this is not an elon musk essay.

Yes, Mr. Tesla hosted ‘SNL.’ No, I’m not watching or writing about it.

Listen, I understand that a certain very wealthy non-actor just hosted Saturday Night Live last night. As a result something happened with Dogecoin, and Musk incorrectly named himself the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL. But to borrow a phrase from Real Housewives of SLC icon Meredith Marks, I am disengaging.

First, there’s plenty of Elon Musk Discourse out there today. You don’t need mine.

Wanna feel creeped out? Google “Neuralink,” another of Elon Musk’s companies. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Secondly, this is the guy who has mocked gender pronouns, spoken out against his employees organizing, and has been an anti-vaxx Covid-19 truther (though he did come around on Covid-19 vaccines last month). I’m just not interested in his presence on my screens, especially the same weekend that the new, final season of Shrill just hit Hulu and I still have hundreds of The Nanny episodes to get through.

Thirdly, as you might already know, I work full-time in editing tech news for my employer. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that Musk is pretty much a one-man traffic generator — recent news stories on his companies’ expansion efforts in Austin, for example, are among our most-viewed stories across any tech hub. So, ya know, I’ve spent a lot of time editing stories sometimes based entirely just around his tweets. Here’s to work-life balance?

Also, to be frank, I don’t have an essay in me this week. So instead of slapping together some uncredited memes like certain others lacking fresh ideas might do, this is a link-dump edition of QTB. I promise more robust things are on the way in the weeks ahead — and, boy oh boy, there are some very exciting, very queer rumblings out here in these suburban streets these days that I can’t wait to dig into. Also, a new season of The Good Witch (Hallmark) and The Woman in the Window (Netflix) both drop this week. Good things are brewing. In the meantime… 

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• The Washington Post just ran an op-ed from a media CEO that appeared to threaten her full-time employees who decline to return to a physical office with being converted to contractors (which is illegal, by the way). In Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen writes about why so much of the “office culture” work (also referred to here as “non-promotable tasks”) that the CEO claims gets ignored while employees work remotely falls overwhelmingly on the shoulders of women and people of color in offices. (I’d add that this burden tends to go to marginalized workers as a side effect of our tendency to feel the need to seek likability and avoid being labeled as “not a team player” at all costs, but… that’s another essay for another day.)

• Does it feel to you as though animated dads are getting.. hotter? If your answer to that question is a “yes,” you’re not the only one thinking so. The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan investigated this very important question.

• On the topic of getting hotter, Sebastian Stan (who, lest we forget made everyone fall a little in love with Jeff Gillooly in I Tonya) is playing Tommy Lee in a new Hulu series and the first photo of his transformation just hit the presses. 

Pop Crave @PopCrave

Lily James and Sebastian Stan give a first look of them as Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee for Hulu’s upcoming drama, ‘Pam & Tommy.’

• A town in Japan decided to spend some of its Covid-19 relief funds on the construction of a massive (13-foot-tall, 29-foot-long) statue of a squid. The town, Noto, is known for its squid fishing, so the town is hoping that the monument will drum up tourism dollars. Honestly, this makes a lot more sense than that Marilyn Monroe statue we were stuck with in Chicago for several years.

CNN International @cnni

"No matter how you look at it, this is wrong. They have to return that money." A Japanese town spent Covid-19 relief funds on building a statue of a giant squid. cnn.it/3ul6DA4

• Variety reports exclusively that Glenn Close wants to play Cruella again and we are morally obligated, as a society, to allow her to do so.

• Caitlyn Jenner is running for governor in California and she just can’t stop saying patently stupid shit.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

Caitlyn Jenner to Hannity: "My friends are leaving California. My hangar, the guy right across, he was packing up his hangar and I said, where are you going? And he says, 'I'm moving to Sedona, Arizona, I can't take it anymore. I can't walk down the streets and see the homeless'"

• Everyone’s favorite (deeply) problematic lawyer-mortician-Scorpio queen Phaedra Parks has been rumored to be returning to the Real Housewives of Atlanta for some time now, and her appearance on Watch What Happens Live did not squash that chatter. She appears to be open to returning, but would Kandi Burruss actually let it happen? Only time will tell.

• Japanese garage band Chai just appeared on the Live on KEXP at Home YouTube series and their set is a hot-pink treasure. Just pure, unmitigated joy. I’ll never listen to the song “Karma Chameleon” again after hearing their cover. They are dropping a new album, titled Wink, later this month on Sub Pop.