Oh whiskey, you’re the devil

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUs-fqoTx7U

 

I shan’t insult you by explaining who the Pogues are, but I will observe that A) even they were not immune to early-eighties album art design and B) 27 year-old Shane MacGowan, at right, looks eerily like my brother. Unfortunately for MacGowan—and incredibly fortunately for Brooks—they now look very different. The Irish are not a handsome people, and we do not shepherd what beauty we have into old age. In MacGowan’s case, heroin and excessive drinking—he famously stopped singing during the first song of a 2002 concert at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre to vomit on fans in the front row—conspired with a weird nationalist/intellectual refusal to brush his teeth to make him look like, well, everyone he ever sang about. “I’m completely Irish,” he told the Guardian in 2001, by way of explaining why he had arrived at his interview holding a bottle of gin. This interview took place at a bar.

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Precommitment devices, Eva Longoria, Sartre

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

You could have done worse, Tony Parker.

Slate runs three kinds of articles: (1) timely analyses of news items that appeared on Gawker four days ago, (2) Would This Statement Attract More Readers As a Question?, and (3) essays on subjects that the author happens to have just published a book about. For my money, category (3) is the most interesting, since if there’s one thing I like more than reading a book, it’s talking about a book I haven’t read. I was therefore thrilled to encounter Daniel Akst’s report/essay/plug about precommitment devices—not because it’s tremendously insightful or fun, but because it draws attention to two important issues facing society: Jean-Paul Sartre’s construction of vertigo and Eva Longoria.

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Good night, sweet prince

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

In a blow to snide remarkers everywhere, Michael Steele is no longer chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has been replaced by a man named Reince Priebus, who certainly sounds amusing, but seems unlikely to go on television and talk about how he’s so street that sometimes he wears a hat backwards without even thinking about it.* We are not likely to see another Michael Steele. That’s kind of ironic, because there are already two of him. As Ben al-Fowlkes and the Huffington Post recently pointed out to me, the story “Michael Steele loses RNC chairmanship” threatens to be eclipsed, in our minds if not in our lives, by the story “Daily Show retires Michael Steele puppet.” Video after the jump.

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Scientists identify religious gene, intractable research problem

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

A giant Pacific octopus, since pictures of scientists are boring. The octopus is the scientist of the sea.

In their ongoing quest to determine why other people believe in stuff that cannot be demonstrated by logic or cutting open a mouse’s brain, scientists have identified a gene that predisposes people toward religious belief. They’ve also identified a classic problem of deductive reasoning. Citing the World Values Survey, Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn noted that “adults who attended religious services more than once a week had 2.5 children on average; while those who went once a month had two; and those who never attended had 1.67.” From these statistics, he concluded that “the more devout people are, the more children they are likely to have.” Kombat! Kids: can you spot the flaw in Professor Rowthorn’s reasoning? Probably not, because there are only 1.67 of you for both Combat! readers.

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