Talk Tuah '24

Fame. Fortune. Podcasts. It could have happened tuah anyone.

I’ve always felt distinctly impassive observer of the mainstream culture rather than an active participant. For instance, I’ve said my fair share on the current state of the collapsing pillars of modern cinema that are the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars franchise, but I have no real vested interest in whether or not they find renewed success or continue to languish in a protracted, agonizing death-spiral.

Okay - maybe that isn’t entirely true, because I am an avowed Hater who revels in negativity and wakes up excited at the prospect of making the world a worse place, and I take particularly sadistic delight in watching certain sacred bulls bleed out on their altars. But, for the most part, I am still only an observer - not a participant. I just kind of… y’know. Stand there. Watching. Not the shows, mind you, just the superstructure beneath them unraveling and the ensuing drama.

Personally, I’ve always felt more like a cultural umarell than anything else - an Italian term that translates to little man, used to describe practitioners of a queer cultural phenomenon apparently common in Southern Europe, in which retired men of advanced age will congregate around construction sites, stand there with their hands clasped behind their backs, and simply watch the laborers go about their business from beneath the brims of their hats. Usually, they’ll trade commentary between one another, and at times proffer criticism to those young, strapping lads hauling lumber or setting concrete about what they could do better.

Pictured: Me watching the discourse around the latest Star Wars trash-fire unfold.

What is it that possesses these elderly gentlemen to do such a thing? Perhaps the answer may one day be revealed to me, if the good Lord sees fit to let me see my twilight years. But, if I had to guess, they’re most likely motivated by the same force that animates me to be snarky about movies I’ll never watch - they just do it for the Hell of it. Because they’re bored.

It wasn’t until recently that I accepted the fact that there may just be some ideological kinship between me and the umarî of Repubblica Italiana. There was one specific event that, more than any other, emphasized the distance at which I am removed from the mainstream American culture. I had already been well-aware that I may as well be a stranger from a strange land among my own countrymen due to my music of choice alone, but I’d always understood why that was the case; I still don’t know who Sabrina Carpenter is and, at this point, I’m afraid to ask. This was the singular event at which I was left somewhat reeling in the aftermath as I realized that the gulf between me and what felt like everyone else was not just expansive, but perhaps untraversably vast.

It was mid-June of this year of our Lord, 2024. I came into work, as I often do, and went right to my desk. I’ve been accused by previous employers of being cold and unfriendly, which I never really understood; I always made an attempt to be cordial, but I was under the impression that I was being paid to do a job, not schuck and jive with my co-workers around the water cooler. Unfortunately, after several rapid-fire terminations in the early 2020’s, I realized that there are an uncomfortable amount of people sprinkled across every office in corporate America who derive their sense of worth by having their taint tickled by baseless flattery from their co-workers, and, apparently, if you don’t make idle chatter with them about the new brand of organic sloppy they put their precious little fur baby on, they take your silence not as indifference, but a personal sleight, and they will see to it that your insolence is punished. It always seemed absurd to me that Paige the middle-manager can see to it that your primary source of income is yanked out from under your feet because she didn't think you smiled enough and possibly put you and your family in abject destitution, but that's apparently the world that we live in.

I digress.

The point is that, I am not the type who pretends their place of employment is a suitable alternative to an actual social life, but, ever since my previous woes, I’ve learned to play the office game a little better and ingratiate myself with the others a bit more. This particular day, I went into the break room to get some water¹, and I found some of my co-workers huddled together, snickering at someone on a phone screen held before all of them. I didn’t ask what had them so tickled because I didn’t really care, but one of them waved me over because, apparently, I had to see it. With flashbacks of being finger-wagged for making others feel uncomfortable for, y'know, not wasting company time flapping gums and being terminated as a result, I obliged with a smile and said, What’s up?

This is the video they showed me.

If the volume of the resulting cackles that followed was anything to go by, one would reasonably assume that this may have been the single most hilarious thing any of them had ever seen in their life.

I only forced a snicker and lied; Hey. That’s pretty funny. They nodded in agreement, and I went back to my office. Behind me, I could hear one of them mimicking the girl’s crude joke, much to the childish delight of the others.

I found myself deeply puzzled by this little video clip. Whatever humor that my co-workers found in it was lost on me. I mean, I can understood why people might find it mildly amusing, I’ll admit that much, but I could not for the life of me figure out why so many people found it was as gut-bustingly hilarious as they appeared to think it was.

My bewilderment only grew over the passing days as The Hawk Tuah Girl would become an inescapable presence across both the internet and reality. Again, it seemed as if this twenty-second clip of this random girl making a tasteless gag about administering fellatio was the paragon of comedy to the average person.

Prior to June 11th, 2024, one would not be wrong to describe Haliey² Welch as a nobody. I don’t mean that as an insult - most of us are nobodies, and a lot of famous somebodies were busy over the past two decades attending Diddy’s freak-offs, so I’d say we’re all in good company. Her backstory is something of a mystery, but what is known is that she was living in an unincorporated community in Marshall County, Tennessee called Belfast - total population, 884 - with her grandmother, where she worked what one can only assume was a rather boring and unfulfilling job at a local factory that paid minimum wage and required her to wake up at 3:30 AM to make her shift.

On a lark, Welch and her friends would make a trip to nearby Nashville to see the lights, have some drinks, and get out of their little town. While cruising around the city, doing whatever it is young white girls do, they were stopped by some YouTubers doing man-on-the-street style videos with passersby in Nashville’s Broadway district. The channel was called Tim & Dee TV.

Which one’s Tim? Which one’s Dee? I don’t know, and it’s not really germane to the story since this is the first and last time they’re ever mentioned in it³, but one of them proceeded to ask Welch a series of rather raunchy questions that no father would really feel comfortable with a stranger asking their daughter, especially on a public platform.

Haliey answered them perhaps more candidly than she should have while one of her friend awkwardly giggled in the background, visibly uncomfortable with the whole thing. I can only imagine that, given what was about to happen, her anonymous friend deeply regrets that she’d let her better judgement stand in the way of engaging with Tim and/or Dee, as they were about to ask a question that would irrevocably alter the trajectory of Welch’s life. And not in the way that I think anyone present would have anticipated.

The question was simple: What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?

And that’s when it all changed with two simple words -

The full line is, You gotta give 'em that 'hawk tuah' and spit on that thang, but it must be read in an almost comically overwrought Southern drawl to really get the full effect. Are you laughing yet?

Yeah, me neither.

Now, if you’re unaware of what exactly Miss Welch is referring to by hawk tuah… well, this is a family-friendly publication. Look it up yourself. Suffice to say, if Welch was somehow related to me, or God forbid, my partner, I would not have been too enthralled about this little clip going viral. Even the infamously taste-deprived cretin Howard Stern, when speaking about it, called it Every father’s worst nightmare.

Now, this is not a puritanical struggle session against Welch. I’ve never met her. I don’t know her. Many have called her a slut or a skank. Maybe she is a bit loose. I dunno and, really, I don’t wanna know. It’s understandable why those words come up so often around her - I mean, her claim to fame is drunkenly blithering about a slobbering on a “corn dog”, but I also think deploying such charged words for the crime of telling a bawdy joke might be a little uncharitable, as well. If I was going to accuse her of being a salacious harlot of ill-repute for being crass, I’d hurling boulders around the most fragile of glass houses. Regular readers know my vocabulary is… colorful, to say the least.

Welch herself deeply regretted participating in the video, which suggests to me she’s not as rock-stupid as some people think she is. Within days, the clip had gone viral on TikTok and accrued tens of millions of views. Rightfully, she was concerned that what she had thought was just a bit of harmless, inebriated buffoonery would result in dire consequences with both her employer and her family. Being known as the TikTok blowjob girl is not a title that anyone with any real sense would want stuck to them for the rest of their lives.

On this, Welch said the following:

The first week of it, I was so embarrassed. I wouldn't come out of my house. I went to work, but that's about it. Other than that, I didn't go anywhere.

However, Welch’s regret, and any reservations from her family⁴, all but evaporated the moment they saw the first paychecks roll in. Within two weeks - I am not exaggerating, two weeks - a deal between Welch and the talent management firm Penthouse had been inked. Welch, who had an impressive (and advisable) non-existent presence on social media beforehand, opened an official Instagram account that instantly gained tens of thousands of followers. Today, it boasts over three million.

You can see her friend cringing in the background, her hand around Welch’s neck, trying to pull her away from the microphone, but I guarantee you that girl will go the rest of her life kicking herself in the ass for not drop-kicking Welch to the concrete and screaming HAWK TUAH herself.

Merch - tacky as it is - was already being printed by third parties across the internet, prompting Welch to establish and trademark a brand so that she could capitalize on the moment.

I’ve seen people make the claim this was a conceited move on Welch’s part, and that it was ridiculous to monetize a meme. Which it is. I don’t know what kind of person would want a Hawk Tuah t-shirt to wear out for a nice night on the town - actually, I do, and I’d rather not associate with them, but at the same time, if people are buying, I don’t fault Welch for selling. I agree with her when she said the following:

"If everyone else is making money off of it, I might as well, too."

I say it a lot, but get that bag, girl.

Hey, I never said the merch were tasteful.

As an interesting aside, one of the first merchandise deals Welch struck was with a local Tennessean small business called Fathead Threads, which had the exclusive rights to sell Hawk Tuah merch; silly, yes, but quite the lucrative deal, really. Within days of pitching the product, over two thousand officially-branded, trade-marked Welch-approved Hawk Tuah hats had been ordered, with many more on the way. Unfortunately for founder Jason Poteete, the deal proved so lucrative that PayPal locked his account under suspicion that his business was fraudulent, since he had processed so many orders in such a short amount of time. Poteete’s operation was small, and he needed some of the nearly $200,000 in cash in the account to keep business moving and produce the outstanding orders. He lobbied with PayPal, who told him they were looking into it (read: he wasn’t going to get the money any time soon). He even tried securing a loan from a bank to fulfill the orders with no success. When he went to break the news to Welch, she generously offered him $10,000 to ensure that the orders were fulfilled. Now, it’s easy to say that, well, of course she’d dump some of her own money into the business - they were selling her hats and if customers didn’t get them, it would reflect poorly on her. But, at the same time, there have been plenty of high-profile internet figures that have previously just let merch orders go unfulfilled and not donated so much as a dollar to ensure their fans got the product they paid for, so I must give Welch credit where credit is due.

Thanks to her, Fathead Threads was able to continue producing hats, and all of her fans could proudly wear hats with a tacky blowjob joke printed across the front.

Good for them… I guess.

With all that being said, ten thousand bucks wasn’t all that much for Welch to drop, given that, around this time, she started making public appearances that came with a price tag of twenty-five thousand dollars a pop.

And yeah - people paid it. She showed up at a Zach Bryan show in Nashville literally less than a full calendar month after her video went viral. I don’t know who Zach Bryan is, but I’m told he’s a big deal.

Welch caught in the act of Hawking a Tuah. I guess.

Of course, she started to do the podcast circuit, too, all the while popping up at random big-wig events and rubbing elbows with fellows like Shaquille O’Neal.

She even had Elon Musk simping for her when she made an account on Xitter, too.

I’m not joking or exaggerating, either.

Apparently, the feeling is mutual. I also remember Musk being tickled this particular tweet of a poorly photoshopped image of a Tesla-branded robo-Welch.

There is… a joke I really, really want to make about robots that are designed to fulfill a specific functions, but…

Remember what I said about glass houses, stones, and making ribald japes? Yeah.

I’ll let you come up with your own.

Now, if you know anything about what Mr. Musk has been up to during the latter-half of 2024, you know that he hasn’t exactly been ambiguous about his political affiliation.

When you open your Happy Meal and there’s an extra nugget in the box.

Hell, I’d go so far as to say Musk’s ingratiation with the Trump campaign will go down as one of, if not the most bizarre yet consequential factors that redirected the course of the 2024 election. He didn’t just endorse Trump - he was a bonafide part of the campaign, and his work earned him a comfortable seat firmly not just within the incoming Trump administration, but the inner-circle of Dorito Putler himself. Though I do have my questions to see how well the newly minted counter-elite power clique, of which Musk is a key member of, will ultimately play with Trump’s MAGA party, Musk is, for the moment, part of the coalition, and anyone who is openly friendly with him is going to be considered sympathetic to Trump and the MAGA movement by dint of association by the mainstream media. Even if all they did was exchange niceties on Twitter.

So, naturally, suspicious eyes were soon cast upon Haliey Welch. In fact, there were questions of whether or not she was - horror of horrors - right-leaning from the very beginning of Welch’s ascendancy. Because apparently the political opinion of a random woman from rural Tennessee who got famous from making a blowjob joke is worth agonizing over, if you’re someone who’s brain has completely rotted away from huffing too much partisan politics.

“You’re harboring conservative sympathies under the floorboards, aren’t you?”

But it does make sense as to why people would just kind of guessing Welch's political convictions - assuming that she had any of substance - may lie somewhere to the right of Marx on the political spectrum. She’s white. She’s from a ruby red part of the country where every single white person is a vicious racist, virulent homophobe, and card-carrying member of the Klan - or so I’m told. She’s what many would consider an uneducated hick, because, remember - anyone who doesn’t have a college degree or come from one of five or six major metropolitan areas on the coasts is automatically a bumbling, illiterate rube incapable of critical thought.

This raises the burning question the nation was demanding answers to - was the fucking Hawk Tuah girl, of all people, going to vote for Trump?

Shortly after her SpaceX-branded launch into the meme-stratosphere, Welch sat down for her first public interview with Barstool Sports contributor Brianna LaPaglia, who, for reasons beyond my comprehension, also goes by Brianna Chickenfry⁵. She apparently dated Zach Bryan up until recently, so, if you were wondering how Welch got up on stage with him… there you go, I guess. During this interview, Welch said the following about former and soon-to-be-again President, Donald Trump.

"Donald Trump, I’m sure you’re a nice man, but you ain’t getting the hawk from me. He’s old enough to be my granddaddy."

In my experience, when it comes to the True Believers on the left-most reaches of the political spectrum, if you reply in anyway other than inchoate, mouth-frothing rage when the name Trump is uttered, it’s taken as a full-throated endorsement of Orange Cheetoh Hitler and everything he supposedly represents. Naturally, even saying that he was a nice man was enough for some to classify Welch as a goose-stepping brownshirt ready to stage the Hawk Tuah Putsch on the Capitol.

However, her comment did not win her any friends on the other side of the aisle, either. Laura Loomer, who… you know what? The less, said, the better. The point is, Loomer is a very vocal Trump supporter with her own checkered past who heard Welch’s statement and promptly posted the following on Xitter:

“The degenerate Hawk Tuah girl, whose real name is Hailey Welsh [sic], is ANTI TRUMP.”

Again, why anyone cared to begin with, I’ll never understand. I do like that Loomer couldn’t even bother to spell her name correctly, though. Of all people, Democrat-defector turned Trump ally, multi-billionaire hedgefund manager Bill Ackman, stepped in to clear the air on what Welch was really saying in her sit down with Chickenfry… because I guess he had nothing better to do than monitor the drama around the Hawk Tuah girl. Loomer issued a retraction and helpfully explained Welch’s comment so that no further misunderstandings would follow.

“I stand corrected, @BillAckman. Upon further review, it turns out that she was only talking about whether she would perform fellatio on President Trump.”

Okay, so, maybe the whole slut accusations weren’t totally off the mark.

Apparently, Welch’s comment was just misunderstood by the left, as well, as a Xitter account titled Biden Wins⁶ posted the clip along with the caption:

“BREAKING: The Hawk Tuah girl just absolutely demolished Donald Trump saying it’s a no-go for her. Retweet to make sure all Americans know Gen-Z is speaking out against Donald Trump and his radical agenda.”

Since the violent outbreak of shit idiot brain fungus had seemingly breached containment and seeped into both sides of the electorate, the Hawk Tuah endorsement was the one to clinch this election cycle.

Welch, sensing a threat to her brand, took it upon herself to dispel all ambiguity about her political opinions and what they mean to the wider world in a statement on Instagram:

"I don’t want to be in the middle of it. Whoever you want to be president, that’s your business. What’s my opinion to you?"

I have to say that, whatever you may think about Welch, it appears she has more sense than fucking literally everybody else in this entire debacle.

By this point, the glitz was beginning to wear off of Welch’s public image. It had less to do with politics and more with that fact that the meme that had made her famous, like all memes, had gone through its full life-cycle; it was born, it crested in popularity, and by this point, it was less charming (if it was ever charming to begin with) and more grating. Welch didn’t have fifteen minutes of fame - she had fifteen seconds, and just about everyone was ready for them to be over.

Come September - and I must stress that this was still less than three months after she’d finagled lightning into a bottle - Welch made it abundantly clear that she had no intentions of going quietly into the murky obscurity to which all notorious meme-figures eventually saunter into.

“Yeah. I guess you could say I was famous, in a way.”

Her saving grace, like her fame, would come from a most unlikely of places. Long before his recent⁷ attempts to discredit the entire concept of boxing as a respectable sport with the complete joke that was the Paul/Tyson Fight, Jake Paul made a name for himself by creating an internet media empire alongside his less-inked by equally obsequious brother, Logan.

I want to see him in the ring with Canelo. Maybe then he can call himself the face of boxing and not come off as a gormless tit.

One piece of this larger patchwork of lucrative endeavors is the Betr Media Company, which is largely under his purview and focuses heavily on the medium of podcasting. With Welch, Paul saw dollar signs. With Paul, Welch saw a lifeline to reset the timer her rapidly dwindling fifteen seconds of fame. Together, the two brought around what might have just been the single most influential podcast of the 2020’s, if not all time. Joe Rogan? Pft. Forget about him.

Rogan’s time has passed. This is the era… of Talk Tuah.

Currently, Talk Tuah boasts only ten episodes, but why go for quantity when you have unmatched quality? With thrilling, edge-of-your seat interviews with luminaries such as comedian Whitney Cummings, the aforementioned Brianna Chickenfry, and, of course, Welch’s Granny, additional commentary from Welch’s frends - no doubt the brightest minds in Southern Tennesee - and titles like I Told Granny About Hawk Tuah and I'm Fighting Jojo Siwa, well - let’s just say that the internet will ever be the same again.

Don’t believe me? Look at some of the testimonials from the audience, provided in the comments section of YouTube.

Hell, even the memes that spawned from the very birth of Talk Tuah are funnier than anything that came from the original joke that my co-workers were in stitches over. I don’t want to just blast you with a bunch of images, but I really do want to share some.

So, yeah - it’s basically a joke. Everyone knows it. Everyone treats it appropriately. It seems as if more people enjoy the hyper-absurdist commentary from the YouTube commentariat than the show itself, which really is just Welch and her friends yapping about whatever's on their mind at any given moment.

Welch herself has taken the joke in stride.

Official merchandise that you can own for the low, low price of $45.99 (plus shipping).

Again, to give credit where credit is due, she’s able to poke fun at herself in a way that an astounding amount of public figures on the internet can’t.

And, ultimately, that’s why I actually kinda don't really hate Haliey Welch. Now, I’ll admit - there may be information she discloses about herself in the twelve-plus hours of Talk Tuah content I do not have the time, patience, or desire to wade through that may well make me say, Actually, she needs to be burned at the stake. Maybe she really is a raging, uncontrollable strumpet. But I kind of doubt it.

In a world of e-celebs that have inserted their heads so deep into their rectums that they risk collapsing into a singularity of narcissism, it’s refreshing to see one who, at least on the surface, seems to have a modicum of humility. The gimmick that made her famous is, in a word, stupid. It’s crass, it’s juvenile, and it’s really not that funny, but, as a person, she does have a kind of dopey, self-deprecating, folksy charm to her that’s almost endemic to a lot of people from the Southern United States. She doesn’t seem to suffer from delusions that she’s anything other than just another Tennessee bumpkin from a small, one-horse town who happened to strike it big through an unpredictable stroke of dumb luck.

From what I’ve seen, she just seems happy to get some attention and shoot the shit with her friends on her podcast. Sure, she’s making a small fortune on the side, but, hey - can you blame her? If I ever found myself in the spotlight of a viral meme for saying something stupid, you can bet your ass I’d be squawking whatever dumb bullshit I could for a buck until people stopped paying - I’m not above that. My dignity may take a hit, but the tears I’ll shed about it will fall upon the leather sets of a fresh-off-the-line Bugatti La Voiture Noire.

Pictured: Me after going on stage at a Zach Bryan concert to scream Stuck Culture for the two-hundredth time.

Yet, true to my pathologically contrarian nature, it seems I am at odds with the mainstream culture in my opinion on Haliey Welch.

While it seems like most reasonable people are content to not care much about Haliey Welch one way or another and let her have her fun, there’s a lot people who really, really hate her.

For some, it’s a political thing; some on the right seem convinced she’s the Whore of Babylon come to sow the seeds of degeneracy and sexual impropriety among the younger generation. Some of the left are certain she’s a closeted, Trump-loving fascist. Others just plain don’t like her content, which, yeah - it sucks, but labeling a gaggle of white girls yammering about throwing hands with JoJo Siwa on Talk Tuah as LITERALLY TEH WORST THING EVAR!!!1! is… well, hyperbolic, perhaps? I mean, if you want to make the claim that Welch and her podcast are degenerate, they very well might be, but I also invite you to look at some examples of the podcast scene magnitudes more popular that Welch will most likely ever be.

When there’s a thirty-something millionaire profligate yapping about bleaching her asshole and doing a whole lot worse than hawk tuah-ing on enough men to form a full-fledged militia with someone who had a real chance at becoming the president of the United States, I think there’s more transgressive and subversive actors to get rankled over.

Truth be told, I understand why people are tired of Welch. Frankly, despite my previous comments, I’d be a bit relieved if I never had to hear about Hawk Tuah or Talk Tuah or anything Tuah ever again. From the very beginning, the Hawk Tuah meme was over-exposed, pushed by the media to make a dime on a viral joke, and heavily forced. Rolling Stone published an article that glazed her in a way that they usually reserve for people like Kamala Harris. There’s buttering up the subject of an interview, and then there’s… this:

She went viral for a sex joke, but Haliey Welch is much more — a charming Gen Z Dolly Parton who’s rightfully becoming America’s Sweetheart.

Puff pieces like this, and the Hawk Tuah phrase itself, got very obnoxious, very fast. Even the people I know who found the video unfathomably funny weren’t laughing at it for long, and the longer Welch stayed in the zeitgeist riding that one, single joke, the more people were prepared for her to depart stage left. After all, when corporations start using a meme on social media, you know you can stick a fork in it - it’s cooked. Sure, Talk Tuah extended her fifteen-seconds of fame to thirty, but once the humor of photoshopping the Joker or Kim Jong-Un into her studio or using AI to generate a clip of her praising the Unabomber Manifesto stop getting chuckles… what then? The point is that the artificial life-support afforded to Welch and the Hawk Tuah gravy train did nothing to endear either of them to the public.

Hell, I even understand why people resent her. With many people in America struggling to make ends meet and even more trapped in miserable, unfulfilling, dead-end jobs that they loathe, it’s easy to see some chick rake in a fortune and rise to fame for nothing more than a stupid joke about something as puerile as oral sex. I mean, I make dumb sex jokes all the time and I’ve never made a dime off it. And I’ll admit that I’m no saint; I’ve felt that twinge of bitter, indignant envy towards her myself.

It’s happened more than once.

But, at the same time, if Haliey Welch plays her cards right, keeps her nose clean, and invests wisely, she’ll never have to truly work another day in her life. I don’t know if she has or ever will accrue a fortune sizeable enough that her grandkids won’t have to work, either, but it’s a safe bet that she can live a very comfortable life if she plays her cards right, keeps her nose clean, and invests wisely.

Ultimately, despite the urging of my inner Hater, I don’t begrudge Haliey Welch for her success. I can’t say she deserves it, but at the same time, who am I to claim that anyone deserves anything? She was only ever paid the money people were willing to give her. She never put a gun to anyone’s head and hissed, Buy the fucking Hawk Tuah hat or you’ll talk tuah Jesus today. She provided a service, however senseless it was, and was paid accordingly by the public. It’s annoying, sure, perhaps even unfair, I’ll cop to that, but to revile someone for success, whether or not you believe it to be justly earned or not… well, you do know there’s a woman making millions off a Netflix series for the infamy she garnered for orchestrating the murder of her mother, right?

Yeah, yeah, I get it, her mom was psychotic and abusive, but have you seen what she’s been up to lately?

All I’m saying is that I’m not going to begrudge Welch for capitalizing on a joke while Gypsy-Rose Blanchard is concurrently riding a second-degree murder charge to stardom.

Welch could have never gone to bed on June 10th, 2024 knowing that her life would be divided in two the next day; there was going to be every day that came before June 11th, 2024, where she was just another nameless face being paid minimum wage for grueling hours at a factory, and there was going to be the rest of her life. She never sought fame - remember, she didn’t even use social media before it happened. Fame, wealth, success all came to her unbidden. We can sit here and wring our hands over the fact that she didn’t work for it, or this, that, and third, but… truthfully, I find Welch’s story somewhat inspiring. That sounds silly, but it reminds me of another I know of.

I once met a man who won the lottery. It wasn’t a record-breaking jackpot, or anything, but it was a life-changing amount of money that all of us would love to just have fall into our laps. All he did was spend four dollars on a ticket. No work. No effort. He was awarded, he felt, unjustly, especially while so many people in the world struggled worse than he did. So, he talked it over with the pastor at his church.

I don’t understand why it was me, he asked. What are the odds it would happen to me?

The pastor simply said, The same that it would happen to anyone else.

1. At one of the aforementioned Hell-jobs, I had a superior ask me why I was always going to the break-room. I told him simply that I was refilling my glass with water. Then he asked, Why are you doing that? They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I think that’s categorically incorrect.

2. Yes, that is how you spell it. Add another new and novel way to spell Haley to the ever-growing list.

3. Imagine how these guys must feel, having posted the original video and getting exactly none of the resulting fame and fortune.

4. I can find next to no information about her family sans the grandmother that she lives with and was apparently raised by, which suggests that she may not have much family too be embarrassed on her behalf.

5. I really cannot be the only person who thinks that sounds like a racist caricature from a comic strip penned in the early 1900’s, can I?

6. Filing that one under Things That Aged Poorly.

7. As of this writing, as everyone is still talking about it.