NTMP 130: Joe Sucrose

That's MISTER Farto to you!

New-To-Me Phrases, January 12, 2025

Bum Farto * Cake picnic * Vanilla Rice * Plague enthusiasts * Sucrose gravel * Stubentiger

Photo by Matthew Larkin on Unsplash

The Phrases, With Context

New year, same you am I right? I do enjoy being reflective when the calendar page turns. I go through my camera roll and journal from the past year and contemplate what I’ve learned.

One of the best ways I’ve found to look back on the prior year is my family’s annual Happy Jar reading on New Year’s Eve. Throughout the year, we write things that made us happy on colorful scraps of paper and put them in a jar (a Kirkland container that I believe once held mixed nuts). Then on NYE, we divide them up and read them out loud together. I learn things about what my kids notice and find special, and we have a lot of laughs because my kids write inside jokes and add doodles on some of the notes. Our wild turkey featured prominently in the 2024 Happy Jar event. He has joined one of his siblings and her brood and we’ve seen him out with them. He even came to visit us on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, running up to one of my kids when he saw her to let us know it was really him.

Look, the world is on fire and currently run by billionaires who have lost their humanity. Start your own Happy Jar, even if it’s just for you, as an act of hopeful resistance. At year-end, you’ll marvel at all of the good that can happen in a year.

Yes, that’s me writing about the new year mid-month. It’s what happens when you switch from writing weekly to every other week. Now it’s time for phrases—let’s get to it!

1. Bum Farto

I can’t think of a better way to kick off NTMP 2025 than with a phrase this beautiful, this magnificent, this perfect. I found it on Bluesky, one of the few places online that doesn’t seem to be owned and run by assholes. (Give them time, I know.) I still refuse to call posts “skeets,” but I’m sure I’ll be pulled into that unfortunate undertow there soon enough.

TV writer Andrew Farmer posted this beautiful new year’s note on Bluesky:

Before we even get to this incredible name that I will never get over, this is exactly how group chats function. There’s always one of us who finds something perfect for the group who rushes in to share it without reading what’s currently happening and has to post an apology. It’s part of the flawed beauty of digital group dynamics.

In addition to looking like one of my Chicago Italian relatives from bygone days, Bum Farto’s given name was Joseph. Let’s be honest here: it’s not like Joe Farto was going to be any less funny. According to Wikipedia, his nickname has nothing to do with butts, which I find deeply unfortunate. As a child, he hung out at the fire station behind his Key West home and fetched coffee for the firefighters, who nicknamed him Bum.

After doing a bit of light digging into the etymology of “bum,” one meaning I found was a hanger-on or follower.

Farto’s Wikipedia entry is a great read simply because it repeats the word “Farto” over and over again. Farto grew up to become fire chief until he disappeared in 1976 after being convicted for dealing drugs. Oopsie! That’s the thing about Florida; it’s really easy to hide bodies there. As my brother-in-law, a longtime Florida resident says, “Enter the water, enter the food chain.”

For further Farto info, there’s a podcast and a musical about him that was still running in Key West as of October 2024! I would actually go see this.

2. Cake picnic

While reading a lovely essay by Bettina Makalintal about finding community by attending potlucks, I found this story about cake picnics held throughout the U.S. and I very much want to attend one with a homemade cake. Here’s their IG account in case you want to as well.

3. Vanilla Rice

Nobody can take down a mediocre dude like

lyz

Lenz. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the ultimate marker of success in our culture. But he’s also a deeply, deeply mediocre human being who got rich after starting a social media site designed to rate the appeal of women’s faces.

I for one am tired of our media and culture admiring these folks by default. I wish more interviewers led with asking them to acknowledge and mitigate the harms their companies do and pay their fair share in taxes instead.

Anyway, Zuck was last week’s dishonoree for Dingus of the Week¹, and this is where Lenz dubbed him “Vanilla Rice.”

In case you haven’t read, in a bald effort to appease Daddy Trump, Zuckerberg announced in a reel that Meta is ditching fact-checking and explicitly allowing people to accuse members of the LGBTQ+ as mentally ill. Zuckerberg also went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to whine about how he never gets a fair break. It’s almost as if he’s more focused on his own woes than the real harm he’s caused.

Lenz writes:

It’s important to remember that what happens on Facebook isn’t just a clash of ideas between respectful but disagreeing friends and neighbors. Misinformation on Facebook has led directly to violence and death. Kyle Rittenhouse went to Wisconsin because of a Facebook page titled “Kenosha Guard,” which instructed members to patrol the streets with guns and exact vigilante justice. During 2020, Covid misinformation was rife on Facebook, and how many people died or ended up in the hospital because of it? We simply will never know.

In 2022, Amnesty International released a report detailing how Meta was directly responsible for violence in Myanmar. It argued that “Meta knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act.”

And that’s just the violence we know about. Who knows what other deaths and violence were avoided by Meta’s moderation policies? I guess we will find out soon.

4. Plague enthusiasts

A friend posted screenshot of a joke calling anti-vaxxers plague enthusiasts and I am adopting that phrase from now on. But it turns out that rebranding isn’t new. Months before COVID-19 entered the global chat, “crazymothers1” tweeted asking the media to refer to them as “vaccine risk aware,” and Twitter jokesters were more than happy to suggest alternatives.

Here’s an old post about it from Huffpo. It’s interesting to see how many Twitter/X accounts have been deleted since then, including the user who coined this phrase.

5. Sucrose gravel

Drew Magary’s annual Hater’s Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog is one of my cherished holiday traditions.

Here’s the context for this phrase:

You know what the best marshmallows for hot chocolate are? The tiny-ass ones that come in every Swiss Miss packet. I don't want actual, hand-pulled marshmallows. I want sucrose gravel, the kind that wouldn't even pass inspection on the Lucky Charms production floor. Fuck these other, Harvard-bound mallows.

He also examines the evidence about whether or not Santa Claus is a boozer that had me laugh-crying. That’s a gift link; you’re welcome.

6. Stubentiger

Friend of NTMP Tonya sent me this one. Stubentiger is colloquial German for “living room tiger,” or house cat. Here’s a fun explainer from an expat, with an alternate use of this word:

Der Stubentiger can also be used to affectionately refer to a man with a tough exterior who, as soon as he comes home from work, puts on his comfies and snuggles down on the sofa with a beer.

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Bonus Bits

1. Help for L.A. Residents

What’s there to say about the devastating fires in Los Angeles that hasn’t already been said? I cannot imagine losing everything in minutes to a fire and wandering around your neighborhood, bewildered and wondering where to go or what to do. The rest of us watching this unfold are heartbroken and wondering what to do; it feels so big and insurmountable. This is when, instead of doomscrolling, we look to the helpers, as Fred Rogers’ mother once told him.

Here are some resources I’ve found this week:

• Donate to Mutual Aid L.A. Network (MALAN) - here’s their spreadsheet of orgs and people who need help after wildfires devastated their neighborhoods. If you’re not familiar with mutual aid, here’s an explainer.

• Altadena was one of the few parts of L.A. that historically didn’t practice redlining to prevent Black people from owning homes, allowing generations of Black families to own homes there. Here’s a spreadsheet of GoFundMe appeals for Black families in Altadena, and it shows the % toward meeting their funding goals.

• World Central Kitchen is on the ground feeding people, like they do.

• This Cannabitch newsletter lists more orgs who need support.

It’s a lot, I know. It’s overwhelming. But I believe that giving $1, $5, whatever you have, helps. Whatever we can do helps. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Pick one org and send what you can, when you can and allow those actions to keep our shared humanity intact.

2. A bonus bit of great news

I’ll admit it: I’m an optimist by nature and always have been. But I temper it with skepticism and try not to let that slide into cynicism. I feel that questioning and being skeptical offer a healthy buffer against certainty, which is often rarely achievable in human interactions or group dynamics. All this to say: Boy was I surprised about the outcome of this story, because I was certain the powers that be would never have done shit about a sad situation of their own creation.

Backstory: In October 2023, nearly 1,000 migratory birds struck the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center and died. (I know; I said this was good news, and it’s coming.)

According to Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

Ornithologists estimate that as many as a billion birds die each year from flying into buildings. They become disoriented by the artificial lights and reflections and slam into glass (see Is Bird Migration Getting More Dangerous? Spring 2021). Shutting off lights during migration and taking other measures, like installing window films on the glass’s exterior, can save birds.

This garnered quite a bit of media attention but not much response from the folks at McCormick Place other than “we had an event; sorry.”

This year, Block Club Chicago reported that McCormick Place added film to its windows that likely prevented 95% of bird strikes during the 2024 migratory season. I think it took public pressure from local groups to get this done, but it happened and that’s great news.

That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird and to stay furiously curious.

1. One thing I love about the weekly Dingus column is that the URLs are often just as rewarding and funny as the columns themselves.