Just in time for the weekend, the temperatures of both Missoula and Roger Ebert have dropped precipitously. Did you ever notice that catastrophes come in twos? I’m just exploiting your cognitive bias—really, did you ever notice that when something bad happens, you can always think of something else to complain about? Gloom and doom go together like tomorrow and your inevitable death. Today is Friday, and the week has been full of pointed injustices with which to prod our self-pity glands. The self-pity glad is located just behind the soft palate and in front of the uvulua. Keep poking with your toothbrush—you’ll find it. In the meantime, won’t you lament our collective lot with me?
Category Archives: Friday Links
Friday links! In retrospect, it was obvious edition
Even more than projectile motion, our understanding is bedeviled by the arrow of time. So many things seem obvious in retrospect, and yet they arrive like thunderbolts in the way that only a new piece of obvious information can. Okay, I guess a thunderbolt can arrive that way, too, since that is how similes work. In retrospect, it was obvious. Constantly, we are not so much learning things as realizing them, and once they become real to us they cannot be un-known. Today is Friday, briefly coalesced from the unknowable future on its way to the rigid past. Won’t you realize some mind-blowing stuff with me?
Friday links! Home again edition
Here I am standing at my desk, sunshine blaring through my window, and it is snowing: I must be in Montana. My glutinous subway cold tells me I was recently in New York, but now all that is as a pleasant dream; there is only the comforting routine of typing Combat! blog, plus a raft of deadlines I put off to enable my weeklong drinking/carousing/companionating binge. Let’s not think about those now, though. Today is Friday, and I am home again. Won’t you luxuriate in the comforts of the hearth with me? By hearth I mean internet.
Friday links! Familiar ground edition
Greetings from Aaron’s futon, where I luxuriate in the scorched neurons and sleep-deprived biliousness of late morning in New York City. Obviously, I couldn’t just get in last night and curl up with a cup of chamomile and Right Ho, Jeeves. Back in New York means back in old habits, and I was drinking seven-dollar beers and dramatizing the interior lives of weird strangers until the wee hours of the morning. Now I am tired. Today is Friday, and the charms of the familiar remain as potent as ever. Won’t you clench your stomach and lurch back into the groove with me?
Friday links! A problem like Korea edition
Can you imagine how weird it is to be the guy in the United States government—possibly there is a name for this position—in charge of dealing with North Korea? On one hand, they are clearly not a serious country; their economy alternates between collapse and starvation, and they can’t afford electricity at night. On the other hand, they keep threatening nuclear war. Perhaps most infuriatingly, their threats come in a form that insists everyone else is threatening them. It’s a weird combination of delusion, incompetence and crowing arrogance, and it is frustrating. How do you solve a problem like Korea? That’s the worst part: you ignore it. You don’t even get the pleasure of seeing the weirdo son of the weirdo son of the weirdo dictator get his comeuppance. You just have to let being Kim Jong Un be its own punishment. Today is Friday, and the high ground sucks. Fortunately, our decadent American lifestyle provides the internet to distract us. Won’t you ignore belligerence with me?





