Combat! blog’s fleet of private jets, currently outsourced to United Airlines—motto: for $85 we’ll spit on it first—has run into a bit of a snag, and I’m going to spend much of the day straightening it out. You know what that means: extremely half-assed Friday links. You could just turn to Facebook right now, since I already have your precious clicks. Or you could criticize my output in the Comments section, although as Alex Pappademas points out in Grantland, objective standards of success and failure are hard to come by in our increasingly fragmented culture. Ours is the kind of alienated multi-society that leads a former Olympian to become a pricey Vegas call girl, although it’s possible she just did that for fun. The important thing is that we judge her, and judge her harshly—as does our Smoking Gun reporter in a series of jarring intrusions. Welcome to the new journalism—a place where those who report cannot believe the stupidity of those reported upon. Suzy Favor Hamilton should have retired with dignity/hepatitis like Aleksander Emelianenko. If you don’t know who that is, you need to start watching the UFC immediately, or at least this weekend, when it airs. Prime yourself by reading Ben al-Fowlkes’s generous profile of Chris Leben, the tough/self-destructive/fascinating middleweight who will eventually not get another chance. It’s all glory now, though, until he steps into the cage. On a related note, we’ll be back soon with actual blog. In the meantime, I have to hurtle through the air in a metal tube full of jerks.
