I don’t want to rub it in, Montanans, but it’s supposed to be 72 degrees in New York today. I plan to spend the afternoon in Central Park, although I may be distracted by the Met’s collection of priceless artworks and/or readily available pan-Asian cuisine. Yes, I will probably accidentally see someone masturbating, but that’s a small price to pay for cosmopolis. While I enjoy the world’s greatest city in decline, how about you read this geopolitical analysis of Afghanistan by a woman with three cats? It’s actually by me. That’s a trope!

Loyal commenter and patient user of keyboard shortcuts Attempt posed a genius question in yesterday’s Comments section: when I’m away on vacation or otherwise stricken with laziness, why don’t I post links to some of my paid work? The answer is because I am not very bright, but it’s possible he was asking rhetorically. In that spirit, here’s an increasingly dated list of crises Tila Tequila has tried to solve by showing her tits. Now that I have become aware of this possibility, I need only write stuff until I reach a sort of critical mass that gives me enough to recycle for the rest of my life, like John Updike.

 

Combat! blog is safely ensconced in New York, where all is spring and malodorous fog. The beauty of self-employment is that you can take a trip whenever you want. The horror of self-employment is that your clients still expect you to work no matter what trips you have decided to take, and I remain busier than a shithouse mouse in a country meadow. Combat! blog is the thing I don’t get paid for, and so Combat! blog must suffer. That’s called the invisible hand of the marketplace; it follows that the next best thing would be the very small hand, and so I direct you to the peculiar website One Tiny Hand. Is it an essentially limited concept? Probably. Is it kind of disturbing? Oh yeah. But there is something transcendent about it nonetheless.

It’s just shy of 5am here in Missoula, and I am about to begin the arduous process of being there in New York. While I spend the next several hours getting frisked and jostled and mechanically questioned, how about you read this article about Whit Stillman, whose new movie opens selectively in April? I heard about it on my air traveling bourgeoisiephone. Combat! blog will be back tomorrow and full of falafel.

Guess who lost ten pounds in the last four days? If you guessed Ugandan refugees or someone else with real problems, you’d be right, but I would still glare balefully at you and demand soup. Then I would not eat the soup, because my throat hurts. My throat hurts so much that I make an involuntary motion with my arm every time I swallow. It hurts so much that I actually went to the doctor, who A) feigned pity and B) gave me antibiotics. So now I am fevered, swallow-averse and nauseous, and the self-pity—the real kind of pity, the purest form—rolls forth like, I dunno, breakfast. There is no Combat! blog today. Probably, there will be no Combat! blog tomorrow. I’m sorry that everything has been so crappy this week, but I’ll make it up to you on Monday. Or I will be dead. Either way, everyone will be much happier.