Mark Cuban inadvertently reveals massive Twitter conspiracy

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment
So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

The big news in news that covers the news is that robber baron of the DeBordian Spectacle Rupert Murdoch has threatened to opt out of Google, walling off all News Corp  properties from the search engine’s webcrawlers and generally ensuring that nobody gets anything he makes for free. That’s cool. If Murdoch really thinks that the traffic driven to his various internet properties—which include WSJ.com, FoxNews.com and the purchased-in-a-manner-analogous-to-getting-wasted-and-going-home-with-a-fat-girl Myspace—isn’t worth the irritation of knowing that Google is indexing them for free, he’s welcome to hitch his wagon to Bing. As Weston Kosova of Newsweek sarcastically points out, people are totally going to search for “Sarah Palin teeth vagina” on Google, see what comes up, and then head on over to Bing to see if maybe News Corp has anything else. It’s a terrible idea if you intend to use the internet as a tool to disseminate your news reporting, but if you only see the internet as a way to advertise the other media outlets through which you disseminate your et cetera, it’s great. Murdoch’s problem with Google is that it doesn’t tell anyone about his products without also giving them a way to access them for free. His frustration captures the irony of the internet’s relationship to newspapers and television; it increases their circulation exponentially, while simultaneously making increased circulation almost valueless. It’s a real pickle, and it explains why, six months ago, every conventional news outlet in America couldn’t wait to tell us about Twitter.

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Gaywad who won’t say Pledge a nerd hero

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 10 Comments
They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

As an adult nerd, I am peculiarly fascinated by Will Phillips, the Arkansas ten year-old who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gay people are allowed to marry. If you haven’t seen the CNN interview he did with John Roberts, quit your job, tell your loved ones to go to hell and watch it now. Will Phillips is a very principled young man, who is possibly the puppet of his enormous father but unquestionably very brave. He is also a big-time nerd. Specifically, he is a nerd subspecies I refer to as the Careful Nerd—an articulate person whose intense awareness of himself has terrified him into a state of eerie calm, as if he were perpetually speaking from the top step of a ladder. The Careful Nerd makes up for his inability to confidently navigate nonverbal social cues by investing in the denotative meaning of language. Hence his vaguely Spock-y demeanor—he’s put his faith in the logical value of what he’s saying to get through the conversation, and organized the rest of his communication around not fucking up. I base all of this one accepted psychological study, by the way, and certainly not on my own personal experience.

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Friday links! Agonizing anticipation edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Hot dog dog

Ah, early November—the season when America waits for things. Fall is crappy and wet, but winter—like a father glaring at you over the back of his hand—has yet to unleash his fury upon us. Baseball season is over, but binge-eating-and-gift-giving season has yet to begin. This time last year, we were waiting for our newly elected President to replace the semi-retarded cowboy who had taken over the White House. Now, we’re waiting for aforesaid President to make good on one of his biggest campaign promises, despite the strenuous opposition of a whole nation of semi-retarded cowboys. And tomorrow night is Fedor vs. Rogers, which, if you don’t know what that is, oh man. The point is, we’ve got a lot to look forward to over the next couple days/months/decades, and the anticipation is killing me.

It didn’t kill this guy, though, thanks to the swift intercession of paramedics from the Office of the Attending Physician. Ironically, the man who collapsed at Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” anti-health care reform rally on Capitol Hill yesterday was saved by government doctors. Apolitical coverage of the event has been hard to come by, in part because the whole thing was a piece of political theatre to begin with and in part because a bunch of other horrible stuff happened yesterday. The New York Times offered some street-level reporting in their Well blog, the tone of which I would describe as barely-restrained anger. The author the article, David Herszenhorn, points out that many in the crowd, “while visibly angry, could not articulate the main problems in the health care system or how they should be solved.” Now that’s the real America, right there: visibly angry, and unable to articulate what the problem is.

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What’s funny about the Onion’s Glenn Beck car accident gag?

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 3 Comments
It's not funny, but I agree with it. I guess that's better than laughing.

It's not funny, but I agree with it. I guess that's better than laughing.

Today’s Combat! post is going to be unusually short, because I spent the time during which I normally write in my blog waiting for the Bresnan technician to come out and install cable internet in my new home—an expedience which, ironically, was supposed to make it easier to write in my blog. I also spent all the other time I usually spend doing stuff waiting for the Bresnan technician to et cetera etc. Just because Bresnan tells you when they’re coming doesn’t mean it has any significance to them. They’re like a college sophomore that way.

Anywhom, during the six or so hours I was deprived of the internet today, literally threes of you sent me this video from the Onion News Network. If you somehow haven’t seen it already, I urge you to watch it immediately. Entitled “Victim in Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck,” it depicts a small town riven by the news that the young honor student killed by a drunk driver is not the Fox News star. It’s funny. Then again, “funny” is a subjective term, especially if you’re moral mountaineer Melissa McEwan.

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