Who loved the Garth Brooks appearance on Wednesday? Oh wait, no one? Well let’s use him as a pivot point, then, to Charley Crockett, a Black-Cajun-Creole-Jewish blues-Americana singer who’s now out with his eighth album since 2015. The distant relative of Davy (!) spends his latest release, Welcome to Hard Times, applying classic country tropes to contemporary marginalization. He sings about his personal traumas, which include plenty of heartbreak, sure, but also serving time and facing crimes he didn’t commit; losing his sister to addiction; and living with congenital heart disease. The album came out in July, and this month he’s here with a new single covering Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” a plain-faced croon that truly makes you feel like someone’s got your back. Kind of a spot-on listen for the new era.

I’ll be honest, I tried not to plan too much for today in case we had any heavy news to unpack after the inauguration. While I am now consulting the @waitingonbiden twitter account for my daily mantra (“Today is the 3rd day that Biden has chosen not to guarantee healthcare for all”), the ceremony at least worked out and here we are finally with enough peace to talk some shit about CES. For the uninitiated, that’s the Consumer Electronics Show that usually happens at the convention center in Vegas. This year’s incarnation was notably low on shenanigans (harder to exploit booth babes on Zoom, ya know?) but when you have a gadget-based dick-measuring contest, you’re bound to come out with something notable.

Predictably, folks came out swinging with the Covid tech, none of which is particularly useful or even sexy. Sitting squarely bottom-left of that graph is the smart mask, which is not a lone product but an entire category thanks to innovators who could just as easily devote their energy to N95s. The smartest* smart mask on display, the AirPOP, is like a sleep tracker for air, monitoring breath, air quality, and filter efficacy, in an apparent bid to fold breathing into the wellness movement after the pandemic ends. On the other side of the utility spectrum, Maskfone is just a regular mask that bluetooths to your phone for calls. Then there’s Razer’s see-through mask, which amplifies your voice (as if cloth stifles it) and lights up in neon when it’s dark (so you can get back to your pre-Covid routine of……illuminating your face?). Details aside, aren’t you comforted to know that we’ve got our brightest minds working on our most pressing problems? THANK YOU, ENGINEERS <3 

*dumbest

(for anyone missing the reference in the headline, please meet my favorite YouTube video)

Our next-best innovation harkens both to the future and to a simpler time, before breathing became our bodily-function-du-jour. Courtesy of Toto the toiletmaker, please meet the Wellness Toilet, a bathroom gadget that monitors your output to generate tips on how to eat better and check for potential illness. Given that this one’s still in idea phase and no actual building appears to have been done, it does not yet have a way to connect your poo monitor to your smart fridge to see what foods in your existing collection might remedy your smear. I’ll be over here manifesting.