A blog by Dan Brooks
Frank Zappa was the voice of the Pope in that episode.
There is no Combat! blog of value today, because I am flying to Chicago. While I steep in baby germs, why don’t you watch this panel discussion on filmmaking with the Coen brothers, moderated by Noah Baumbach. It’s an hour long, which is way more enjoyment than you would get out of a regular blog post anyway. We’ll be back Friday morning, probably in extremely half-assed fashion and eating enormous hot dogs.
El mono!
Last night I found out that I have probably had mono for the last two months, which is what I get for living as a cad. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, I thought I was just really bored. It was a weirdly satisfying diagnosis, and not only because mono is the one where you don’t do anything. I was pleased to learn that the last several weeks of lingering illness and PoS syndrome were not just in my head—in fact, they were in my lymph nodes—and that my mysterious illness is something college students get and not, you know, Crohn’s Disease. Mono is bad news, but it’s specific news and I know what it means. I submit that the possibility of a problem is often worse than the actual problem, and knowing what hit you invariably softens the blow. On that note, here is an article that pretty well demonstrates the much talked-about growth in income inequality over the last twenty years. While certain parties warn us of the impending socialist welfare state, the USA has progressed toward a less even distribution of wealth at a more diligent rate than at almost any time in our history. And you thought we were just bored.
What’s green and sticky and lives in my throat and ears, breeding several times each hour? I don’t know either, but probably I need antibiotics. Combat! blog is sick again, with an illness that suspiciously resembles the brutal flu/throat combo I had in February, again in April, and pretty much anytime I miss a few hours of sleep. Is it some new super-illness that resists modern medicine and promises to return the specter of disease to American life? Probably not, but it does represent a new frontier in complaining. While I pity self, how about you read this article about what George Lucas did when his neighbors in Marin County tried to prevent him from building a new studio at Skywalker Ranch. Hint: it rhymes with “build low-income housing instead.” Take that, wealthy neighbors!
Combat! blog is buried in work today, but that’s no reason to ignore our fundamental obligations. Chief among them? Presenting a convincing simulacrum of humanity, something Mitt Romney has done with only intermittent success during his political career. It’s just like the plot of A Christmas Carol: all the money in the world can’t buy him a working heart. While I toil in obscurity my apartment, how about you enjoy this video in which James Lipton gives Candidate Rombot some acting tips. Lipton has one hell of a deadpan. It’s possible he’s been doing it for like twenty years.
Scandalously, all these girls are actually Kulap Vilaysack in whiteface.
Now that Twitter and an HBO sitcom have finally convinced me that racism exists, I see it everywhere. It’s like when you first learned who Black Eyed Peas were: you thought that you were being followed by a child reciting nursery rhymes while someone tried to drop pinball machines on her, but actually that’s a song. Racism works the same way. It’s everywhere and bad, but some of it is also maybe kind of okay. It so happens that the last month in popular culture has given us two examples of blackface, one of which is the bad kind of racism while the other is okay—by which I mean okay, still probably bad. Video of Ashton Goddamn Kutcher after the jump.