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Hello, and welcome back to the Trash Report! Or if this is your first time reading, regular welcome to the Trash Report. I imagine the existence of this column is very irritating to people who are trying to figure out how to report trash, cuz if you google Portland Report Trash, this is what you get. I’m sorry if you were trying to have a public space cleaned up and instead you’re having to read my idiotic takes on our silly little world, but I think you’ll like dealing with me nominally more than you’d like dealing with a public nuisance. Or wait—am I a public nuisance?! 

Pardonnez moi?

President Biden kept up with the freak tradition of pardoning two turkeys ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The turkeys were named Peach and Blossom, and I don’t know why… but they sound slutty? Apparently the Peach Blossom is the state flower of Biden’s home state of Delaware, so obviously their fate was sealed when they got those names. If any turkeys wanna get pardoned by Trump next year, farmers will want to start workshopping stuff that the other guy likes, and you know what? TV and Diet Coke are pretty good names for turkeys. 

Then yesterday Biden pardoned a third turkey: his own son, Hunter Biden. This was a hilarious move that will make a lot of people upset and will lead to pointless frowny think pieces from liberal news outlets about norms and shit whereas conservative media will use it as an excuse to share pictures of Hunter’s hog. The potentially cool thing about this, though, is that it shows Biden’s willingness to ruffle some (non-turkey) feathers on his way out the door, and I hope he keeps it up! I doubt he will, because he seems dead set on making both the left and right hate him, but who knows, maybe he’ll surprise us yet??? It’s never too late to be a good and effective president.

it’s so heartwarming to see everyone arguing over how best to Defend Norms, just like it’s 2017 again. missed you all 🥰

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic.bsky.social) December 1, 2024 at 5:46 PM

These Weird Freaks

The most important thing to discuss is that Vice President-Elect JD Vance tweeted the following image on Thanksgiving: 

I imagine that in Jonathan Donathan’s brain, this image relays that he and Donald Trump are to be thanked for delivering an electoral victory for the Republican party in America. But what it’s actually saying is that Vance is willing to do anything to debase himself into being Trump’s favorite boi and that includes pretending to be Trump’s wife, I guess? Not that he had a choice; I’m not exaggerating when I say that if Vance had made Trump the wife, Trump would have given Vance the ol’ Pence treatment, by which I mean he would gleefully sic his MAGA mob and a customized gallows his way.  

For his part, Trump spent the holiday weekend having Thanksgiving dinner at Mar-A-Lago with actual favorite boi Elon Musk and then doling out cushy federal jobs for whoever has kissed his ring the wettest and sloppiest since his last time in office. That these rich fucks get the prize of a job when they could simply retire is such a self-own. Have fun with your meetings, morons.

Movie Time

This long weekend was huge for people going to the movies, and I count myself as one of the millions who flocked to Moana 2, making it the biggest Thanksgiving opening ever. The Rock was out in force promoting the movie and said it’s fine for people to sing in movie theaters, which is 1) wrong on its merits; nobody should sing out loud at a movie, and 2) an obvious ploy to try to get people to believe that they will want to break into song during Moana 2, which of course they can’t do because it’s a new movie and nobody knows any of the songs yet, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, the songs in this one aren’t very good! I spent hours in that dark theater and my mind was completely blank the second I left, nary an ear worm fester for several months and slowly drive me insane. Where’s that Lin Manuel Miranda when you need him?*

*I actually know where Lin Manuel Miranda was, and it was writing the songs for the upcoming Mufasa movie, which previewed before Moana 2 and looks very baller. That’s where this year’s ear worms will likely be found. Call me RFK Jr. how I’ll let those worms live in my brain.

Speaking of non-consensual song, Leonardo DiCaprio is getting dragged all over the internet after clips went viral of him talking on the phone when walking through a Fiji hotel lobby and ignoring the choir that was singing him farewell. Look, I’m pretty much always game for piling on DiCaprio for just about anything, but we as a culture have just determined that unsolicited singing is a no-no! This is true in movie theaters as it is in hotel lobbies. Not everyone gets to be the star of every moment by making noise. Sometimes people just need to get to their Uber to the airport.

Love AND Hate are in the Air

Love: Martin Lawrence’s daughter just got engaged to Eddie Murphy‘s son! Iconic Black comedy excellence! I love that those two actors will become in-laws and I think that will be a fun wedding. However, don’t you think Thanksgiving is a revolting holiday to use for an engagement? Everyone is all tired and bloated and full of potatoes. How could love be in the air when the air smells like salted farts?

Hate: Kendrick Lamar just dropped a new album which immediately charted. Drake responded by suing him like a little bitch. 

Animal Trash

A pug named Vito won this year’s National Dog Show on Thanksgiving due to its “sympathetic eyes and muscly stature.” I told my pug Dolly that she was a winning kind of a dog and she said “then stop complaining about my frequent expensive vet visits” and I said “no deal.” Dolly could not be described as having “sympathetic eyes” because she only has one eye and it’s hardly sympathetic—she mostly uses it to stare out the front window on the lookout for birds and UPS trucks so she can unleash the world’s shrillest bark, especially when I’m in meetings. News outlets have shared pictures of the winning pug Vito standing stoically as its haunches are prodded by various strangers’ hands; my dog would have bitten every one of those strangers’ hands. All this to say: pugs are the best. Congratulations, Vito and Dolly, for equal amounts of dog excellence.

Wild orcas have been spotted wearing dead salmon as hats again, a trend which hasn’t been seen in three decades. Fashion is cyclical, y’all. All the older orcas who are years out of the dead-salmon-hat phase are looking at these younger orcas the way I look at high schoolers wearing jeans that drag on the ground so their ankles are all wet and muddy. 

And this isn’t so much actual animal news as animal art news: There’s an art installation in Florida of a bunch of huge elephants and obviously a Florida couple was arrested for having sex on top of one of them. You can’t just put art installations in Florida without a plan to deter would-be sex-havers. If you put a large flat surface in your sculpture, you have laid the scene, my friend. May as well have scattered rose petals on top of those elephants for how probable it was for a Florida couple to try to have sex on top of it. Honestly, who is surprised? 

That’s it for now, girlies. Thank you for reading. If you still need to report trash, please return to your search engine and click the second option down. If you forgot all about the trash because you had so much fun reading this stupid column, you’re welcome, and please do come again soon. Love you.

Graciously,