This Week in Our Dumb World
Who Poisoned Joe Gilliam Twice?
I do not use the phrase “Shakespearean” lightly, but it absolutely applies to this incredibly complex story of politics, friendship, family, and revenge. YES ALL FOUR OF THOSE THINGS ARE HEAVILY INVOLVED.
Joe Gilliam, one of the most influential voices in Oregon politics, has been silenced.
For more than two decades, Gilliam, 59, served as president of the Northwest Grocery Association, which counts Fred Meyer, Safeway and Costco among its members. He represented their interests in Salem, battled competitors and earned a reputation as a punishing opponent and loyal friend.
But for the past nine months, WW recently learned, Gilliam has been lying in a vegetative state at an undisclosed care facility in Clark County, Wash. Vigorous and athletic as recently as May 2020, he can now neither move nor speak.
It wasn’t COVID-19 that laid him low.
Nor was it heart disease or a car crash.
It was poison.
Two criminal investigations are pending into Gilliam’s attempted murder, one in Lake Oswego and another in Arizona. Police in both jurisdictions declined to comment.
Both agencies believe, however, that someone close to Gilliam tried to kill him last year with a toxic metal called thallium. And they did so not once, but twice.
His guardian and the judge overseeing his custody are concerned enough that someone will try again that they will not reveal his exact location.
Gilliam’s plight has not previously been reported. A review of documents and interviews with Gilliam’s family, friends and associates yield a tale of a prominent Oregon family beset by tragedy, secrets, broken trust, financial manipulation—and on, two occasions, attempts to kill its most prominent member.
The story would be extraordinary under any circumstances, but the attack on Gilliam comes at a pivotal time—when his organization is trying to pry open Oregon’s tightly controlled market for alcoholic beverages. It’s a crusade Gilliam hoped would be the crowning achievement of his career, and that public employee unions, governments dependent on liquor revenue, and beer and wine distributors all vehemently oppose.
There Is One Man Behind All This Horror
I am absolutely fascinated by these horrifying food videos. Part of it is the presentation because these people are just so goddamn excited about the gastric nightmare they are smearing on the counter (or in the toilet). Part of it is that it’s fun to watch the process of making anything. But part of it is that they’re absolutely perfectly awful. BUT, they’re hideous in a way that just skirts plausibility. They exist in a culinary uncanny valley where you can’t tell people would eat that or not. Watching some smear nacho cheese and taco fixings on their country and then scoop it into a tortilla cone is so gross, but also is it?
Yes.
But also I will watch it and whatever happens next.
So, with that in mind. It’s incredible that all these things essentially come from one source with a story that speaks to a lot of the ways that people interact with the internet and the challenges of creating content that then gets repackeged in all sorts of unintended ways. It’s an unexpected story of art on the internet.
Now, while you read this I’m going to go watch chippy people make maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
In January, a photographer from Minnesota named Janelle Flom posted a three-minute video titled “EASIEST DINNER HACK EVER!!” It shows Flom dumping multiple cans of Spaghetti-O’s into a piecrust. “Make sure the chunks are all spread equally,” she says to the camera as she mushes the Spaghetti-O’s around.
She then covers buttered slices of bread in garlic powder and flattens them with her forearms. She dumps skim milk and more garlic powder onto the piecrust with the Spaghetti-O’s. Finally she bakes the pie, removes it from the oven, and tells the camera with a straight face that this is her “best one yet.”
The video went viral, prompting a Vice writer to ask, “Why Is My Feed Full of Gross Cooking ‘Hacks’?” and inspiring The Atlantic to explore “The Absurd Logic of Internet Recipe Hacks.” Both pieces make good points about the commodification of online food content and the viral catnip of process videos: There is something innately compelling about watching someone execute a recipe, no matter how deranged it is. And this absurd “pie” wasn’t a one-off for Flom. Her account is full of pranks and gross food. A few weeks before the Spaghetti-O pie, she posted a video about melting down candy canes and serving Chinese food on top of them.
But what was left out of the Spaghetti-O pie discourse is that Flom is the sister of Justin Flom, a magician who has appeared on TV programs like James Cordon’s Late Late Show. And Justin Flom, Janelle, and dozens more are part of a viral Facebook content network run by another magician named Rick Lax.
All My Family’s Undignified Deaths
I cannot imagine finding out that one’s family history is littered with ridiculous deaths.
Take, for example, Thomas Strickland, my great,-great,-great-grandfather, who after barely leaving rural Norfolk, emigrated to New Zealand in 1851 at the age of 17 on one of the first few settler boats. After months at sea on a wooden coffin, travelling across the face of the planet to a radically different eco-system and culture, his diary for the day he arrived is almost vertiginously banal: “Beautiful evening and fine sunset, nice and warm, such a difference to the cold evenings we have been accustomed to.”
The next generation of Australians, the Dibdins, fared little better, living lives that were profoundly altered by their refusal to conform to even the most basic of gun safety measures. In 1889, my great-uncle, Tom Dibdin, accidentally shot himself. Tom was riding in a horse-drawn buggy in rural Australia, a rifle perched between his legs, its barrel resting on his shoulder. When the buggy hit a bump in the road, the rifle fired. He survived, but his arm was probably amputated.
Incredibly, Tom was not the only member of the Dibdin family to accidentally shoot himself that year. A few months after this incident, Tom’s father (and my great,-great-grandfather) Robert Dibdin fired a bullet into his chest while cleaning a gun in his shed. According to a newspaper report, Thomas had a charming habit of firing guns alone in his garden during his downtime, meaning that his family thought nothing of hearing ambient gunfire outside. It was only after some time had passed and “some deep groans were heard” coming from the shed that they found him lying in a pool of blood. Miraculously, Robert also survived.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones’ Unkown Muse
I am always interested in the forgotten people that stand just outside the frame in history. Naturally this makes me a sucker for things like the story of a unknown art model who helped define genre art for decades.
Zinaman wasn’t public about her modeling, but she didn’t hide it either. Her husband, Dan Green, was also a painter and an artist for DC and Marvel Comics and had used her in his own work. But, as Jones’ muse, Zinaman shows up in the work that would carry the artist from cartoonist and fantasy paperback illustrator to a revered painter in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition.
“Sandi stood the test of time, because of the untold number of photographs,” says Zaloom. “Sandi had a languid beauty...she was graceful without trying.”
From 1974-1976, Jones took hundreds of reference photos of Zinaman. This overlapped with Jones’ time as a member of The Studio (1976-1979), the fabled New York City space in the Chelsea district that she shared with Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith. Famed artist Frank Frazetta called Jones “the greatest living painter,” and fellow illustrator Roy G. Krenkel called Jones the “master of the meaningless gesture,” a commentary on the unposed, natural composition of Jones’ figures, often personified in the artist’s work with Zinaman.
“Some of these poses are definitely Sandi,” says Zaloom. “Sandi was so archetypal.”
Cardinal-Nephew
I had no idea that Pope’s used to always name family members as cardinals to the point where it had an official name.
I had no idea that “Cardinal Nephew” is where the term “nepotism” comes from.
Papal corruption always has the best stories
BRING BACK THE CARDINAL-NEPHEW