Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
What do you make of the news that Brangelina is no more? Also, completely unrelated, how might you suggest a news website increase its traffic and social-media impressions?
Michael W.
I’m only human, so of course I was left hollowed-out and broken by the devastating news last week. Not by news of the terrorist attacks in New York and Minnesota, or of the Charlotte race riots, or of the largest data theft in U.S. history—500 million Yahoo users, of which I am one, seeing their personal info compromised by mercenary hackers. (Full disclosure: Yes, I am a sad person who still uses Yahoo Mail. Which I hope crashed on the hackers as often as it does on me.) No, like most Americans, I have become entirely inured to current-events calamities, since they seem to never stop. Instead, I now take my victories and defeats vicariously, through celebrities. So what really rocked me was word of the conscious uncoupling of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, i.e. Brangelina, the most instantly recognizable celebrity portmanteau since “Frill” (Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol.)
I’ve not yet decided whether to throw in with Team Brad or Team Angelina —that will require lots of thoughtful prayer. Plus, I’m still waiting for all the facts to come in from my facts bible (In Touch magazine.) Oh, I might feel a little more naturally sorry for Brad, since Angelina will be just fine in the re-coupling department, but how is that ugly mug ever going to find a woman again? Though I’m sure that time will heal all wounds, as both A-listers get back to doing what they do best: for Brad, smoking weed and nailing co-stars; for Angelina, getting inked with questionable body art, collecting third-world children like a cat-lady hoarder, and not eating. (Brad may no longer give Angelina what she wants, but what the skeletal star seems to need most immediately is a bag of cheeseburgers with all the fixin’s.)
With online rumor mills ruminating over what caused Jolie to file for divorce (speculation has ranged from Pitt having an affair with co-star Marion Cotillard—which she’s adamantly denied—to a drunk Pitt allegedly roughing up one of their children during a fight with Jolie on their private plane), all the background leakage seems curiously managed by Jolie “intimates.” You’ll forgive my skepticism, but I’m old enough to remember Jolie before she became a revered feminist icon and St. Angelina of the U.N. Refugee Agency. I recall when the pillow-lipped star was still knocking around with Billy Bob Thornton, wearing vials-full of her beloved’s blood, making out with her brother at awards shows, collecting spears and battle axes and other weaponry while explaining her cutting habit (“You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed, and you’ve got knives. So shit happens.”). All the while, she vowed that her love for Billy Bob would last “forever.” Though forever ended by 2002, after just two years of marriage. Jolie sells the Audrey Hepburn/Mother Teresa/Susan B. Anthony act pretty hard these days, but lest we forget, she did put the “crazy” in “crazy love.”
And now, as some reports have it, Pitt might be getting investigated by the FBI over whatever happened on the plane. (Good thing the FBI doesn’t have more pressing concerns than whether a person who gets paid to play pretend while saying other people’s words had too many Johnnie Walkers and yelled at his kid.) Celebrities: They’re just like us, only richer and more miserable. Remember, kids, that money cannot buy you happiness. Though it can buy you a vicious lawyer and a team of publicity elves who can publicly humiliate your estranged spouse with the deft knife-work of a surgeon as you attempt to gain sole physical custody!
As for Part II of your question—how to increase web traffic—I don’t pretend to be some traffic czar. Though I do read the internet all the way through at least once or twice a month, just to stay on top of trends. And when I’m teaching my How To Go Viral class down at the community college, I suggest to budding writers that whatever their story is about, get “Brangelina” in the headline. Not just Brad, not just Angelina, but Brangelina. Together, they are stronger than they are apart. Kind of like America was before we all decided to start hating each other.
“But what if my story is not about Brangelina?” I can hear naïve little lambs asking. That doesn’t matter. Whether your story is about the mating habits of cephalopods or the Quadrennial Defense Review, work Brangelina into the headline anyway. Because in 2016, chances are nobody reads past the headline. “Reading” an article is completely beside the point. In our Web 2.0 economy, it’s all about sharing, or, if you prefer, inflicting.
In fact, I refer you to a Washington Post piece by Caitlin Dewey, the headline of which I found fascinating: “6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new depressing study says.” As a very busy thinkfluencer, I didn’t get any further than that. But I’m told by people who have read the piece that it details how a team of Columbia University and French National Institute computer scientists did a study that found 59 percent of the links shared on social media haven’t been read by the actual sharers themselves.
So if you’re still reading this piece, instead of sharing it, don’t take this personally, but you might be a loser with too much time on your hands. Instead, be a forward-thinking, efficient member of the Infliction Economy. To be dutiful citizens, it is no longer good enough to merely pretend to consume useless information. You must also inflict that information on everyone you know. Why? Because people need stuff to ignore on their phones, while pretending to be busy checking their phones as they’re ignoring you. It’s the new Circle of Life.
Dear Matt,
Where do you go for trophy rainbows and have you considered Fishing Unlimited in Alaska?
Steve Jones
Anchorage, Alaska
Sadly, I don’t catch a lot of trophy rainbow trout. We don’t have naturally reproducing rainbows in my neck of the woods (southern Maryland), and so most of my trout fishing is limited to mountain-stream brookies and tailwater browns. I don’t bother with Alaska, since I otherwise keep pretty busy with a steady diet of shad, stripers, blues, largemouth, smallmouth, white and yellow perch, crappie, sunnies, pickerel and whatever else I can fool into ingesting feather’n’fur. (Biggest pleasant surprise recently: the notorious snakehead.)
But here, the “trophy” rainbows are usually some pellet-fed 12-inchers, still dazed and confused after being dumped out of the trout truck that transported them from the concrete runs at the Department of Natural Resources hatchery. The disoriented fellas get deposited in some rivers, but mostly in brown-water ponds, which will cook them by the heat of August if they don’t stay deep. Though most of them have no chance of making it that long, since greedy Power-Baiting bubbas will usually fish them out in a weekend, ignoring the five-fish daily limit by taking their limit to their cars, enjoying a belt of something (probably Fireball, the favored whiskey of amateurs and criminals), then coming back to the pond with an empty bucket as though they’re just arriving for the first time. It’s a disgrace for all involved. And if my fellow fishermen are more interested in eating than sport, there’s a McDonald’s right down the street where they can inhale Filet-o-Fish’s until they tax the seams on their camo neoprene waders.
I hate playing along with this “trout fishing” charade. It makes me feel like a small man in a cheap suit. But I still can’t help myself from doing so a few times a year anyway. Not only am I frugal, and those rainbows represent my overpriced fishing-license dollars at work. But I consider it a humanitarian mission. As a catch-and-release absolutist, I hate killing fish, or seeing fish killed. Even if these trout are raised for slaughter. Much the same way I don’t like seeing my basketball popped at the end of a pick-up game. Why extinguish the very thing that just brought me pleasure? It’s an act of ingratitude.
So every trout-stocking season, I call a source of mine to get an early tip on when the next planting will happen, before the info gets posted. I show up the day of the stocking and try to sting as many of those poor bastards as I can catch. And of course, I let all of them go. It’s a useful arrangement for both me and the fish. I add plenty of rainbows to my fish log. The rainbows get a crash course on what not to eat, now that the pellet buffet is closed. It’s my hope that they understand in their little fish brains that they’re lucky they ran into me first. Because any encounters with the neoprene eating machines coming behind me will end, for them, under a squeeze of lemon and a glop of dill sauce.
So that’s my regional trophy rainbow story. As Mr.Trump would call it: “Sad.” Though I’ll still give you your Fishing Unlimited plug anyway. (Get off your duffs and go fish Alaska, lazy readers!) This one’s on me. But generally speaking, graft is a two-way street. My journalistic integrity is not up for sale, of course. But in Donald Trump’s America, it is up for licensing. So to future would-be fly fishing sponsors, feel free to send me rods, flies, extraneous gear, lodge passes and airfare, and especially liquor. Are you listening Maker’s Mark? A man needs something to drink after a hard day of fishing.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
