Gear up, Trash Pandas! It's me, Elinor Jones, welcoming you to this column: The Trash Report. It's Tax Day today, which is probably a fun day for the mega rich to feel smug about how much they've evaded sharing this year. Me, I'm feeling bummed that all the money that is withheld from my paycheck that could help to fund a society where we take care of each other, but instead of us having universal healthcare, Israel gets weapons.

Having set the baseline of malaise, let's move on to funnier things! 

Mt. Ve-poo-vius?

A volcano in Italy has been spitting out smoke and ash, including some perfect this-would-have-been-so-hot-in-high-school smoke rings. Volcanologists aren't expecting a major eruption, so people near the volcano haven't been evacuated from the area. And I'm sure those scientists know what they're talking about and people in the area are currently safe. However. If it were me, I would definitely start being lightning-quick on the toilet, lest the volcano go off when I'm doing something embarrassing and I get Pompeii-ed mid-dump and then preserved in ash for thousands of years until eventually being discovered by a future people who will find my situation so amusing that they put my pooping corpse in a museum and then everyone would know that I pooped and I'd be laughed at by children on field trips until the end of that civilization. But that's just me.

Speaking of dying, O.J. Simpson died last week at the age of 76. He was good in The Naked Gun, I'll give him that. The rest of his legacy—yikes.

Bored Games

Margot Robbie's production company has announced its plan to make a movie based on the classic board game Monopoly. I am into it! Barbie taught feminism 101 to the masses; let's let Monopoly serve as a treatise on the inherent wrongness of a wealthiest among us profiting off a basic human necessity like having a place to live and the general unethicality of exploitative property development. It could be the movie that changes everything. Unless they go with a screenwriter who was the one in the family that ruined it for everybody by building hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and then being a huge dick about bankrupting everyone else with its exorbitant rent. As long as everyone agrees that the guy with the top hat is the bad guy, I am seeing some real potential here.

But people have to be haters, and internet conversations all include a bunch of lame jokes about which plotless board game will be next. "What's next, Checkers? Jenga? You wanna make a Jenga movie? What, fuckin' CONNECT FOUR?" And I will stop you right there, because that one works. I am in a best friend group of four women. I have two separate other friend groups of exactly four people. Four is the correct number for a collection of people. It's the best table in a restaurant—no pulling up an extra chair for some poor schmuck to sit at one end. Four is the maximum number of heads that will fit into a photobooth picture. Four is how many adults fit comfortably in a car. So let's talk about this Connect Four movie: I am seeing three friends realize that something is missing and they desperately seek a fourth, but they keep being blocked by outside forces, until finally, one day, through either meticulous planning or pure dumb luck, the pieces line up just so, and they find their fourth friend, thus creating a powerful block which shall emerge victorious! "But Elinor," you say. "Is this not the plot of the 1990s supernatural teen thriller THE CRAFT?" To which I say: "DING FUCKING DING." A Connect Four movie already exists, it stars Fairuza Balk and Neve Campbell, and it's perfect!

Now let the people workshop a Jenga movie. This shit works.

In non-existing-IP movie news, I saw Monkey Man over the weekend, and it fucking ruled. This isn't gossip, just a heads up that you should go see it at the movie theater. Very cool, very gory.

Trash Denim

There is literal trash, there is gossip that we call trash, and then there is the color of J. Lo's new jeans, which is its own new category of trash. "Distressed" isn't a strong enough word for denim that looks like it was forged in a dirty diaper pail. I'd call that devastated denim. Or depressed denim. She used to have a little, now she has a lot... of dirt on her pants!

Speaking of jeans, music festival Coachella kicked off over the weekend, bringing out all sorts of famous people in some spectacularly regular clothes! Festival time used to be for our Vanessa Hudgenses to flaunt weird crochet bikinis so that months later, basic girlies could buy a knockoff from Free People. I'm still haunted by images of Coachella from years ago, when Kendall Jenner wore the worst jean shorts I'd ever seen in my life, prompting the baggy jorts style to become widespread that 19-year-old influences regularly shared a silhouette with suburban dads. Thankfully, the fashion this year seems to be pretty chill, and Miss Jenner herself showed up in black jeans and a grey hoodie, an outfit virtually identical to how I dress every single day. Your girl's in style again, folks! The takeaway here is to keep dressing like you did in college, and every 20 years or so, it will be cool. 

Also at Coachella, Kesha said this: 

Local Trash

This lil internet site is also sometimes a newspaper, and we put out our second Say Nice Things About Portland issue ~in print~ this week! I wrote a piece about the city's cutest critters, and I included my very own dog on that list. I mean, look at her! 

Intrepid readers may notice that this picture of my dog includes a glimpse of my foot. You're welcome, sickos. Read the rest of the guide; so many smart people wrote gorgeous things. 

A less cute critter is the turkey that busted through a Portland trucker's windshield, resulting in severe injuries to the driver to the point that he now wears an eyepatch. I think I went too deep into the Monopoly-movie land because I keep trying to turn every event into a major motion picture. We'd call it: Thanksgiving: Judgment Day, and it's partly a study of the violent colonialist origins of the holiday, and partly a story of this trucker seeking vengeance against the bird who took his eye. 

Anyway, I'm already at my word count and I barely wrote about any news. Haha, sorry! I had a good time writing all of this though, and I hope you had a good time reading it. Please have a wonderful week, and please buy yourself or someone else a $10 treat simply for surviving. You deserve it.

Hopefully,