WHAT. IS. WEWORK. (And what is sugary hot sauce?) This was a very confusing evening at The Nerdery™.
Dave: Well, this film certainly explains why Donald Trump could supposedly make money in New York real estate. Joe kept turning to me every few minutes asking, “But what does WeWork actually do!?” That we still aren’t sure at the end of the movie isn’t the fault of poor filmmaking: it’s that WeWork was mostly bluster, financial mismanagement, and false promises. The fact that someone could embellish a ridiculous company that basically rented cubicles, rake in billions of dollars (some of it from the Kushner family), and then get a huge golden parachute when the company lost billions over the course of a few days is appalling. That the founder managed to ruin the lives of so many people in the process is beyond reprehensible. And what did the world get out of it? Only a series of trashy news stories and hundreds of failed businesses like a blog that reviewed brunches (that really was a WeWork startup). This movie cemented my belief that playing the stock market is just legal gambling on imaginary ideas of companies. If the smartest people on Wall Street were fooled by a bit of charisma and a fabricated business plan, then it seems pretty clear they’d never last a second in a real job. (⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2)
I’m pretty sure the book this popcorn recipe came from was written by the kind of people who would find great value in a brunch review website. [Joe, while editing the reviews, laughed so hard at this callback, btw.] Who in hell adds sugar and corn syrup to hot wing sauce and blue cheese and thinks the result will be both A) edible and B) good enough to include in your darn cookbook? I’m no wing purist, even if I did spend a few memorable nights with high school friends at Hooters (long story), but really. If you have to add sugar to your hot wings, do us all a favor and find something else to eat. For example, you could dump some Lil’ Smokies sausages in a crock pot with a big ol’ jar of grape jelly and a little BBQ sauce. You and your precious daughter Audobon, who can’t even abide you waving your Crate & Barrel pepper grinder in the vague direction of her dinner plate, can eat all the grape jelly sausages you want (they are, in the right setting, deeee-licious) and let us have our actually spicy hot wing popcorn. Rant aside, we did eat the whole bowl well before WeWork’s façade even started to crack. But after doing so many popcorn and movie nights, we’ve made an art of inhaling an entire bowl of popcorn. (⭐️⭐️1/2)
Joe: All y'all know I'm a sucker for Schadenfreude, especially when it comes to Millennial "entrepreneurs" and "influencers". Wind me up, and I will Soapbox Until The End Days about the topic. Dave has perfected the art of remaining stoic and not rolling his eyes when I launch into the delight I feel at Caroline Calloway's downfall or the bust that was FyreFest. This documentary, though, was a whole different ball of wax. I'm still not entirely certain what WeWork was. Like, renting office space is some kind of ingenious plan? And because there's beer at the office, that makes the concept more palpable than something Jeff Bezos would cook up? Also, am I the only person who didn't think Adam Neumann was even remotely charismatic? And his wife - Gwenyth Paltrow's equally kooky and Goop-y cousin - is so far removed from reality that she's nearly a parody of Paltrow herself. Have capitalism and social media so starved us of human authenticity that we lap up platitudes like "WE NOT ME" like it's some kind of revelation? Man, humankind is fucked, and this documentary is proof positive. (⭐️⭐️⭐1/2)
I'd like a tête-à-tête with the folks who write these recipes. This is the umpteenth popcorn recipe that reduces the popcorn to a soggy mush once the sauce is added. To wit: Prior to pouring the sauce on the popcorn, we had a full bowl - 8 cups - of popcorn. After pouring the sauce on, I watched in horror as the popcorn reduced to about 3 cups of near-liquid popcorn. What's even more infuriating is that this recipe called for baking the popcorn after adding the sauce. Conventional wisdom might suggest that this would firm up the popcorn? Make it less gloopy? I don't know, but it didn't work. Neither did the sauce. This is a white person's idea of "hot sauce": 6 tablespoons of Buffalo wing sauce with 3 tablespoons of corn syrup and 2 tablespoons of brown sugar. No ma'am. That ain't hot anymore. So I added another four tablespoons of hot sauce. It didn't help much. And the blue cheese was just lost in the glop. So I popped four more cups of plain popcorn hoping that it would balance out the disaster and maybe mitigate the sogginess. I was wrong. (⭐️⭐️)
Popcorn recipe from: Party Popcorn by Ashton Epps Swank (2014)
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