, not an opinion. And the most succinct illustration of why is a particular cartoon from cartoonist, Ben Schwartz:
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We did attempt to put more thought into why. And the answers to why took many different forms. Some of them were so comically high-minded and overdone that they’ve been forever banished to a digital landfill. Some were right on the money, but didn’t feel big enough. So were were at a confusing crossroads, because ultimately we were trying to define why something like this makes us feel:
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So we thought we’d go straight to the source, to Mr. Ben Schwartz (of that first cartoon we showed you), and he summed it up better than we ever could:
“I think cartoons can hold a mirror to our attitudes and behaviors, expose hypocrisy, challenge assumptions, and be a force for change – like any good art can. I also don’t think it HAS to do those things, and that it’s okay to have a cartoon about cat businessmen looking at yarn sales that isn’t a commentary on capitalism, cats, Big Yarn, etc.“
And there it was, the connecting thread (no pun intended).
Because on one end of the spectrum are gag cartoons – pure absurdity (our Cat Businessmen) – and on the other end of the spectrum are subversive, historically-potent political cartoons. See if you can pick out which is which in the following (DANGER: Highly Difficult):
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And while we’re certainly drifting more toward the gag cartoon side of the spectrum with our selections, that merely reflects our personal preferences. The beauty of the medium is in the range: from sausage warriors to colonial politics.
Ben Schwartz told us: “…a lot of cartooning is about following vague, goofy hunches until they lead you somewhere interesting…. Personally, I always have fun with the purely silly stuff, but I’ve also noticed myself doing more observational stuff as I drift into middle age. You could definitely call it cultural critique, but I see it more as basically subtweeting myself.”
As we tried to heap praise onto Ben, he effectively dodged, and made sure to plug his own inspirations:
“Your praise is very kind, but to be clear, the greatest cartoon of all time remains this gem from the late Charles Barsotti…”
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And when we thought about it, a year like 2022 – with its “post-Covid” world of new normals – cannot be summed up better than the image of two noodles of differing construction reconnecting on the phone. In a world of infinite opportunities, infinite information, and infinite paths to take, we ended up here, with the fusilli noodle. It’s easy to feel paralyzed by choice as we re-emerge from our Covid cocoons back into a world that has changed since we last fully lived in it. It’s easy to feel anxious about our wealth of choices, staring at a wall of pasta sauces with no idea where to start. Personally, I often feel weighed down by perfectionism, striving to make the most out of every week, every day, every moment (just like those motivational quotes tell us to). But maybe what this moment calls for is an abandonment of those old ideas. Maybe what this moment calls for is that each of us take Mr. Schwartz’s advice, and instead follow the vague, goofy hunches in our life, and see if they lead us somewhere more interesting.
So next time you see this…
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…just follow your heart.
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A MASSIVE MASSIVE thank you to Ben Schwartz for taking time from his multiple professions to answer a bunch of weird questions from strangers on the internet (Ben’s rankings were: french toast>pancakes>waffles, by the way). Ben posts infrequently on Instagram and Twitter, and regularly appears across The New Yorker, Wired, and Air Mail. You can buy prints, merchandise, or original artwork from Ben at CartoonBank or CartoonStock.
In a rare first for The Giltner Bros, we’re going to be giving out A MUG WITH THE BEN SCHWARTZ CARTOON OF YOUR CHOICE (from CartoonStock link above) to the first two people to successfully read this far and comment below (or send us a text or tweet or something – this isn’t super official). Use promo code CAPITALISM for no discount, but instead a short monologue on the need for climate legislation.
And in addition to Mr. Schwartz, please also support the other cartoonists we included above. Some of our favorite cartoonists’ Instagram links are included here: Ellis Rosen, Will Santino, Navied Mahdavian, Sofia Warren, Asher Perlman, Ali Solomon, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Jon Adams, Tom Toro, Joe Dator, Paul Noth, David, & Shitty New Yorker Captions
Here are some of their weird & wonderful cartoons:
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Well, that’s it for 2022. We hope you enjoyed.
What might 2023 bring? Great question. We can barely count that high.
Perhaps 2023 will bring peace, sensibility, a renewed sense of community, a tidal wave of appreciation for elders, and a year-long rainbow that eclipses the sun and casts the globe in a psychedelic kaleidoscope of light.
Or perhaps not. One can only guess. And what a gift that in spite of all our technology, knowledge, and sarcastic, indifferent social posturing, each new day remains a mystery.
Logging off,
-Casey
-Brett
-Jason
The Giltner Bros Blog 