Happy Mother’s Day! Normal protocol has been to talk about the holiday the week after it happened, but I hate that whatever I could say about Cinco de Mayo would be a repeat from St. Patrick’s Day, with a different layer of ugly cultural tourism. However, I did have myself a solid Seis de Mayo, and is now my preferred way to celebrate the drinking holiday. If you’re not Mexican on Cinco de Mayo, at least get a thoughtful buzz on at the National Museum of Mexican Art before shambling through midday bar patios yelling fake Spanish.

That being said, Happy Mother’s Day! I’ve been looking forward to writing an I.C.Y.M.I about Mother’s Day ever since Thursday, when Tanning Mom crawled out of her ultraviolet bed, compared her skin to the night sky and doomed herself to six more weeks of tanning. She has a real name, but I refuse to use it. Like a sex club, learning her real name would ruin the fun. We can’t laugh at someone who has a real name, as that makes us monsters, and have you seen Tanning Mom? Tragedy and faded hopes paint her body. She’s the closest we will get to a monster in subruban gothic tradition, someone who became the joke after becoming addicted to beautification. Her life is a shitty Twilight Zone episode entitled “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, and You Look Like You’re Wearing Full-Body Blackface.”

Maybe the founding fathers of our current media culture had mommy issues? I’ve been noticing a trend of shock stories and terrible shows relying on ineffective or inexperienced mothers. This week, Octomom came back from the inky depths of irrelevance under the headline “Octomom at Crossroads, Broke and Considering Porn.” Why doesn’t she just use the library computers like the rest of us? See, making fun of news fad moms is fun!

Distance from the subject with a fun, catchy name does help, even if it’s as uncreative as Tanning Mom or has a B-movie ring like Octomom. Or you can watch Teen Mom and facepalm until the wrinkles on your forehead become fingerprints. It’s marginally better, as it’s not as much a straight-up fad as other flash-in-the-pan news moms. It’s still classic fish-out-of-water entertainment, but the fish is also teaching a smaller fish how to walk. That metaphor is not mixed. THEY’RE TRYING TO TEACH BABY FISH HOW TO WALK.

To be honest, all I want out of this filthy blue marble is an Avengers-like force of news fad moms. It’s economically viable. Some Discovery Channel moms should want in on this. And if I may be really honest, all I really want is theaters full of mothers watching the Mom Avengers, and muttering “Oh, that poor child” and, to a lesser extent, “Wait, what is happening, is that the bad guy?” Thanks for reading, mom.

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Other news

An amazing man died.

An amazing man died.

My only hope is that MCA and Maurice Sendak died to meet the Nick Fury of the afterworld, desperate for a supergroup. It’s just been a depressing week in news. I know the news is meant to be sad and fear-instilling, but the major headlines were MCA’s death and Octomom.