Combat! blog move! Combat! blog smash!

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice. This picture has nothing to do with today's post, but it is just so clearly Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice

The Combat! blog offices continue our move from our crappy old mountain lair to our beautiful new creekside lair today, and we have no time for, say, 900 word screeds about Keynesian economics. Lucky you. Lucky all of us, in fact, because it so happens that Ben al-Fowlkes has sent us a link to this wonderful website. There is probably a better use for the internet, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. Viral image-makers, take note.

Mike Cassady travels through time, amuses you

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

Combat! blog is buried in an avalanche of work today, but fortunately we have this video to brighten our spirits. Just when you thought there was no more work to be done in the field of discount electronics store sketches, Mike Cassady makes it new. Watch this video and then go see him at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade in LA, pretty much every night of the week because he is awesome.

Errol Morris on the unknown unknowns

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 9 Comments

Documentary filmmaker and all-around dope human being Errol Morris has a semi-regular column for the New York Times, in which he discusses “the influences and use of photography.” One of the uses of photography is to provide subject matter for essays I don’t read, for possibly the same reason that I am not interested in sculptures about songs. Yesterday, though, he got me. Morris describes a man who came under the impression that rubbing lemon juice on your face makes it invisible to cameras. Armed with this knowledge, he robbed two banks in Pittsburgh, his eyes and skin burning, only to be identified from security footage and apprehended. The man, Morris opines, was the victim of a kind of anosognosia—in this case the failure, caused by stupidity, to recognize one’s own stupidity.

Continue reading

Glenn Beck writes book of “faction”

By Dan Brooks in Literature, Uncategorized 4 Comments

We’re fucked, you guys. Glenn Beck is a genius, and there’s no way to undo him now. Like Ozymandius before him, Beck has moved from crusader to architect of worlds. The conspiracy-oriented, anti-progressive television host has written a conspiracy-oriented, anti-progressive thriller called The Overton Window, which he describes as a work of “faction”—”completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact.” Exactly how faction differs from realism is not explained, although if early reviews are any indication, it has something to do with motivations, emotions and dialogue. I haven’t read The Overton Window yet—and I’m not sure whether my schadenfreude receptors can handle doing it—so I’m going to stick to what’s known: Glenn Beck has written a novel about a progressive conspiracy that attempts to install a one-world government by unfairly demonizing a grassroots patriotic organization called “The Founders Keepers.”

Continue reading

Who is S.E. Cupp, exactly?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse, Uncategorized 5 Comments

"Are you sure we should take the picture right now? It seems kind of windy."

In addition to being every woman I told myself I should just go over and talk to, SE Cupp is also a mystery. She’s a professed atheist who has written a book called Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity. She’s just completed a master’s degree in religious studies at Columbia, and also just asserted her nonbelief on Bill Maher fifty times. [Warning: Maher at his most irritating.] She did the same thing with Sean Hannity, who insisted that she was actually an agnostic.* In an interview with the Daily Beast, she told Benyamin Cohen that ““I knew at a very young age that I didn’t really buy the whole God gamut.” She also told him that as a child she wanted to be a nun. Her columns for the NY Daily News—in which she argues that President Obama has not effectively wielded the power of fear and that we shouldn’t clean up the BP oil spill—suggest that she might simply be a contrarian. Yet she has built her career on aggressively upholding traditional beliefs. Let us not forget, when she argues that the news media naturally attack Christianity because “liberalism and secularism are the standards and anything that crops up against that are the exceptions,” that she is talking about a religion professed by nearly 80% of Americans.

Continue reading