Friday links! Low expectations edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

A sea creature meets some girls on vacation.

The picture above will be forever known as the Alleged Stingray Photobomb, and sadly it is posed. I should have known; something that beautiful doesn’t just happen, at least not to the likes of us. With the internet, as with all things, you’ll be happier if you lower your expectations. Today is Friday, and I’ll probably string together a half-assed narrative from uninteresting links before I show up late to yoga and fart. See how that works? If I can keep that idea firmly implanted in my head, anything short of disaster will feel like a pleasant surprise. The events you anticipate do not exist. There is only the world that happened, and now it is gone. Won’t you wish it a disappointed farewell with me?

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Friday links! Fantasy of persecution edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

A modest sense of self at Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor

I pretty much only know via books, but being persecuted appears to suck. Anne Frank, the dude in Invisible Man, every character in the field of postcolonial studies—the only good thing about these people’s situations is that they are fictional and we sympathize with them. The real lives and diaspora on which they are modeled offered no such comfort, in both cases pretty much by definition. Actual persecution is a drag, but imagined persecution—especially when it’s imagined by members of a comfortable majority—rules. You get none of the actual inconvenience of institutionalized prejudice, plus the benefits of victim status. Today is Friday, and our link section is chockablock with jerks who have convinced themselves that they are crushed under the heels of jerks. Won’t you manufacture a smug self-pity with me?

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Friday links! Impossibility of perspective edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

Smoke from the Sawtooth fire obscures the damn sun.

I am dogsitting my excellent nephew in the South Hills today, and the smoke is so thick I cannot see the mountains. Hell, I can’t see the grocery store at the bottom of the hill. The Sawtooth fire has covered Missoula in a rich musk, equal parts wood smoke and singed squirrel. In addition to creating some really excellent lighting effects and possibly damaging my lungs, the smoke creates an atmosphere of isolation. Even more than usual, the broad view is impossible. Today is Friday, and none of us can see too far in front of his own nose. Won’t you revel in subjectivity with me?

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Friday links! Second best team in Tampa edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

The Republican National Convention has blown out of Tampa with a whoosh of salt air, leaving behind it only litter and fact checkers. By all accounts, it was a fine affair that Combat! blog covered not at all. I don’t go in for political kabuki. I only like political Noh, on which the RNC verged several times. A bunch of crazy stuff happened in Florida this week, and none of it was true. Super PAC and campaign operatives stayed in the same hotel, not coordinating at all. Paul Ryan blamed Obama for a bunch of stuff that happened before he was president, and Clint Eastwood did a ventriloquist act with no dummy. Also, a Montana man was killed while impersonating Bigfoot, in what for now seems to be an unrelated story. At this point, though, I woud believe anything.

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Friday links! Possible causes edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 1 Comment

I hear you, brother.

Evidently one of the eight drinks I drank with Ben al-Fowlkes last night had food poisoning in it, because I feel sick. Combat! blog operates from bed today, in a version of work that would make Thomas Jefferson shake his head bitterly. America has changed so much. Our world has changed so much; we navigate images projected on a skein covering shadows on the wall of a cave. Yet the light shines through, if you look for it. My point is that A) Ben al-Fowlkes is unclean, and B) sometimes, in this vale of illusions, what’s going on is pretty obvious. Won’t you pierce the veil with me?

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