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OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

They said Cass Elliot died choking on a ham sandwich. That lie spread around the world, and the truth couldn’t catch up for decades.

On July 29, 1974, in London, Cass Elliot—"Mama Cass" to millions—was found dead in a borrowed flat. She was only 32 years old. She had just finished two weeks of sold-out shows at the London Palladium, a career milestone most singers only dream of. A friend found her in bed, looking peaceful. A half-eaten sandwich sat on a nearby nightstand.

By the next morning, the rumor was everywhere. But it wasn't true. The coroner confirmed the cause immediately: heart failure. There was no choking and no food involved. The sandwich was irrelevant, but the story was too "perfect" for a cruel world to let go. It became a punchline that a woman of her size wasn't allowed to escape, even in death. For forty years, late-night comedians made jokes and newspapers repeated the myth without checking. It became "common knowledge" because, apparently, if you are a woman who doesn't fit the mold, the world will find a way to make you the joke.

Before the lie and the tragedy, Ellen Naomi Cohen was a force of nature. Born in Baltimore, she was smart, magnetic, and gifted. By the 1960s, she was the anchor of The Mamas & The Papas. Think of "California Dreamin'." That warm, iconic harmony wraps around you like summer, but Cass’s voice is what holds it together. It was rich, pure, and unmistakable. Musicians knew that when Cass sang, you stopped to listen.

Yet, the industry didn’t know how to handle her. She was brilliant, but she wasn't thin. Executives told her to lose weight to be a star; TV producers worried her appearance would be a "distraction." While male rock stars could be disheveled or overweight and be called "authentic," Cass was constantly scrutinized. She faced fat jokes on talk shows and was expected to laugh along.

Cass did what many women feel forced to do: she tried to "fix" herself. She endured years of crash diets and extreme weight loss cycles. She would lose 50 pounds, then gain it back, caught in a loop because the industry’s hunger for thinness was bottomless. Offstage, she was a dedicated single mother to her daughter, Owen, and a famously generous friend. She was "Mama Cass" because she took care of everyone. But the world still wouldn't let her be great without an asterisk. Even at the height of her solo success with "Dream a Little Dream of Me," reviews prioritized her dress size over her talent.

When her heart finally stopped at 32, the autopsy revealed heart muscle damage (myocardial degeneration). This is often linked to the physical strain of extreme yo-yo dieting and malnutrition—the very "solutions" the world demanded of her. The industry that told her she needed to change is likely what killed her. And when she died, the world turned that tragedy into a joke about a sandwich.

Her daughter, Owen, now 57, has spent her life defending her mother’s memory. She once noted that perhaps if the world had just let her mother be, her heart wouldn't have been under such impossible strain. We are still doing this today—reducing women to their measurements and making thinness a prerequisite for respect. But Cass Elliot’s voice is still here. It’s in the coffee shops, the movies, and the airwaves.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

They were discouraged from breaks because they were actively trying to unionize, and bosses felt that keeping them from unsupervised contact would prevent them from joining the garment workers' union.

This is why unions are important. This is why today, right now, the biggest companies in America are trying to squash unionization of their laborers and why those workers are fighting so hard to unionize.

For years after 9/11 we were constantly told “NEVER FORGET” and the idea was basically “keep feeling sad and afraid and especially ANGRY forever; don’t let time dull your emotional response like it’s naturally supposed to; continue to justify the injustices by feeling this way all the time.” And the 3000 deaths were constantly pointed to as this huge deal that justified any lengths to go to.

And then Covid hit. And there were several points during the height of the pandemic (because fun fact, according to the actual definitions of a pandemic, *it’s not technically over yet!* ) where we were having a 9/11’s worth of deaths every week or so. And suddenly 3000 deaths were not a big deal at all. Instead of being enough reason to go to war far away and strip us at home of many rights too, they weren’t even enough justification to make people wear a damn piece of fabric over their face.

3000 people died once and now the government can legally wiretap anyone without a warrant, and hold people at Gitmo under suspicion of terrorism (no need for due process)… 3000 people dying every week but we should all still be going out to brunch and concerts and who cares about the disabled and immunocompromised?

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.