(It is every part.)

Do you know the Property Brothers? They’re HGTV personalities whose schtick is that they’re twins and they’re tall. One Property Brother (you can look up his name) is more of a real estate guy, helping you buy your house for the best possible deal and making sure you’re getting great resale value. The other one (Google it) is more of a design guy, taking your new home and transforming it into a functional and stylish living space the whole family can enjoy. Moist? America sure is. The pair helms multiple shows for the network, and two of them are in their top four ratings-wise (Property Brothers raked in more than 2.2 million viewers in 2016, and Brother vs. Brother brought in over 2.6).

I’m not sure anyone anticipated them being on the air this long when they first launched in 2011—and it definitely seems like the boys are ready to explore some new projects. In an effort to stop making the same suburban West coast house over and over again, they recently did a miniseries in New Orleans restoring a historical building to code with Hoda as a guest judge, but they still had to be “themselves.” Brothers. Single identical twin brothers. Guys who roast each other because they’re bad at dating, or mis-measured the length of a beam and cut it too short—only now they’re 38 and designing their 45,000th man cave.

For all we know these guys have fulfilling personal lives, but they’re not allowed to share that with us. Their style of dress is not allowed to change. It can best be described as Vegas business-casual. They live together in a house they built and renovated together (on the air, as the Property Brothers) and it has a two-story spiral water slide that leads to their party pool, and you can access both from a balcony. They will be forty in two years, but have to continually scream, “I AM VERY FULFILLED BY A VERY SPECIFIC TYPE OF MASCULINITY I PROBABLY RELATED TO MORE WHEN I WAS 28 AND PITCHING A TV SHOW TO A NETWORK” all day for a living. That must be… complex to navigate.

Anyway, these two put out a music video this week and it’s a cover of Flo Rida’s “My House” featuring someone named Eric Paslay whom you are also free to Google. It is at once an extension of the pseudo-fratty, family-first lifestyle they’re always peddling and an odd, sweet peek into the things you can tell they wish they were able to do more of. For instance, “comedy” and “country music.”

Here are my favorite parts of the video:

• when the Property Brothers totally forgot the Architects Quarterly photoshoot
• when the Property Brothers transition from casual day to formal day looks
• when a bunch of squares show up at their door
• when one square is named Muffy Winthorpe
• when the Property Brothers are in the photo booth with their pals
• when the one in the gray? deep olive? teeshirt does “country voice”
• when both Property Brothers are very sexually tempted by hotties in bikinis
• when the Property Brothers don’t let their horniness stop them from having this meeting, though
• when we discover that Carrot Top is friends with the Property Brothers
• when everyone hides from the squares under the water in the pool
• when they are finally like “fuck it” and reveal their party boy nature to the squares
• when Muffy Winthorpe yells “Cannonball!” and does a cannonball

Capitalism is weird. Dream big, little sweeties.

Civil War-era medical instruments, a canine skeleton, and a famous club’s neon marquee

Lot 1: Amputation Tools

On offer in Knoxville, Tennessee, on January 21 is this “nineteenth-century American surgeon’s field amputation kit in fitted, brass mounted, mahogany and satinwood veneered case with velvet lining,” and ugh, it’s that murky red velvet that really delivers the gut punch, considering the splatters it could be concealing. Nestled inside are 35 grisly-looking medical instruments, including a bone saw, scalpels, probes, and a tourniquet.

The auctioneers date this set to “circa 1870s,” i.e., post-anesthesia, but pre-Germ Theory, which means the patient would be knocked out while the doctor sawed off his leg, but he’d still have a decent chance of dying from infection soon after. As Dr. Stanley Burns, historical advisor to PBS’s medical-historical drama, Mercy Street, has written, “Of the approximately 30,000 amputations performed in the Civil War there was a 26.3-percent mortality rate.”

A twentieth-century Nashville doctor previously owned this kit, and although it bears signs of use — “some blades retain dark stains” — we imagine he wasn’t actively operating with it. Bidding starts at $1,200.

Lot 2: Dog Bones

This is pretty much exactly what it looks like: a dog’s skeleton mounted on a wooden base. To be slightly more specific, it’s an Irish wolfhound’s skeleton mounted on a wooden base.

If you’re thinking WTF, here’s the thing: large auction houses, in this case, Bonhams in London, occasionally hold sales under the rubric, “A Gentleman’s Library” or “Gentleman Collector,” where you’ll find an assortment of model ships, antique microscopes, and silver toast racks. Also, a dog skeleton. Was it a beloved pet? There is no mention. What we do know is that Wolfie stands 42” x 35” x 18” and is estimated to bring in the equivalent of $2,000 at auction on January 19.

If you happen to be in the possession of the Golden Tablet of Pharaoh Akhmenrah — which is totally the kind of object that would turn up at a “Gentleman’s” sale by the way — you might even get this carcass to play fetch à la “Rexy.”

Lot 3: Jim Morrison Played Here

Just last month, Sotheby’s sold the original hand-painted CBGB awning for $30,000, and in that light, neither the forthcoming sale on January 25 of this neon pink marquee for another legendary music club, nor its estimated price of $35,000–40,000, elicits much surprise.

‘The Whisky,’ as it was known in the 1980s and 90s when this sign topped its entrance, is a Los Angeles rock club that has been open since 1964. So says the Maine-based auctioneer offering it: “Performing on its infamous stage is one of the true rites of passage in the world of rock ’n’ roll and it is credited with having launched the careers of countless bands including The Doors, Frank Zappa, Buffalo Springfield, Van Halen, Motley Crue, and Guns N’ Roses.” Now known as The Whisky a Go Go (its original name), the club remains a Sunset Strip attraction.

Rebecca Rego Barry is the author of Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places.

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“Friday is the end of the world and we’ll all be dead by the middle of next week, right?” — Worried Walt

Take it easy, snowflake. I hope I’m using that term correctly. I like snowflakes, but only when they’re falling and not when they’re all piled up and in my way. No one’s got time for belly-aching. We should cherish the time we have left on this earth and not use it to worry about things we cannot control. Like the next president of the United States. Or earthquakes. Or even the TV show ‘The Bachelor.’

It’s not going to be fun for however long Donald Trump is President. Thoughtful, sensitive people will have a hard time. People who read newspapers or magazines. Those who watch television. Or who think about things. Twitterers. Even the people that voted for him will probably soon turn on him. Because if there was a picture of what someone who shouldn’t be president in some book somewhere, that picture would be of Donald Trump.

But it’s the waiting that’s really driving you nuts. Friday still seems like a lifetime away and things are always worse when they are off in the fuzzy, near-future. Let’s just tear the seventh seal off and get this apocalypse started, am I right? Well, Friday will come soon enough. But your dread is really just your body telling you that the grapes are just a little too-far off for your little fox snout.

That we really have control over anything is an illusion, one that you should relieve yourself of. That’s what gives you ulcers. If three people in your car on your road trip decide to drive off a cliff, there’s nothing you can do, is there? You can make a protest sign in your back seat, or call your senator. But you’re still going over the cliff, Thelma and Louise. That’s why we live in a democracy. You’re only as smart as your dumbest majority.

You can’t really blame people for voting for Donald Trump. His way of approaching all of his problems is unimpeachable: tweet insults about it. That’s what I do when an airline loses my bags or there aren’t enough Ikes in my box of Mike and Ikes. It gets results. They will probably send you an envelope with some Mikes in it.

And I understand people don’t like Hillary Clinton. I can barely stand anybody, myself included.

But let’s not completely give into despair, sheeple. Let’s just let despair get to you naturally when it will, like the rising water in a bathtub. Sure, people of intelligence are going to have it rough for a while. Sometimes you’re on top of the wheel, sometimes the wheel grinds your face into the concrete. We will have to bounce back and forth between lilypads, like Frogger, waiting for the new president to tweet out his edicts. There’s worse way to get information. Flaming poo and pitch slung from a catapult, for starters. Or a voicemail message.

Make love like there’s no tomorrow. Some Republicans want to do away with pornography. So make sure to back up all your pornography. You can’t worry about death. You can worry about slowly fading away in a world in which lies are the truth and down is up. So refuse to be gaslamped. There’s more of us than there are of them. So find each other, be of comfort to one another. Fuck each other. Then make sure to back up that other person’s pornography.

Sarcasm, humor and snark: these are the last resorts of the pathetic and powerless. So break the glass and start using that stuff. Laughter may be the sound of an emotion inside you dying, but it also makes you feel a whole lot better. So why not go for it? Superior people are going to get to feel very superior for a while. Compared to Donald Trump the person sitting next to you on the subway is Thomas Merton. In both directions! We’re all in this together. We could be there for each other. In the small ways that mean something when added up. Being polite and thoughtful. Holding doors open. Not foisting a maniacal ego monster on people in the future.

It will probably take a while for us to get used to Trump and the new circle of Hell we are entering. Someday soon we will ignore his tweets. We won’t worry about him every second. And then we’ll know that we’ve truly died on the inside. Everyone’s dying, though. How bad could it be. It’s not the end of the world but you might wish it were. We survive even the Donald Trumps of the world. But it feels a little bit like dying.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a New Yorker cartoonist. She is also on Instagram.

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Happy New Year. Here are some facts about human sexuality expert and radio personality Dr. Ruth.

Dr. Ruth was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1929, in Wiesenfeld, Germany.

The SS took Ruth’s father away a week after Kristallnacht.

At age 10, her mother and grandmother sent her via Kindertransport to Switzerland.

She grew up in an orphanage in Switzerland and stopped receiving letters from her parents in September of 1941. Years later, she learned that they had been killed in the Holocaust.

As a teenager, Ruth decided to emigrate with some friends to Palestine. There, she changed her name to Ruth.

Her first boyfriend’s nickname was Putz.

She “first had sexual intercourse on a starry night, in a haystack without contraception” on a kibbutz.

She joined Haganah, an underground organization fighting to create a Jewish homeland, and was trained to be a sniper.

“As a four-foot-seven woman, I would have been turned away by any self-respecting army anywhere else in the world,” she says. “But I had other qualities that made me a valuable guerrilla.” One of them was “a knack for putting bullets exactly where I want them to go.”

In 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence, she was seriously injured when an exploding shell took off the top of one of her feet. (It happened on her birthday.)

She wasn’t able to walk again for several months. She had a “brief but intense love affair” with her nurse.

In 1950, a soldier from her kibbutz proposed marriage. Ruth accepted and the couple moved to Paris.

She studied and later taught psychology at the Sorbonne. “Everybody around me didn’t have money,” she said. “We went to cafes and had one cup of coffee all day long. Everybody.”

After five years, her marriage ended and her husband went back to Israel.

Ruth got a restitution check from the West German government for $1,500 and decided to immigrate to the United States with a French boyfriend.

In New York, Ruth gave birth to a baby girl called Miriam. She had married Miriam’s father, a Frenchman, to legalize the pregnancy but decided to divorce him.

She took English lessons and worked as a maid to support herself and her daughter. At the same time, she took evening classes for a master’s degree in sociology.

In 1961, Ruth was on a ski trip to the Catskills with a boyfriend (6’1″) when she met Manfred Westheimer, also a Jewish refugee (and more her size: 5’9″). They got married nine months later.

Ruth became an American citizen. She and Manfred had a son called Joel.

In the late 1960s, Ruth took a job at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem. At first she didn’t know what to make of the frank discussions people at the office had about sex, but she soon became comfortable with it.

She became a project director at Planned Parenthood and in the evenings took classes toward a doctorate in family and sex counseling at Columbia University.

In 1980, Ruth gave a lecture to some New York broadcasters about the need for better (and more honest) sex ed programming.

An exec at a station called WYNY was so impressed she offered Ruth a 15-minute slot on the station at midnight on Sundays.

Those 15 minutes evolved into Ruth’s famous hour-long call-in show, Sexually Speaking. They built in a seven-second delay just in case.

The phone lines were jammed during every show. By 1983, Ruth had 250,000 listeners every week, more than many New York stations had during morning drive-time. The next year, the show was syndicated nationally.

Her catchphrase: “Get some.”

Ruth became a household name after appearing on Late Night With David Letterman frequently in the early 1980s and later making appearances on Hollywood Squares.

She has written several books about human sexuality, including Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex and Sex for Dummies.

She says she is old-fashioned about sex: “I don’t believe in hooking up. I don’t believe in sex on the first date. I want people to have a relationship before they have sex. I can’t say how long before. Also, you don’t have to share your fantasies. If you have sex with your partner, and the woman thinks about a whole football team in bed with her, that’s okay, but keep your mouth shut about it.”

Ruth once started a line of low-alcohol wine called “Vin d’amour.” “It wasn’t very successful. It was very sweet.”

An off-Broadway show about her life called Becoming Dr. Ruth opened in October of 2013.

Her husband died in 1997. She has four grandchildren.

In December of 2014, Ruth was a guest at a wedding in the Bronx. The groom, Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt, was the great-grandson of the woman who helped rescue her from Nazi Germany 75 years before.

Previously: Julia Child Facts and Dolly Parton Facts.

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That was then. This is now.

I bet you really appreciated that extra day off, huh? Like, more than you usually appreciate a three-day weekend? It’s because every weekday is a million years long now so by the time you make it to the end of them you are so beaten down that there’s no way two lousy days are going to get you anywhere ready to face down another week come Monday. You will still be feeling last week into next month from now on. If this coming year does nothing else for us — and the odds are that it won’t — it will at least teach us to finally appreciate those brief moments of nothing we are given (before all that we are given is one moment of nothing that extends out into forever). Anyway, welcome back. Here’s some controlled weirdness from Botany. Enjoy.

★ “This right here is a tiny bit disgusting weather,” the five-year-old said, trudging through the damp false spring. If it was still winter, he’d asked, why was it getting warm again? Later there would be big raindrops, falling from a sky of ever-increasing blue, landing with individual taps on a waterproof sleeve or coffee lid. The dripping sustained itself for blocks of walking, and then full sun arrived to match, if not to justify, the warmth.

What if the universe doesn’t even have an arc to bend?

It will one day seem stunning that the right tried to turn Barack Obama into some sort of Stalin when he was in almost every sense — refusing to help labor unions improve their ability to organize, granting the insurance industry unprecedented federal gifts, allowing banks to remain as private institutions when there was a compelling case to nationalize them and bailing out Wall Street to such an extent that Republicans were able to profit from the resulting discontent — corporate capitalism’s greatest handmaiden during its darkest hour. Will the next Democratic president be so conciliatory to a system that will take everything offered and then actively campaign against its savior? Hahaha, there’s never going to be a Democratic president again, and even if one somehow slips through that person will be the same sort of conciliatory centrist who continues the cycle where the Republicans burn everything to the ground and the Democrats expend all their capital trying merely to restore things to the previous poor position the country was in.

But can democracy even work in a capitalist society, particularly one with deep racial divisions?

We are finding out that racism is not simply a product of ignorance, prejudice or arrogance; it endures, despite all our cautionary tales and resolves of “never again”, because its promise of social solidarity serves to assuage human fears and nurture hopes for the future…. Bill Clinton surpassed Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in condemning African Americans to mass incarceration and poverty while deregulating financial markets for the benefit of his patrons on Wall Street. The rhetoric and actions of Trump’s cabinet, the wealthiest and most fanatical yet, will no doubt clarify further the inhuman practices that drive a politics and economy ostensibly devoted to human freedom. Those who oppose them should welcome this clarity. It has taken too long for the ellipses, omissions and subterfuges in the American — and now universal — promise of liberty to be widely noticed.

That’s Pankaj Mishra, whose forthcoming Age of Anger is on almost everyone’s must-read list for 2017. He is perhaps more optimistic about the benefits of clarity — there is a compelling counterargument to be made that most people will simply stare at their phones while the bad things happen in the background — than the situation merits, but it’s provocative reading, in the best sense of that word.

The Divided States: Trump’s inauguration and how democracy has failed

You know the one

balk [4:08 PM]
what;s the name of that lady

[4:08]
who was a kid actress

[4:08]
and is now an adult actress

[4:08]
something with a g?

mikedang [4:08 PM]
Drew Barrymore

kelly [4:08 PM]
Anna Chlumsky

balk [4:09 PM]
ugh

christinefriar [4:09 PM]
geena davis

kelly [4:09 PM]
George Lopez

christinefriar [4:10 PM]
gina gershon

kelly [4:10 PM]
oh!

[4:10]
gg allin

christinefriar [4:10 PM]
gina rodriguez

mikedang [4:10 PM]
Gilmore Girls

balk [4:10 PM]
this is gonna drive me fucking crazy

christinefriar [4:11 PM]
gigi hadid

balk [4:11 PM]
AH HA

[4:11]
gaby hoffman

christinefriar [4:11 PM]
mmm

kelly [4:11 PM]
oh right

christinefriar [4:11 PM]
we would have gotten there

Friday reading roundup

The moment was so great in magnitude that it even made Beyoncé weak in the knees. As Barack Obama, donning a perfectly tailored white-tie tuxedo, shared his first dance as 44th President of the United States with his wife Michelle at the 2009 Inaugural Ball, the country’s most celebrated pop star stood feet away, serenading the First Couple with Etta James’ “At Last.” Over her career, Beyoncé had become famous for her bombastic, unrestrained exploration of the stage, but in this moment, Queen Bey was just a girl, standing in reverence, with the humility of a high school student who had won a contest to be there. In an interview afterwards, through tears, she described performing for the first black President as “the most important day” of her life. It was the type of moment Donald Trump desperately wishes he could capture for himself, but never will, because he is a fucking loser.

Donald Trump, a Tremendous Loser, Has No Famous Friends, Sad! – Noisey

Roman Catholic clergy have also worn them for roughly one billion years — their pom-pom hats are called birettas — and the colors of the hat and pom-pom tell you what type of guy they are: Cardinals wear red birettas; bishops wear violet; priests, deacons, and seminarians wear black. Oh, my god. Are you bored? Seamen from the 18th century also wore knit caps with pom-poms on them!

What an incredible history that we have learned thoroughly.

Why do we all have balls on our hats?

There’s no way to succeed without having a team and all of the moving parts that help bring it into life. But I do have — and I’m unafraid to say it — a very distinctive, clear vision of how I want to present myself and my body and my voice and my perspective. And who better to really tell that story than yourself?

Solange

He is no longer what he started out as on the talk show, the kind of person who could ask the question we wanted answered (like: Jacqueline, why would you sit on that woman’s lap after she threatened to “rage on your ass”?). Now he’s one of the famous people.

Living in Andy Cohen’s America

She had a McNugget in her hand, a gun to her head, and no fear in her heart.

Attempted McNugget thief busted for pulling gun on classmate

When I asked Kyle about the Rhoden Massacre, he said, “No one cares about white trash.” He said I was there to cover “old news,” and suggested I write about something important, like his deer farm — “a farm where I raise deer and guys pay me to come shoot them — what are you, fucking retarded? You don’t know what a deer farm is?”

“Write about my dick,” he said.

Murder on Union Hill Road | Hazlitt

Mm, clicky: The iPhone was announced 10 years ago, here’s how people on Twitter (men) reacted (funnily) | Diet Coke is not killing you | There’s a documentary about WFMU on Netflix | How San Francisco’s drag scene is changing