“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
–Pablo Neruda

“I’m cracking eggs of wisdom!”
–Charlie

Today is the first full day of Spring, folks, though technically the Vernal Equinox started yesterday night at around 11:50 (just to be difficult). It is also apparently the earliest this Equinox has occurred in 124 years—because obviously, we need more little factoids like that to weird us out.

Let’s take a look at some notable events that happened on this date, to provide us with the illusion of control over the world and human destiny:

• Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915.
• The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult carried out a deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.
• The Iraq War began in 2003.

And, of course, WWE pro wrestler Sting was born in 1959.

Sting—Steve Borden—started in the 1980s as a sort of goofy looking dude (though I realize he was cool “for the time”):

Then in the mid-1990s Sting suddenly changed his look to be all gothic and broody…basically aping comics/movie character The Crow. (That’s when I got into him, natch…that stuff was SO AWESOME!!!)

Finding a gimmick that worked and having fun with it, Sting tweaked his persona in the early 00’s by becoming more of a manic character clearly modeled after Heath Ledger’s Joker:

The whole Sting Joker saga, which I watched as I prepared this post, is melodramatic pro wrestling soap opera hijinks cranked up to the nth degree. Basically, Sting feels betrayed over a match and systematically loses his mind, smearing clown makeup on his face, smearing makeup on the faces of fellow wrestlers like Hulk Hogan, and generally laughing like a loon:

Particularly interesting is how this extended narrative, with Sting in his red jacket, prefigures that of the 2019 Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix much moreso than simply imitating that of Ledger’s 2008 Dark Knight. Sting is called a washed-up failure, and he goes out for systemic revenge against wrestlers and wrestling staff (seemingly breaking the fabled “kayfabe” as he calls Hogan by his real name Terry). Along the way he expresses disillusionment with his former wrestling hero Hogan and the entire biz as a whole. So it gets a wee bit “meta.”

Anyway: I eat this type of stuff up like Doritos. Could you tell?

***

A few interesting bits:

• How zombie narratives in popular-culture intersect with right-wing philosophy.
• Are drive-in theaters making a comeback in the age of the coronavirus? And if so, can we have those really cheesy double-features by Ray Dennis Steckler?
• It’s really heartwarming to see how “pandemic expert” Sean Penn hyping the military on CNN brings both the Left and the Right together in mutual disgust & ridicule during this uncertain time.
• LOST’s Daniel Dae Kim tests positive for COVID-19 the same day his former co-star Evangeline Lilly cries “freeeeeeeedom” from social distancing (’cause freedom).

And so in celebration of the first full day of the Vernal Equinox—which is of course about Dayman (Jesus, Horus, etc.) defeating Nightman (Satan, Set, etc.)—here is a scene from Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s “Dayman” musical (which, as we all know, was just a scam pulled by Charlie to trick the Waitress into marrying him—an ancient fertility ritual, it turns out!):