The Pop Culture Pyramid: Vol. 20

HOUSEKEEPING!

Thank you for your patience in my absence last week. The fam escaped down to Anna Maria Island for the week as soon as school was out for Summer.

Also, make sure you are following my Sunday Night Lights fiction-comedy series about a megachurch hosting a reality TV competition to decide its next pastor.

Listen below if you want to start from the beginning…

BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID

Public Conversations about Your Potential Paternity!

There I was, on a flight to Atlanta, trying to decide between watching The Secret Agent and eavesdropping on our aislemate, who was having a loud conversation about contested paternity. I’d like to pretend it was a close call, but dear reader, it was excessively not.

I'm a classic introvert and a devoted acolyte of the new social schooling that prefers texts over phone calls, especially in public. I don't know why I cannot have a phone conversation in front of people, but I will pace in live traffic before I'll have one in front of real, actual humans.

These rules, it turns out, do not apply to the gentleman on our plane. He was traveling with his son, though opinions differed on whether the woman and two children in the row directly behind him were also his wife and also his children. Appearance-wise, he looked like someone who, ten years ago, would have been the cover model for a Men's Health edition in a month when they couldn't book a celebrity. I provide this context to give you a visual sense of the situation but also to emphasize the point that men can be messy too, especially the really attractive ones.

As best we could reconstruct, a woman had been texting him information pertaining to her pregnancy and his paternity within that pregnancy. And as a man who was very clearly NOT a texts-only guy, he placed a single AirPod into his ear and called her so that the two of them could loudly dispute, at thirty thousand feet, the precise extent to which he was or was not the father of her unborn child.

Accusations of stalking followed! Our aislemate accused the woman of forging both an ultrasound AND a pregnancy test:

“Sheila, ANYONE can ChatGPT a fake ultrasound these days!”

And all through this twenty-five-minute conversation, Mr. Potential Paternity's real and actual son was going absolutely apeshit in the seat right next to him.

To be honest, it made me feel a little bad about myself. I can’t have a one-sided conversation in public, but this man is out here free-range parenting his way through a live paternity dispute as the wheels touch down in Atlanta. Kudos to him, I think?

MIDDLE OF THE PYRAMID

Texas Tech Softball!

TTU Softball, how I was not familiar with your game! Over the course of the Super Regionals, these ladies have brought a Professional Wrestling flair to a sport that was already very compelling.

As a product, I find the College Softball postseason gripping and compact in a way that College Baseball sometimes struggles to be, but two separate Texas Tech kerfuffles just force-multiplied the entire Women's College World Series into appointment television.

FIRST, we got a full-scale beef alert between Florida and Texas Tech, built around Red Raider Mia Williams, a junior who transferred FROM Florida and then, in what feels straight out of a movie, had to play a three-game Super Regional against her former team in Gainesville. Florida pitchers hit her with pitches MULTIPLE times over the course of the series, and Williams answered with multiple clutch hits to help TTU take the series.

This drama also inexplicably featured Mia’s father, former NBA point guard Jason “White Chocolate” Williams, AKA one of the swaggiest Whitebois to ever play high-level basketball. He was briefly ejected from a game before being returned to celebrate TTU’s win on the field with the team and hitting the Gator Chomp in open mockery of his own alma mater.

THEN, after advancing to the World Series, Texas Tech found itself at the center of a SECOND former-team grudge match.

Red Raider Taylor Pannell, who ALSO transferred away from her opponent, Tennessee, claimed that her former coach Karen Weekly skipped “good game” in the postgame handshake line and instead told her she’d “made a mistake” by transferring.

Weekly called the accusation “an outright lie,” and ESPN, sensing content, pulled the handshake footage and aired it during an entirely separate game, where it was analyzed frame-by-frame like the Zapruder film while sideline reporter Holly Rowe testified that she had personally heard a clean “good game.”

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE.

Survivor Thoughts!

Due to our traveling, I wasn’t able to write out my thoughts last week, but I wanted to drop some now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to reflect back on what happened, so let’s talk it out.

Before we get to the Aubry vs Jonathan vs Joe of it all, I wanted to shout out Jonathan’s brother for traveling all the way to Fiji while being dressed like Super Mario.

Brother man, of all the fits you could have planned to be on a beach in Fiji with your brother on TV, you picked Italian Video Game Plumber? I wouldn’t have done it myself, but to each their own I suppose.

I also want to shout out Jeff screwing up the Rizo reveal that he lost fire before it actually aired.

This was absolutely incredible and probably why we will never get a live final tribal again. To be clear, a NUMBER of people had to fail at their job for that mistake to happen, but seeing it occur was arguably more thrilling than anything else in the episode outside of Aubry’s win in the final immunity challenge.

Ok, with that out of the way, let me start here: Did Aubry deserve to win this season? No. Absolutely not. The amount of retconning the jury did about how impressive it was to "play the middle" felt like watching Democrats explain away Joe Biden's last debate performance. This is supposed to be the Season of Seasons, and I'm sitting here listening to legends of the game marvel at how Aubry managed to be functionally non-existent for 68% of the season and win zero individual immunities until the literal last possible one. It was so disingenuous it flashed me back to the brief, shimmering era when JD Vance had a spine about Trump.

So, did Joe deserve to win?

No, absolutely not, if only because he actively resisted the entire premise of the game and tried to impose an accidentally condescending moralism on the competition that almost seemed performative if it wasn’t probably his actual personality.

So then, did Jonathan deserve to win?