Documentary filmmaker and all-around dope human being Errol Morris has a semi-regular column for the New York Times, in which he discusses “the influences and use of photography.” One of the uses of photography is to provide subject matter for essays I don’t read, for possibly the same reason that I am not interested in sculptures about songs. Yesterday, though, he got me. Morris describes a man who came under the impression that rubbing lemon juice on your face makes it invisible to cameras. Armed with this knowledge, he robbed two banks in Pittsburgh, his eyes and skin burning, only to be identified from security footage and apprehended. The man, Morris opines, was the victim of a kind of anosognosia—in this case the failure, caused by stupidity, to recognize one’s own stupidity.
Friday links: Get away from that! edition
Oh, Link. Oh, nerds.
It’s Friday, when the week that is becomes the week that was and the work that waits is the week that ends. Or something like that. In addition to hiring Rudyard Kipling’s incompetent great-grandson, Rupert Kipling, to write our lead sentences, Combat! blog has been inundated this week with stories of various fins de siecle. Reporting on the aftermath of the end of things is a journalistic pursuit second in popularity only to predicting the end of things, which pretty much take care of all points on the spectrum. It’s a scam, but everybody loves a good postmortem. A widow is the chattiest person you’ll ever meet, and in that spirit today’s link roundup is a collection of stuff about other stuff being over. Lord knows, it’s less ominous news than hearing a bunch of stuff is beginning.
Oh, Steve King. You so, um, racist
Fun fact: This picture of Steve King came from a Fox News article headlined "Rep. Steve King upset that group of Democrats opposed Christmas resolution."
Fellow Iowan, US Representative and probable crazy person Steve King appeared on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show Monday, where he discussed Liddy’s role in the Watergate break-in President Obama’s systemic racism. Mad props to Jacek for the link. According to King, Obama’s policies consistently favor blacks over whites. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from this series of words that he said: “The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person in the case of professor Gates and officer Crowley.” Later in the program, Frankenstein accused the President of having bolts in his neck.
Glenn Beck writes book of “faction”
We’re fucked, you guys. Glenn Beck is a genius, and there’s no way to undo him now. Like Ozymandius before him, Beck has moved from crusader to architect of worlds. The conspiracy-oriented, anti-progressive television host has written a conspiracy-oriented, anti-progressive thriller called The Overton Window, which he describes as a work of “faction”—”completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact.” Exactly how faction differs from realism is not explained, although if early reviews are any indication, it has something to do with motivations, emotions and dialogue. I haven’t read The Overton Window yet—and I’m not sure whether my schadenfreude receptors can handle doing it—so I’m going to stick to what’s known: Glenn Beck has written a novel about a progressive conspiracy that attempts to install a one-world government by unfairly demonizing a grassroots patriotic organization called “The Founders Keepers.”
Zombies capture visceral fears of Ford motor company
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GW9bLQa_Xo&feature=player_embedded
The video above is Ford’s attempt to sell the 2011 Fiesta via an advertisement suggesting that, in certain situations, keyless entry might prevent your being consumed by the soulless husk of your dead grandmother. Caution: zombies, and surprisingly gross makeup/realistic ligament-crunching sounds for a car commercial. If you’re like me, you consider zombies by far the most frightening monster western culture has ever come up with (second most frightening monster,) to the point where watching Shaun of the Dead made it impossible to sleep for the next 48 hours. You are probably not like me. Humorous or at least tongue-in-cheek zombie products—Zombieland, The Zombie Survival Guide, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—far outnumber tongue-on-floor zombie products in contemporary culture. America seems to have decided that living corpses bent on surrounding and then mindlessly forcing their way into your boarded-up house so that you wake each morning to the sound of scratching, scratching, until finally they eat your face and ears have at least some camp value. Zombies are hip.