I hope everybody had a good Super Bowl, and even if you didn’t Observe it, you mighta been able to have a less-annoying grocery experience, shopping outing, or possibly enjoy a less-crowded movie theater or exercise gym because of the whole XLVII thing, so it was Good Times for America, especially since that whole deal with the lights going out in the Mercedes-Benz stadium in New Orleans wasn’t Terrorism or whatever, you know? Just for a minute, I thought maybe it was.

For your too-much-information, I enjoyed Super Sunday, and I support legislation to make the day after Super Bowl, aka “Super Monday” the National Hangover Holiday of America, especially since you can have an alco-hangover, but also a food-hangover is possible.

I’m disappointed, however, that one of my fave-rave holidays, Groundhog Day, got lost in the news cycle. Groundhog Day! This is an overlooked holiday, mostly because it is not a Holiday, but c’mon, this is the day when we acknowledge it’s a lock that there’s only six more weeks of Winter! Everybody who lives where there is Winter understands why you need to know every year that Winter will not be forever.

Most of us who have Winter won’t live in the Nordic North or wherever it is that people actually enjoy Winter, with giant warm coats and mukluks and cross-country skiing and outdoors skating on ice and ice-hockey and fishing and downhill skiing and tobogganing and luging; instead, basically Winter is a big giant fucking pain in the ass, with coldness and darkness and cold darkness, and frozen things outside that can kill you and sometimes the pipes in your house freeze up and you have to buy oil or natural gas or electricity to heat where you live just so you don’t die from sitting in your house, and then you have to put on all these extra clothes and footgear and headgear and handgear and neckgear just to fucking go outside, even for a few minutes, not that you want to go outside when it’s goddamn Winter anyway, where there are great sheets of ice and frozen precipitation, plus, assuming it’s not a flat sheet of dark grey sky, there’s only like three hours of daylight, but that’s really when you do need to go outside, otherwise you get the Seasonally Activated Depression Suicide Syndrome Disease and you will want to kill yourself or just stay in bed where it’s warm, and even if you don’t have the Seasonal No-Light Depression you want to stay in the bed anyway because it’s cold outside of the bed, and then just to get from the bed to the bathroom (where it is also cold) requires putting on clothes or stuff for your feet because it’s cold, cold, cold, everywhere, and when you finally get to the bathroom, it’s totally cold in there, and if you have to sit on the can, that’s cold, where your flesh touches it, and then you need to take a shower to warm up and then as soon as the nice hot shower stops you’re cold again, and then your skin starts to dry up, and you have to put on lotion all the time otherwise you get the “Winter skin,” where your skin gets all dry and itchy and tight and if you move too quick in any direction it’ll crack open, your skin, so you need the lotion, otherwise your skin will be split into huge fissures, and so you really have to be careful to put lotion on your legs and your sides and your back and sometimes into your nose because that gets dried out as well, and if you are by yourself, you can get to most of your back, but there will be one spot up high in between your shoulder blades that you can’t get to, and that part will dry out and kill you.

So c’mon, Spring! Right? There is a reason to fight Winter and stay alive! Groundhog Day teaches us there will be Spring!

According to the observed ceremony, the Groundhog is supposed to say (through an Approved Ritualistic Marmot-Psychic interpreter) whether or not there’s gonna be an early Spring or a late Winter or whatever, but look, the season of Winter ends on March 21, and that’s a little over six weeks from now! We’re headed for daylight! Springtime is guaranteed, and expressing obeisance to a noble land beaver such as Punxsutawney Phil of Pennsylvania, America, is a very Holiday thing to do, and the Groundhog itself, along with any information divined from it, is symbolic and mystical, like all good holidays. Plus, the Groundhog is considered an immortal being, like all of your better worship-animals. Groundhog!

Plus, there’s no presents, and you are not required to eat a Groundhog.

Previously: The Super Bowl Is The Exclamation Point Of America

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

★★★★ The overnight snow, which had covered everything but the travel lanes of the avenue, was by daylight politely absenting itself from the sidewalks and driveways. People in warm, dull black coats huddled outside a brunch place. It was hard to pick out the residual falling snowflakes through the salt flecks on the cab windows. Long and menacing icicles hung from the archway over the 86th Street Traverse, on its way up onto the East Side. A baby rolled by, cinched tightly into a fuchsia stroller sack, peering around with its head, the only thing it could move. The sun took over, in due time, and in the afternoon Broadway was a corridor of brightness, its pale salt coating catching and carrying the light uptown.

In the nights before the promised Mayan Apocalypse, mysterious configurations of bright lights hovered over Brooklyn and San Francisco’s Mission District. The first commenter here made the reasonable assumption that it was all some kind of viral marketing aimed at overpaid young urbanites.

But the product of such clever, vague and expensive advertising has yet to appear. And the silent, terrifying craft are now being seen over far less desirable urban areas including Detroit, Indianapolis and the Gulf Coast of Florida. What could it mean? Is Detroit poised for a comeback? And why are they also appearing in Poughkeepsie?

Explanations for the sightings are generally either clusters of drifting lights that might be Chinese-style paper lanterns or solid-appearing triangular craft with bright spotlights on the corners, either some type of earthly surveillance drone or military test. Might also be monsters from space or another dimension or our own future. Or viral advertising.

Or, perhaps most terrifying, the visions may be the unexplained byproduct of human consciousness itself — the raw material of religions and mythology, always seen within the cultural context of the era. Ezekiel saw burning wheels, medieval folk saw trolls and fairies, American men of the 1950s saw tall blonde alien women with breasts like Jane Russell, and the baffled people of today see delta-shaped stealth ships, or cheap imported paper lanterns, or Beyonce. So it all means nothing, or everything, and we are powerless to comprehend, forever.

Joan Jett has correctly picked the winner of the last eight Super Bowls. And she missed predicting the exact score of yesterday’s game by three points. [Via]

The murdered remains of another scrawny Englishman found in the rubble of a “car park” is actually the long-dead hunchback king, Richard III. This is why the United Kingdom continues to cling to its quaint system of royalty, so that a wayward stabbed king can occasionally be found in the sodden ground beneath a parking lot, to give people hope.

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III. Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch’s family …. Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.

Let this be a solemn reminder for today’s kings and queens: Richard III was repeatedly stabbed through the skull like a common drunken brawler outside a curry shop at 10:03 p.m., and he was buried “with his wrists still tied,” and his gravesite was forgotten when the accompanying church and Greyfriars monastery was destroyed on orders of Henry VIII, and the remains were only found and identified more than a half millennium later. Not even the current Prince of Wales has suffered quite the personal shame and indignity of the hunchbacked king with the “feminine” build:

One terrible injury, a stab through the right buttock and into his pelvis, was certainly after death, and could not have happened when his lower body was protected by armour. It suggests the story that his naked corpse was brought back slung over the pommel of a horse, mocked and abused all the way, was true.

Richard III, the frail monster and bastard king, was best known in life for the horrible way in which he died: repeatedly slashed and stabbed by a small group of Frenchmen hastily assembled by Henry Tudor.

by Jane Hu and Carrie Frye

Carrie Frye: Jane, so I was lazing around Saturday morning when I saw a series of ecstatic tweets from you about the amazingness of “House Of Cards.” Up till then I’d only been paying dim attention to the show’s release (basically, I knew it was a series released on Netflix about Washington politics that, disappointingly, did not seem to feature any secret vampires), but on your word, I tried an episode at lunch. And then, next thing I knew, “Portlandia” Battleship Galactica marathon style, it was dusk… and then it was 10 p.m. and I had no circulation left in my legs.

I’m now on episode 7 and view it as a triumph of will that the number stopped there. You’ve watched the entire first season?

Jane Hu: When it comes to inadvertent TV marathons, it’s best not to lie: I watched the first episode in bed Friday morning (just hours after Netflix released the whole 13 episodes of season 1) and had finished them all in a little over 24 hours. Season 2 is now on my list of most anticipated things, but there’s also no rush. For the moment, I’m still digesting the experience of binge-viewing (ick, I dislike this term, I really do; I use it in the spirit of the show’s rampant food metaphors!) the first season. I’m wholly committed to these characters now — all I want is to talk about them — so it’s ironic to me that Netflix’s release model here actually discourages recapping.

Carrie: Yes, the difficulty of recapping something gargantuan like this! As you and I discussed, we’ll talk about episodes 1–3 here, so spoilers will flow freely for those. But there’ll be no spoilers for any episodes beyond that. What an exciting new era of conversational boundary-setting we’re in!

Jane: As it goes, the creative team for “House of Cards” described the show in terms of long-form film, further emphasizing that it was not a text to be chopped up and analyzed. But this only makes me more interested to view it as TV. What does it look like after one episode, two, or three?

Carrie: So I’ll admit: I was resistant during the first episode. There’s one conversation between the protagonist Francis (or Frank) Underwood (Kevin Spacey) and his wife Claire (played by Robin Wright, with Jamie Lee Curtis’ hair) in their living room, and the exchange felt very self-consciously theatrical, like you could see the script tapped out over the actors’ heads as they were speaking the lines:

Claire: You don’t usually underestimate people, Francis.
Francis: I know. Hubris, ambition.
Claire: You should be angry.
Francis: I’m livid.

But midway through that same episode, a guy asks Zoe, the young reporter, if he can come upstairs after a night out together, and she says, “Oh Brian, you’re sweet, really. But if I was going to fuck you, you’d know.” That was the official beginning of love for me — minute 25.

Jane: I LOVE that line. Something else that seems like it could potentially bug people is Frank consistently breaking the fourth wall, but I didn’t mind it so much — it actually grew on me! The convention also presses the question of what kind of animal this Netflix-borne show is: an isolated play, a film, serial television? All of the above? “House of Cards” has been in the works for years, but the timeline of its making is rather different from that of its reception. What did you think of how timely the show was — what with the 2013 election, secretary of state plotline, the use of Twitter (!), and its portrayal of various news outlets?

Carrie: Yes, and we see an inauguration take place, although unlike the Obamas, the president (so far) is a bit of a nonentity and I didn’t even register the First Lady except for a flash of red coat. For it being Walker’s inauguration, the show doesn’t pay much attention to him; all of the interest is at the fringes of the scene around him, which seems the point.

About the news organizations: I believe Choire ducked out on the show after the first scene where the reporter Zoe barges into the newsroom and says, “Put me online! Give me a blog! First person! Subjective!” And certainly it seems weird that, in 2013, she’d have media colleagues in their early 40s who pronounce “blogging” disgustedly as “blaughing” — which, sure, if we’d all known how long the word would stick around we probably would have picked a better one — and call her things like “Twitter twat.” (At this point it’s more complicated — but then being a coroner/medicine woman/vampire slayer is probably more complicated than it looks on TV, too.) Still, her frustration at being a cub reporter stuck doing features on new bike lanes felt true enough. How did you feel about the reality of Zoe’s world?

Jane: Choire, that’s literally 7:15 minutes into the pilot (I just checked, and that’s including the 2-minute long credit sequence)! Ah well, I loved feisty Zoe Barnes, though this is probably partly due to some kind of greedy over-identification. (Also loving: her greediness.) Zoe sitting cross-legged on the floor of her one-room apartment, typing furiously on her laptop, is my version of the modern heroine. It also gave me some Social Network flashbacks, except this time the Mara sister is on gossip’s sending end.

You’re right, though, I don’t know if a publication comparable to the stature of the (fictional) Washington Herald would be so anti-internet, even in 2008 when David Fincher first started thinking about “House of Cards.” And Zoe’s boss, Tom! He comes off very silly, so threatened by the Youngs (though I don’t think he’d ever use that term, or get it) to the point of caricature. As another Herald staffer enunciates: Double Yoo Tee Eff?

But screenwriter Beau Willimon (of Ides of March fame) is good at writing female characters, and Zoe gets plenty of room to develop, even in the first three episodes. This is what she looks like when we first see her, tripping over her sentences after she basically trips into Tom:

This is what she looks like by the end of episode three in front of Tom’s desk (note the height reversal!) pointing out his ageism and… “Are you accusing me of sexism?” Tom asks, to which Zoe replies: “Just making an observation.” His response, which got a laugh from me: “No TV for a month.”

Tom needs to catch up if he thinks TV interviews are what’s going to expose the Herald’s problems. What did you think? You deal with those sticky blaughers all day!

Carrie: Well, you know Zoe’s a filthy blaugher because she’s always in the bathroom! (She’s the only character we see go to the toilet in these episodes! And we see it twice!) That’s where blaughers spend their time when they’re not drinking wine in front of their laptops (actually, this might be true? Don’t break the seal, Zoe!). Although I was intrigued by a world where a scoop on an education bill and a second story on a Secretary of State nominee would make her a cable-news sensation.

Still, like you, I like Zoe! I like that the show features a young woman with super-naked ambition and smarts and greed and doesn’t make her straight-up evil for having those qualities. (As well as lots of women of other ages, too — which we can chat more about later.) I like Zoe’s intense pointy vulpine face and her stick-out ears when her hair’s pulled back and her okayness with “being in a very grey area, legally, ethically.” (She reminds me a little of Anna Kendrick’s character in Pitch Perfect in her monomania and loner-ness and offhand slouching confidence.) Kate Mara who plays her has this great quality of appearing very young & diminutive in some scenes but having this appealing, assured voice, so the audience can see how people might constantly underestimate her and be wrong for doing so.

(It also occurs to me that if you are creating a show that’s hard to recap, how smart to give the bloggers and journalists and recappers a stand-in character with whom to over-identify as a stand-in and incentive of interest.)

Jane: Not just on the toilet but pensive on the toilet. What does this mean, besides making her more vulnerable and, as you said, “naked” to the viewer? Somehow the toilet humanizes her!

Carrie: Maybe this is to emphasize what a Millennial she is — haven’t you heard, Jane, your generation, no boundaries! (Gen Xers always shut the door when we use the john.)

Jane: I refuse to put on pants while at home, roommates be damned! Then I Vine it (for posterity). All in all, I am very invested in this character. I’ve taken to sipping a mug of wine while watching TV late at night now because, y’know, that counts as work… right? BLAUGH.

Zoe is also great with the technology. I totally buy that she’s more media savvy than anyone else on the show, like when the photog department emails her a sassy line about needing to wear more than a G-string to be taken seriously, and her immediate impulse is to google Majority Whip Francis Underwood and shoot back with one line: “He looks pretty serious to me.” Her suggestive text exchanges with Frank make me a little anxious at times (maybe season 2 will incorporate some snap chats?), and I’d be a little more worried about her if I didn’t trust that she’s just quicker than the rest of them.

To some degree, “House of Cards” shows how one of the few potential rivals and equals to Frank is a petite female blaugher (I’m sorry, I’ll stop) who might prove to be as ruthless as him when it comes to getting what she wants. But, overall, the show is being told through Frank’s perspective — if Zoe is my heroine, Frank is definitely The Anti-Hero. So, can we talk about his intimate direct addresses to the camera?

Carrie: Ferris Bueller’s Washington years. I was agnostic about the speaking directly to the camera — it was part of my initial internal debate about the show (along with an active line of “Do I think Kevin Spacey is pulling off this Southern accent?”). Which, as I type out these equivocations, makes me realize how much of getting into any show is like being out on a first date, with the constant “Am I enjoying this? Do I like him/her?” self-checks. (Relatedly: if you extend this metaphor out, by releasing the entire season at once, Netflix was effectively telling viewers: “This show is emotionally ready for commitment.” Which given how often great shows get axed by networks — “Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23” cough — is a smart wooing strategy.) Anyway, fourth wall! As I said, I was unsure, but then that shrug Frank gives at the camera at the inauguration is splendid and funny. Those digressions set up an intimacy between him and us; if he lies to others — and he does all the time, in a fantastically smiling Southern style — he’s real with us. Also: He so has an eye on his role in recorded history and posterity, it makes sense that he would act as his own Boswell.

Jane: When Frank breaks the fourth wall approximately one minute into the pilot, it’s like him skipping dessert, skipping foreplay, and asking you for your undivided attention (and commitment) to all he’s about to say and do next. It’s a lot! I can understand how one might choose to flee early. But then he tilts his head at the camera, shoots us a meaningful glance, and suddenly we’re under his thumb (and only later realize that we’ve been so from the start). Frank talks a lot about loyalty and trust — sometimes to his political partners, sometimes with his wife, other times to us — that I might seriously question how honest he’s being with the viewer in those direct addresses, if I weren’t so taken with the fact that Netflix has “committed to at least 26 episodes for the serialized drama.”

It’s so much easier to give yourself into something when you’re promised, or at least expecting, to be rewarded in turn. This sort of seems like the underlying premise to “House of Cards.” Topple how they may! At least we’ll have seen how it was all built. That’s fine, show: I’ll pay for the first few dates.

Oh my, about Frank’s — or should I say Francis’ — Southernness. The original BBC version obviously does not have a Southern Frank (Urquhart in their case, played by Ian Richardson), and I thought it was at least an interesting touch for his character in the American one. For a moment, while watching Frank maneuver his Southern background (the prominence of his accent fluctuates), I felt compelled to shout “Dick Whitman!!!” But Frank isn’t trying to hide his colonial roots so much as thrive on them: Every trip back to his hometown of Gaffney, he tells us, “is a reminder of how far I’ve come.” Though there are plenty of moments too when the Southern gentleman (or at least his charm) really comes through in Frank’s interactions with others. What did you think of the Southern portrayal? Was it convincing??

Carrie: Apparently I’ve lived in the South just long enough to get distracted by terrible Southern accents in movies and TV. (You’re from Canada; do you experience that with Canadian accents?) But I feel the adaptation of Frank to Southerner was smart. It allows him access to a certain Shakespearean grandiosity of expression. (I was in a bar in Oxford, Mississippi, last year and this youngish guy, maybe 24, told me, arms thrown out, “I am going to let time devour me.”) If Frank were, say, the representative from Minnesota, it’d be more startling to hear him say lines like, “I love her more than sharks love blood.” (Uff da!) The Southernness also lines up, hilariously, with Frank’s being very warm and charming to people’s faces while sinking the knife in one scene later. For example, if chief of staff Linda Vasquez had spent any time running in Southern lady circles she would never have trusted Frank’s sweet, expansive “Oh, my pleasure” so soon after she screwed him on the Secretary of State nomination.

Jane: I love that Shakespearean and Southern locution could be collapsed into the world of DC politics and make perfect sense — only on TV! I actually don’t find Spacey’s accent distracting, and maybe it’s my theatrical sensibilities, but, on top of the direct address, I enjoy the casual inclusion of august declarations throughout this show. It was really great to see the difference between church in DC and church in Gaffney, where the former is mostly all business and cynical innuendos, while the latter is loud reaction gasps to Frank’s florid “impromptu” sermon about his childhood hardships. Up there on the pulpit, however, Frank just felt so in character — aphorisms are his bag! Later, he lectures to us: “What you have to understand about my people is that they’re a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness.” Do you think Frank gets a book deal in the next season?

(As a Canadian I know: no one who isn’t Canadian makes shows about Canadians unless in the form of parodies, so the accent works in all cases. We are a humble people as well.)

OK, but enough about Frank. Looking at those supposedly discardable characters orbiting around Frank, I was particularly drawn toward Meacham — Frank’s guard, who suddenly shows up in episode 3 after his predecessor Steve falls ill. (Talk about dispensable.) But Meacham stays, and what’s more, he almost seems cast as a visual distraction from Frank.

More than anyone else in “House of Cards,” Meacham looks a leading man, yet he is probably the weakest, most nervous presence on screen in that episode, constantly apologizing and thanking Frank for his “patience.” Oh, Meacham. I felt for him. Did you notice him too?

Carrie: I noticed him but not so much as Frank’s office lieutenant, Doug, with his bullet-shaped grizzled weasel head. But Meacham is fidgety — and I wonder what prominence he’ll have. With every character like him, you think “Are you the loaded gun on the mantelpiece?” Episode 3 ends with him being asked to drop off some flowers at the Underwood home, and instead of just setting them by the sink, he takes it upon himself to put them in a vase and set them on the dining room table just-so, before walking out.

Jane: Meacham is my MacGuffin. He seems so out of place — so handsome, yet incompetent — that you wonder why he’s in the show at all. But (and not to give any spoilers) for a series so deliberate about its episode endings, which usually come in the form of a cliffhanger, I think this one is defining in its understatedness. White tulips (picked from Frank’s front yard in Gaffney, the products of Claire’s once and only venture in gardening) as the literal centerpiece of this closing scene felt, unlike most everything else in this show, small on many levels. Neither Claire or Frank will ever know, nor would they care, about the deliberation Meacham put into placing the tulips — but the camera is intent on letting us know. With a show so fixated on the perspectives of powerful individuals such as Frank, Claire, and, increasingly, Zoe, I’m trying to understand why it would want to leave us with this bit of detail shared only between Meacham and the viewer.

Carrie: We will have to see whether that fidgeting with the vase is a sign of Meacham’s intrusiveness, an early signal of his future fealty to the Underwoods, or just a sign that he is someone who really, really cares about getting cut flowers into water.

Next: “House of Cards,” Episodes 4–8: Who’s Making Themselves Available? and “House of Cards,” Episodes 9–13: The Ones Where Everything Goes Nuts

Jane Hu is a Twitter twat. Carrie Frye blaughs.

The heroic Iranian monkey who supposedly rode a rocket into space last week returned to Earth with strange new powers. For instance, the monkey’s distinctive face mole was completely gone when the creature was photographed by government officials upon landing. The creature’s white-blonde hair had changed to brunette, too, much like the hair of Moses changed from black to white after he spotted the Hebrew God cowering under a bush. What other mutant powers could the Persian primate have developed while exposed to dangerous gamma rays or whatever, in orbit?

The Times of London doubts the superhero animal’s mysterious changes occurred in space. Could the sneaky Iranians have actually used two monkeys to trick the world, one to kill on a broken rocket and another to parade around to the government-run media?

Before the alleged launch the official Fars news agency and other state-controlled media published several photographs of the monkey — with a distinctive red mole above its right eye and a band of light fur around the side of its head wearing some sort of spacesuit and strapped into the seat that would carry it heavenwards. Fast forward to the post-flight press conference, at which the regime introduced the heroic astro-monkey. The mole has gone, as has the band of light fur. It is manifestly a different creature.

And with much of the world’s intelligence apparatus aimed at Iran’s regime, there’s no evidence Tehran even launched a rocket on the day in question. If the mighty United States was forced to fake so many moon landings, how would our evil enemies the Iranians figure out how to get a rocket into Heaven?

by Abe Sauer

And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn and call his state senator to complain about expensive new slurry pit legislation, spend all day with his ag lobby board strategizing about more laws against private raw milk sales, take that state senator out for steak and wine at dinner, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board at the school he wants to eliminate with a voucher program.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody that can tell an employee to go shape an ax handle, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, make a harness out of hay wire, and not report dangerous working conditions involved in doing those things. And, who, at planting time and harvest season, can get together with his Tea Party friends and complain about unchecked government spending while cashing Farm Bill subsidy and crop insurance checks. Then, painin’ from ‘golf cart back,’ put in another 72 minutes penning an op-ed to the local paper about socialism ruining the invisible hand of the market.

“I need somebody with strong, undocumented laborers. Strong enough to rustle a calf, yet gentle enough to understand the economic need to ignore minimum wage and overtime laws.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody strong enough to count on an underfunded FDA and castrated EPA, to heave their stomachs out of their SUVs and yet gentle enough to be reactionary about inevitable demographic changes to ‘the heartland’… and who will stop his mower for an hour to paint a sign, to be placed in his field by the highway, reading ‘Show me the birth certificate.’” So God made a farmer.

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed and breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk. Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who’d laugh and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life “not doing what dad does.” So God made an undocumented farm worker.

Abe Sauer is the author of How to be: NORTH DAKOTA.

In case you missed our drubbing of Massively Open Online Courses, the world performed its own takedown, as an online class of 41,000 students about the planning of online classes just went fully haywire and was shutdown. I laughed!

What with the broad selection of items from which to choose it almost seems too easy to allow an artisanal Brooklyn-made heirloom pepper probiotic hot sauce that was produced via a Kickstarter campaign to cause one to consider just how awful the city can be, and yet the results of such a realization are difficult to argue with.