Kourtney Kardashian's Botox-free third eye
Flip it around...Wicked Witch.
Hello! Welcome back, Messketeers! And greetings from a very dreary, rainy day here in NYC.
I’ve been locked in an epic battle with Francis all morning as she DETESTS rain and yet must go out in it to pee multiple times a day. She gets so mad she’s getting wet that she refuses to move or do anything at all, failing to realize that she is only prolonging that unpleasant experience by not doing the one thing we’re out there to do. Her stubbornness remains far greater than her logic. That means we had to go out about three times as much as we typically would just to get the same results and she got absolutely soaked to the bone every time which only made her rage more furiously once back in the apartment.
Fascinatingly, on the flip side, Fran is an absolute snow freak. So when we got a couple of inches over the weekend, she was losing her goddamn mind zipping and zopping about, using her jowls like a snow plow to gobble up the powder which she re-remembers every year is actually her favorite beverage — water — in solid form. I wish I could give this hound a giant field with three-foot-deep snow to frolic about in and chow down on for Christmas. I feel like that would be the ultimate doggie dream realized. As for her real gifts, my mom gave her a foot-long deer antler a couple of weeks ago that she has already reduced to a mangled little stump, so don’t worry she’s still having a grand ol’ time even when I’m punishing her by making her stand in a torrential downpour that she bullied me into letting her go outside and stand in.
Another piece of holiday lore I have to share with you is that there’s a car in my neighborhood that drives past the apartment every single morning blasting “Last Christmas” as loud as humanly possible and I’ve never felt more seen by a total stranger. I don’t know what it is about this holiday season, but that song has been speaking to my soul in a serious way. I think part of this sudden passion for the Wham! discography is that I feel like lately I’ve been hearing a lot of “Last Christmas” maligning out there, and I will not stand for it!!! There are sooo many radically worse Christmas tunes we could be lambasting in this manner, we will not besmirch the great George Michael’s contributions on my watch. Anyway, obsessed with that car owner’s life choices, and I like to imagine it’s the same guy who drives through my neighborhood every day at dusk in the month of October playing the Halloween theme song on a loop. It’s a fantastic gimmick and I hope they never stop.
In other news, my addiction to reddit persists, and this week it brought me a very fun, little historical fact that I thought I’d share with you all. Someone asked why dudes are always posing with their hands tucked into their jackets in historical portraiture and it turns out there’s a whole Wikipedia page on the subject! Apparently, Napoleon used to do it all the time because his portrait artist Jacques-Louis David just thought it looked bad ass. So because of that it came to be known as a stately and regal pose, and fancy people started copying it because they thought it made them look more fancy and royal-adjacent. This is exactly the type of historical gossip I crave.
The last two treats I’ll leave you with for 2025 is a clip from this week’s episode of The Kardashians that explains today’s gorgeous newsletter title:
And this Jared commercial that I’ve had kicking around in my Notes app for months now because back when I was watching The Summer I Turned Pretty they were playing it relentlessly during the ad breaks and the “Diamonds” theme song cracks me the fuck up. It sounds like a Muzak version of Travis Scott. You must stick around for the final utterance of “diamonds” which is always what takes it over the top for me personally:
And as we cruise into yet another year of this unwell, one-sided email correspondence, I wanted to put a query out there for you all: Do you guys like the Discord or would you prefer we move all those conversations over to the Substack chat? Personally, I like what we have cooking over in the Discord (although, admittedly, I often forget to check it!), but I know people are loathe to follow anyone to a second location and might find downloading an additional app daunting, so I wanted to put it to an official vote:
Also, I had to move my livestream convo with paid subs next week to Tuesday at 3pm est — my apologies!!! I just realized I was traveling on Monday and my family feels passionately about eating dinner as early as humanly possible so I decided to opt for a day and time when I had a better chance at being left undisturbed in my shit-talking. Hope to see you all there! <3
Ok, let’s get to the goodies.
To begin, much as Gretchen Wieners with the word “fetch,” I feel the Marty Supreme press tour is trying to make neon orange happen by thrusting it upon me at every turn and I don’t care for it. They’re trying to do a brat, but they’re doing it by force instead of by making the color feel authentically cool and desirable. They are attempting to generate a zeitgeist-y moment in an agency boardroom and it reeks of corporate intervention. That said, I am enjoying the minions with ping pong ball heads.
Billie Eilish heard I’ve been tracking the rise of adult babies all year and so decided to give me the ultimate gift by skipping all the innuendo and sipping straight from the baba. The return of rave pacifiers can’t be too far behind!
And Rita Ora has been tragically missing from these pages for a hot minute, but she came roaring back to close out 2025 in a fit that might be one of the most important I’ve seen all year. While you’re probably baffled by that statement, I implore you to zoom all the way in on this look and realize that what appears to be Rita’s nude, tattooed torso is in fact a trompe l’oeil bodysuit! This is the Britney-inspired faux ink top I’ve been waiting for since this whole trend began! And I love that she deployed it as though it’s her real flesh, keeping the chest modestly covered up in this little leather vestlet. The hyperreal body is coming for us all! But more on that in the new year…..
Beyond the paywall, HUGE hair, Mrs. Claus-core, an update on my Elizabethan ruff agenda, and a juicy piece of Bezos-Sanchez interior decor gossip! Happy Holidays everyone!!!