At the risk of using my blog to tell people about other people who looked at my work, thereby causing the entire narcissism manifold to collapse upon itself, our stupid zombie video has more than a quarter million views since Monday. That officially makes it the most popular thing I have ever written.* 
It also makes me think this internet video thing might be catching on. As a producer and consumer of web bullshit, I tend inordinately toward text for one simple reason: working in a medium that 98% of the population considers important only to schoolchildren obviates the question of whether you’re doing a good job. You can write anything after the first 200 words, because by then the only people reading are those who identify with the act of reading itself and therefore like whatever. It’s like dating a drama girl. Anywhom, this week’s link roundup is chock full of videos, self-portraits, candid recordings and other proof that words are lame. It also contains the word “faggot” like fifty times. It’s Friday!
First, let us examine what is possibly the most bald-faced lie of the entire week: anchor Megyn “With a Y, Because My Parents Just Assumed I Would Become a Stripper” Kelly’s claim, yesterday, that Fox News does not regularly employ comparisons to Nazism in its programming. Such moments remind one of the awesome power of the lie as blunt instrument; you just have to stumble backward and admire the effort for a second, like when somebody hits you with a tire. MediaMatters refutes Kelly with about 30 quotations from the last five years, most of which come from Glenn Beck and former Beck Bill O’Reilly, but one of which is from Fox News president Roger Ailes like two months ago. “[NPR executives] are, of course, Nazis,” Ailes said, regarding the decision to invade Poland, I mean fire Juan Williams. “They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism.”
Meanwhile, on the radically more liberal left wing of Texas, Lyndon Johnson buys pants. “Meanwhile,” in this context, means “fifty years ago.” This video might secretly be a Haggar commercial, but it’s also an animated version of a 1964 recording of LBJ using the phone in the Oval Office to order a pair of trousers/subtly imply that normal men’s pants cannot accommodate his genitals. Behold:
Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.
Drawing a picture is to me as piano recital is to horse, but it turns out that some people can use it as a means of self-expression. Consider Bryan Lewis Saunders, who is producing a series of self-portraits, each under the influence of a different drug. Props to Valley Tiger John Griswell for the link. Saunders is one of those odd specimens of artist: pure, self-destructive to somehow make it into his forties, and the sense of inadvertent survival adds an overtone of alienated wonder to his self-portraits. Be sure to check out his detailed description of the project, if for no other reason than to see the weirdly hilarious cough syrup picture.
Just in case you didn’t get enough hick accents from the LBJ thing, my brother sent me this possibly staged, definitely hilarious dashcam video of, well, this:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbeVnvUfRXw
There is no persuasive oratory like drunk southern persuasive oratory. And now for what you’ve all been waiting for: the word “faggot” a bunch of times. You didn’t think they’d all be at the end, did you?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZPlPdjrNU&feature=related
I’m not gay, but Scott Thompson kind of makes me wish I were. Not in Toronto in the nineties, though.
Thanks for the shout out and the Kids in the Hall were the best.
Two thoughts:
Is “running Faggot, running free” sung by Jack Black? Look closely.
Is it possible that LBJ, then the sitting president of the United States, had no better vocabulary than to use “nuts” and “bung hole” in a commercial
transaction? Makes you wonder what he said at State dinners.
The singers of “Running Faggot” are Bruce McCulloh and Mark McKinney, but you’re right—McCulloh is weirdly reminiscent (or, I guess, prefigurative) of Jack Black.
The LBJ call and his weirdly aggressive use of “nuts” and “bunghole” reminds me of something that happened to one of my former coworkers. He was meeting a new and very wealthy client for the first time, and when he came over, the client was getting a message. In the act of standing up, he casually exposed his genitals to my coworker before closing his robe and introducing himself. We decided it was a spectacular rich guy power play, and I suspect LBJ was doing something similar.
That should be “getting a massage,” not “getting a message.” It should almost always be that.
I love the fact that “dui on skyjack” is a category. I also love hearing a sitting POTUS say “nuts” and “bunghole,” and I owe it all to Combat!
Now then. It’s off to the Times.
The genre of “stupid videogame videos” is absolutely flooded with content, but very little of it is actually entertaining. It’s easy to stand out from the crowd, in the same way that it’s easy to be tall as an American in China.
That said, it’ll be fun telling people “I used to live with the guy who wrote the zombie hooker sketch”