Emmanuel Don't Do It

July 20, 2022 11:00 AM

Emmanuel, do not. Emmanuel Todd Lopez! I can't believe you just did that.

All Taylor Blake wanted to do was make educational farm TikToks, but her colleagues disagreed. Then the internet discovered its viral love for "this lesbian and her bird son". But as Blake tells the Washington Post, at least she can sell some merch out of this situation.

P. S. Emmanuel does not always choose violence. Sometimes he chooses cuddles.

posted by Hypatia (34 comments total)

Emanuel Todd Lopez is a Name
posted by Going To Maine at 11:19 AM on July 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

1) I identify deeply with Emmanuel, in my soul.
2) I had a deeply incompetent coworker named Emmanuel until very recently, and Taylor’s dialog sounds surprisingly similar to some of my conversations with him.
posted by ActionPopulated at 11:23 AM on July 20, 2022 [10 favorites]

Her tweets since going viral have been sobering--like, "I'll finally be able to afford health care for the first time in my life!" and "if you see any Emmanuel merch currently for sale, it's pirated! I'm looking for a graphic artist to create official merch and will have that available soon!" People suck.

Ms. Blake and Emmanuel, however, are great, and she really seems to be doing good work in the world.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:30 AM on July 20, 2022 [32 favorites]

Emmanuel is totally going to do it...
posted by Windopaene at 11:38 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

A few days ago, I watched this for the first time--about five times--and then snapped "Emmanuel, don't do it!" at my cat as she reached for my charger cord. Her name isn't Emmanuel.

I can only imagine how many other people are doing this with unruly pets and/or children now.
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:40 AM on July 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

I am the inadvertent owner of two emus, Ricky and Lucy. They were evacuated to my farm two years ago from local fires, and were supposed to stay here for a week or so - hah! I was terrified of them at first, for they are absolutely dinosaurs, but are in fact, sweet and even cuddly pets. However, they are also big crows and will peck at anything shiny, including cell phones. Especially cell phones.

If you are ever in my area (Santa Cruz, CA), and want to pet an emu, get in touch!
Lucy and Ricky
posted by birdsongster at 11:58 AM on July 20, 2022 [79 favorites]

The Emmanuel Todd Lopez videos have been bringing joy and laughter to my house for several days.

"You know what? Do it....How did it feel? Was it everything you wanted and wished for and hoped for in life? Do you feel fulfilled, now?"
posted by nubs at 12:01 PM on July 20, 2022 [11 favorites]

I really shouldn't be so surprised that the target demo for Tommy Hilfiger overalls is hipster emu ranchers.
posted by pwnguin at 12:07 PM on July 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

I just want to make sure that the evil emu whose shenanigans I follow don't go unacknowledged. Karen will not be ignored.
posted by PussKillian at 12:08 PM on July 20, 2022 [5 favorites]

I WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE TO THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF FRANCE
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:13 PM on July 20, 2022 [33 favorites]

Metafilter: You know what? Do it....How did it feel? Was it everything you wanted and wished for and hoped for in life? Do you feel fulfilled, now?
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 12:26 PM on July 20, 2022 [20 favorites]

Taylor Blake reminds me so much of Millie Kentner, somehow.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:29 PM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Taylor Blake reminds me so much of Millie Kentner, somehow.

You are a genius. I would never have made that connection but it's absolutely right.
posted by dlugoczaj at 12:39 PM on July 20, 2022

She seems awesome. I wish her well, and hope that trolls leave her alone.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:39 PM on July 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Beleaguered Gay Animal Mom is totally a mood.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:43 PM on July 20, 2022 [12 favorites]

reminds me so much of
See, before I turned the sound on, I was thinking of Tara Bellerose.
posted by bartleby at 1:02 PM on July 20, 2022

Karen seems like a bit of a Karen
posted by Windopaene at 1:06 PM on July 20, 2022

We'd all like to be Emmanuel and live by our own rules. But, nooooo.
posted by tommasz at 1:39 PM on July 20, 2022

I really shouldn't be so surprised that the target demo for Tommy Hilfiger overalls is hipster emu ranchers.

Do you ever wear regular clothes? Like a dress or skirt.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:50 PM on July 20, 2022 [12 favorites]

The inevitable cover versions have begun.
posted by young_simba at 1:50 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Do not choose violence, Emmanuel"

Because everyone loves this stuff and it just exploded, the twitter algorithm is showing me a lot of her stuff and it's charming. Both the "content" and her sincere reactions to just exploding overnight. She has many "Thank you everyone!" that seem so earnest one "I'm sorry I can't respond to everyone right away, I used to have a manager but it's just me right now."

If mean people on the internet ruin this for it's going to be another serious black mark on humanity's record sheet, and no one needs that.
posted by mark k at 1:57 PM on July 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

My brother took in an emu on his farm one fine day, a refugee from some exotic animal compound nearby. It is no small thing, by any measure.

Turned out in the sheep pasture, the emu encountered a ram who thought this newcomer needed to know who was boss. After the emu sent him tumbling ass over teakettle across the yard, the pecking order was established.

My brother indulged this critter for about a year, but it was never clear what was going on in that tiny brain pan. It went sideways when the emu got a little too comfortable on top, and decided the farmer was fair game. These are dangerous animals, but it learned that you do NOT mess with the farmer. A few tense encounters between farmer and those really big claws sealed his fate.

We had emu hors d'oeuvres at Christmas that year.

He was a tough bird.
posted by skippyhacker at 4:07 PM on July 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

Oh I love Emmanuel.
There are a couple of emus in a field we sometimes cycle past. They are amazing. They make the most remarkable sound. A loud percussive "thump-thump-thump" deep in their chests.

It's such an odd experience trying to keep eye contact with an emu, or an ostrich for that matter. Their heads kind of float and bob on those long necks and move in all directions.
posted by Zumbador at 8:42 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really shouldn't be so surprised that the target demo for Tommy Hilfiger overalls is hipster emu ranchers.

I wouldn't know the first thing about how to leverage going viral into profitability, but if she doesn't end up with a lifetime supply of Hilfiger swag out of this as a bare minimum, it will be a missed opportunity.
posted by juv3nal at 8:51 PM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

The inevitable cover versions have begun.

So have the inevitable soft core porn versions, I hear that they are very popular in France.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:53 PM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I only have one emu-related story, but it's a fairly good one:

I have a friend who, back in the early 00s, lived on a large-ish piece of property in rural Texas, and was constantly looking for various "creative" (read: non-taxable) ways to make extra money. They boarded horses, they trained gun dogs. At various times they had a herd of semi-feral mule deer, and at another time they raised pheasants, quail, wild turkey, and other types of game birds for sale to hunters.

Anyway, it is a truth universally acknowledged—at least in that part of Texas—that a person in possession of a egg incubator, must be in want of eggs to incubate. Most birds, however, are sort of a low-margin business. Fertilized eggs aren't particularly expensive (you can buy them through the mail!), but once you factor in the electricity for the incubators, food for the chicks, and some miniscule value of your own time, it's not a hugely profitable business. And it's not like people who basically want to use birds as live sporting clays are exactly willing to spend a lot for each one. So it's really a high-volume thing, and hard to compete if you're a small operation. (Plus, I assume it's sort of a bummer when the birds you hand-raised from chicks go to someone who's just going to scare them and blast them out of the sky.)

Emus, on the other hand—on paper, anyway—are very profitable. The eggs cost quite a bit more than pheasants, sure, but the chicks aren't that much more work, they had been told, and I guess adult or young-adult emus sell for quite a bit, like hundreds of dollars. So they called up a guy who knew a guy, who knew another guy, who showed up with a truck and a dozen or so emu eggs, cash on the barrelhead, no questions asked. (Twenty bucks, same as in town, I assume.)

And into the incubators they went. I think they even had some very confused chickens sit on them for a while, just for good measure. And after some weeks, they started to hatch! They had baby emus! They're quite cute, and I gather they were quite the talk of the town after they went down to the feed store for bags of Emu Chow (or whatever the heck you feed emus). And after a few more weeks they came out of the brood house (garage) and started wandering around, doing emu stuff.

And then... things got a bit out of control. I don't know what the expected survival / hatch rate is of mail-order quail eggs, but I gather there's a significant non-hatching percentage; that's just part of the business. And, this being the first time they had raised emus, they figured some of them might unfortunately not make it. But no—it turns out that they did a pretty good job incubating and brooding them, and emus are pretty hearty birds, and all but one or two of them survived. So they had, like, ten fuckin' emus.

Emus, as it turns out, grow quickly. Like, alarmingly quickly. Suddenly they were driving around East Texas, trying to buy emu food, and then once they exhausted that, they were buying stuff that you can make into emu food. And they ate it all. And grew. And ate. And grew. (Also, they consume prodigious quantities of water.)

While some, maybe most, of the emus were fine, a few of them... were not fine. A couple of them just didn't like anybody. They fought with the other emus. They chased the farm dogs, until they went on strike and refused to go outside. They bullied horses. They'd routinely escape from their enclosures and destroy things: lightbulbs, ATV headlights, riding tack. They'd attack their own reflection in windows, breaking them. When my friend went away to school, they stalked her father. "Redneck Jurassic Park" was the phrase used to describe it.

Eventually, one of the ill-tempered emus escaped from the enclosure and the predator fence, and ran for it. Good riddance, I suspect was the thought—until they got a call from a neighboring ranch, where it had turned up at a sheep trough, then cornered and severely injured a dog (I can only assume the dog made the mistake of trying to herd it). The rancher shot it with a pistol, "but it only made him angry". Eventually it was put down—with a Mini-14.

At this point, I gather my friend realized they had made a mistake in raising what were basically feathered velociraptors, and they started to make phone calls. Eventually they found some old Australian guy several counties away who offered to take them off their hands, $50 a head, less the cost of diesel to come and get them. I would have paid good money to see the Great Emu Roundup, which apparently involved people on ATVs with lassos and improvised protective gear, and others standing around with rifles in case someone got cornered, but the Australian guy knew what he was doing and got them all into a trailer, and that was that.

It turns out, there's a reason why well-mannered adult emus are so expensive. It's a risk premium.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:15 PM on July 20, 2022 [33 favorites]

Kadin2048 sounds like some people don't know their history: Emu War (Wikipedia)
posted by MengerSponge at 11:34 PM on July 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

I want to see Emmanuel vibing with the Turkish guy playing the drum and singing the nonsense part of the Finnish polka. Leaving the cat in is acceptable.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:29 AM on July 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm going to give my two cats government names.

I imagine they won't listen, that's just their nature.
posted by wolpfack at 8:36 AM on July 21, 2022

Kadin2048 these days emus eat emu food, also known as ratite food. It's just pellets in a bag like any other livestock food. I order 50 lb bags from Chewy every week.

For anyone else at all interested in emu raising, which I do not necessarily advise, you can only have a single mating pair together in an enclosure or they will fight. They have to be hand raised as chicks (aka stripeys) to be tame like mine. Otherwise, yes, you are basically breeding dinosaurs, and well, we have all seen the movies and know how that goes.

Emus have been around basically unchanged for 40 million years. Homo sapiens? Only around two or three hundred thousand. Long term, my bet is on the emus surviving long after we are gone.
posted by birdsongster at 12:49 PM on July 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

This isn't a particularly happy story, but it IS an emu story and I rarely get the chance to share it. My mother-in-law acquired two emu chicks some years ago from her sister, and drove home with them from Montana to Minnesota with an endless loud chorus of peeping coming from the back as my father-in-law reconsidered their marriage.

They were set up in a large fenced in pasture, with a shed with a heat lamp for winter, although they didn't seem to be particularly bothered by the cold. The emus were incredibly stupid birds and would stand outside in subzero weather, slowly accumulating snow, until my MIL would lead them back to the shed with food, only to watch them wander back out again.

They served as a fun novelty pet and conversation piece for several years until the female laid eggs and the male got broody (emu fathers incubate the eggs). While the father is on the nest, the mother tends to wander off in search of other mates and so she escaped, and was caught. She escaped again, and was caught. Each time my MIL had fears of making the local news for an emu causing a multi-car wreck on the interstate. She escaped a third time and it very nearly went badly. MIL won't talk about it much but it seems like she roped the emu who then ran around a tree a few times, partially tying up MIL against the trunk. Then the emu, frustrated about the rope around her neck, started to kick. And kick. Emus have sharp talons that can potentially eviscerate a human. That didn't happen to my MIL, fortunately, but she got very bruised and cut up, and after she finally got free and dragged the escaped emu home, told my father-in-law she was done and asked him to take care of it. He hired an emu farmer who came out and "harvested" both birds. Or so he thought, until he was loading one into his trailer when the female silently reappeared behind him like some kind of emu Terminator and required another direct hit from a shotgun before going down.

I don't mess with emus.
posted by castlebravo at 1:06 PM on July 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

IMNSHO this is the sole reason the internet still deserves to exist.
posted by liminal_shadows at 6:57 PM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also, still dying over the term "redneck Jurassic park". Thanks for that Kadin. It reminds me of home.
posted by liminal_shadows at 7:01 PM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, uh... about Taylor...

(tl;dr - Emmanuel is fine, but Taylor has milkshake-duck tendencies)
posted by hanov3r at 10:59 AM on July 22, 2022 [5 favorites]