A blog by Dan Brooks
Remember that thing I wrote yesterday about summer hours? Yeah, that wasn’t true. I’ve got a job of work to do today, just like any other day, and summer hours are but a bitter dream. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Today is Friday, and nuisances are tenacious. Neither president nor weirdo in his apartment is safe, and hope is a fool’s fortress. All we can do is enumerate the slights against us. Won’t you compose a quick list with me?
Not pictured: the News
Regular readers of Combat! blog are familiar with this genius video, in which Huey Lewis recreates the iconic scene from American Psycho wherein killer yuppie Patrick Bateman speaks rapturously of one H. Lewis. I got to interview Huey Lewis last week, because shit is weird, and my surefire interview question was “how did you feel when you saw American Psycho for the first time?” He said he read the book. This and other sweet assertions can be found in my featurette about the 30th anniversary of Sports, which I am posting this morning instead of writing in the blog. After many, many delays, my transition to summer work patterns begins today. Combat! blog won’t be different, but the rest of my day will. For example, I am taking the rest of today off, since A) all those delays of summer work patterns were lucrative, and B) everything is permitted because nothing is true. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK,) who called Benghazi more “egregious” than Watergate
I tried to link to a news article about this week’s Congressional hearings regarding the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, but I had a hard time finding an unbiased source. Benghazi appears to be the most important story in the world for the Daily Caller, Fox News and the Washington Times (official motto: Not the Good Washington Paper) and invisible to everyone else. My theory is supported by this poll in which a mere 44% of Americans say they are following the hearings and, in a more complicated way, by this one, in which 41% of Republicans say they consider Benghazi “the biggest scandal in American history.” So suck it, Peggy Eaton Affair.
Jonathan Swift: hilarious
A. Ron Galbraith recently brought to my attention this post in Politico arguing that The Daily Currant is not funny. You may have heard of The Daily Currant in connection with this mistake by the Drudge Report, or possibly this one by the Washington Post. According to founder and editor Daniel Barkeley, the Currant produces a “style of satire [that] is as old as literature itself, but hasn’t recently been applied to news articles.” Apparently one of the satirical conceits over at the Currant is that The Onion doesn’t exist, but that is orthogonal to our discussion. Barkeley’s position is that several of the Currant’s satires have been mistaken for news because what he’s doing is so new. At Politco, Dylan Byers’s argument is that Currant articles keep being taken for real because they aren’t funny. Which brings us to an important question: how funny does satire have to be?
“We’re really puzzled,” Newt Gingrich says. “Here at Gingrich Productions, we’ve spent weeks trying to figure out: what do you call this?” Then he holds up a smartphone. It appears to be an iPhone, but it’s definitely some kind of touch-screen, internet-capable personal communications device, known in circulars and strip malls across America as a smartphone. The term “smartphone” was first used by Ericsson in 1997, but Gingrich seems genuinely not to know it, spending three minutes in rapturous speculation on what such a device might be called. “If it’s taking pictures, it’s a not a cell phone,” he opines. “If it has a McDonald’s app to tell you where McDonald’s is based on your GPS location, that’s not a cell phone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google, that’s not a cell phone.” Props to Aaron Galbraith for the video, which is 2:53 of uncut dramatic irony that you can watch after the jump.