Friday links! End of whatever edition

Then came the Bird-men, probably because we'd all been fucking birds.

Then came the Bird-men, probably because we’d been fucking birds.

As the biggest assholes in the world remind me on Facebook, now begins the end of the Mayan something or other. Their calendar runs out in like a week, signaling the prophesied end of Mayan civilization. You can tell the calendar was really important to the Mayans, because the only specific part of their end-of-the-world prophecy is the date. In this way it is the opposite of say, Revelation, which tells us in gory detail what will happen but really leaves us hanging re: when. I am forced to conclude that all presently occurring phenomena are signs of the end times, and this week was the ripple that precedes the wave of stable dog/cat roommate situations. Today is Friday—possibly our last. Won’t you scrutinize the heavens with me?

No? Okay—let’s watch TV. Anne Coulter, who is not exactly a redoubt of circumspection, has suggested that the Republican Party allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest 2% of households. I welcome our satanic overlords and immediately backwards talking begin will. Also, you know Huffington Post is a real news source because of how many people are in charge of posting clips from cable. When it comes to news of news recently reported, nobody reports better than HuffPo. Maybe the interns at The Daily Show.

Meanwhile, on the withering end of public discourse, Mark Danner has written this wonderful piece about the Republican beliefworld for the New York Review of Books. If you read without enjoyment through the sentence, “Mitt Romney is a handsome man and, in a slightly exaggerated, Senator Forehead kind of way, truly does look like he was born to be president,” you can stop. We are different people. In the early coalescence of master narratives describing the 2012 election, Republicans use propaganda machine to trick selves is my favorite so far. It’s like an Aesop fable.

Less instructive is Sudan’s announcement that they have captured an Israeli spy vulture. Props to Lucretia for the link. The vulture was caught by the authorities and convicted by his GPS collar, along with his “Hebrew University Jerusalem” label, which also included the email address of an Israeli avian biologist. “The Israeli scientists first knew something was amiss in early December,” CNN reports, “when the GPS system indicated the vulture was on the ground and was moving along a road in western Sudan.” Yeah, that’s a problem. No word yet on whether the Jew vulture has managed to turn any members of the Sudanese government, but you can bet he has. The Mayans specifically said that a beast would lead them.

Some events send the mind begging. Consider The Onion’s report, “Sitcom characters still in shock after Christmas episode proves existence of Santa Claus.” Once again, The Onion teaches us everything we need to know about standards of realism. Kombat! Kids: Write 350 words about the use of literary naturalism in the following sentence: “‘Jesus, are we going insane?’ said the show’s protagonist Frankie Heck, several days after hearing the faint sound of sleigh bells as her 10-year-old son Brick joyously unwrapped a popular new toy that she and her husband were unable to buy in time for Christmas.

Frankie Heck, indeed. When parody and nature align so closely, the end draws near. In such times, the wise man trusts in only one thing:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38h-XdFA97g

Rock!

 

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