A blog by Dan Brooks
Pretty much every picture of her is funny if you imagine her saying it.
The short answer to the question posed above, as Dr. Laura Schlessinger demonstrated last week, is “Not eleven times on your nationally syndicated radio show.” If you haven’t heard the clip, I invite you to check it out, if only for the theoretical demonstration of what an n-word valve breaking would sound like. Like Michael Richards before her, Dr. Laura gets started and she just can’t stop.
Participants in the Appleseed Project learn to shoot a man-sized target at 500 yards. Seriously.
Combat! blog is just one Friday link roundup away from its weeklong vacation, and this is it. There will be no Combat! blog next week, because my urbanized ass is going camping in the wilds of, um, New Hampshire. Obviously this period of discombatery will be difficult for all five of us, so today’s link roundup is designed to give you as much to think about for the next week as possible. By “think about” I mean “ponder nervously while you fail to sleep.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of fear, and it’s all over American politics this week. Whether it’s guiding our decisions or just coalescing around them years after the fact, absolute scared-shitlessness is the unifying principle of apparently everything of note in contemporary culture. Won’t you catch a chill with me?
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
By now you have probably heard from the most overweight person at your place of employment that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are disengaged again. I don’t want to make any judgments,*
but it seems like Levi may be responsible for this one, given that A) he confessed that he “may have” conceived a child with another woman and B) according to Bristol, he recently flew “to Hollywood for what he told me was to see some hunting show but come to find out it was that music video mocking my family.” Tactical error, homey. It’s possible, amid the stress that followed impregnating the governor’s daughter immediately before her mom entered a national presidential election, Levi Johnston was not thinking clearly. In that mental state, the decision to get married might not have been wisely considered. Of course, within a broader paradigm, it probably made perfect sense.
How can I hit on her if I don't know what she's reading? Ask her where she played field hockey?
Earlier this week, we discussed the possibility that the trend piece is becoming a new subgenre of newspaper writing, which I intend to start calling Speculative Journalism: stories that could be, but for which there is no actual evidence. As if to confirm our suspicions,*
Mark Oppenheimer published this piece in Slate, in which he worries that the increasing popularity of the Kindle will make it impossible to flirt with strangers based on what books they are reading. “As the Kindle and Nook march on,” he writes, “people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.” Oppenheimer’s position is obviously somewhat tongue-in-check. That doesn’t stop it from also being head-in-ass, though, as Erik Hayden and Eleanor Barkhorn pointed out in separate Atlantic articles. Thus began a war of words, and by “words” I mean specifically the words “digital age” and “social networking,” sandwiched within a series of hilariously inept arguments that culminate in yesterday’s wounded defense from Oppenheimer.
Yeah, who is the President of the United States, really? So little is known about him.
If you don’t already subscribe to the Tea Party Nation newsletter, you are missing some great stuff. The TPN is only one of several groups that claim to be the national Tea Party organization—it’s unclear yet whether they’re the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, so to speak—but they are the canary in the dark, radon-filled mine that is America’s conservative subconscious. First of all, sorry for cramming three metaphors into one sentence. Second, TPN’s most recent screed, entitled The Horrors of Illegal Immigration, is short and spooky enough to quote at length. Check it after the jump.