Well, I’ve moved Combat! to an externally-hosted WordPress platform, sort of. And it works, kinda. I’ll level with you—Combat! looks like complete shit right now, and I barely know how to make WordPress work, and I’ve thus far only been able to figure out how to import the last five posts, and all of the images got screwed up, and asterisks look like they’re going to be damn near impossible. But on the plus side, search engine optimization! I’ve installed the most customizable blog theme I can find, and just as soon as I figure out how to actually configure it I will restore Combat! to its former, aesthetically stunning glory. In the meantime, if you miss the old posts formatted in the old way, you can always point your browser to the old site. I’ll keep hacking away at the new one, and of course the stream of angry, incoherent complaints about contemporary American consumer culture will be unstemmed. Bear with us, Combatants. Your loyalty will be rewarded, probably in the afterlife.

It’s Friday, which means the cognitive dissonance of having to work at a job you dislike—in order to pay rent on an apartment of which you are ashamed so that you can have enough money left over to buy products that only make you feel more empty—has probably reached such a shrieking pitch that you will spend the next four hours listlessly clicking at the internet just to numb yourself enough to forget the passage of time until six o’clock. TGIF, right guys? Me, I work in a closet. Even the most elementary theories of social justice dictate that I ease your pain somehow, so here are a bunch of links for you to stab at between coffee breaks, Facebook updates and specious trips to the bathroom.

But first, exciting news! Those of you who can hear my voice in forms other than Arial 80% gray know my frustration at certain limitations to Combat! blog engendered by the iWeb platform, not the least of which is our inability to participate in Digg or appear on Google. Starting this weekend—assuming I can execute a series of completely baffling technical maneuvers involving remote server configuration and jerry-rigged html conversions that I am in no way qualified to do—Combat! blog will become an independently-hosted site running on the WordPress platform. We’ll still be at www.combatblog.net, and changes to the site will be minimal. The formatting will look different and it will probably take me a while to figure out how to execute in WordPress the stunning graphic designs loyal Combat! readers have come to expect,* but we’ll also get ShareThis buttons and Google analytics and maybe, just maybe, more readers. Cross your fingers.

Now uncross your fingers and check out this review of the new Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, which will apparently include unedited versions of stories from the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love era. Those of you who are way, way too into creative writing probably know that Carver’s ultra-minimalist style—which is A) awesome and B) ruining graduate fiction workshops across America—has been increasingly attributed to his editor, Gordon Lish. Lish cut Carver’s stories mercilessly, particularly for What We Talk About, and in so doing contributed to one of the most distinct prose voices in contemporary literature. “Created” is another term bandied about, although that strikes me as playa hatin’. Whether the crediting of Lish at the expense of Carver is an example of overdue justice or of a critical culture jealously opposed to the notion of the author is for y’all to decide. Try not to be swayed by the knowledge that literature M.A.’s are complete tools.

Mistah Carver also makes an appearance in this article about literary drinkers and whether ending a destructive cycle of alcoholism is, like, good. The author, who is most definitely shilling for his book, makes the interesting argument that the value of authorial drinking varies with style. For Cheever and Carver, getting off the sauce seemed to help—for John Berryman and Steven King, not so much. Poets and guys who write really long sentence should apparently keep pounding whiskey.

On the lighter side of substance abuse, here’s an article about a homeless community under a bridge in Providence, Rhode Island that has a written compact governing its operation.* The organization of their mini-society is both communitarian—that’s why you guys are homeless! you’ve created a culture that doesn’t value individual initiative!—and eerily biblical, including a gay couple that lives “near some rocks where men go to urinate.” It’s an interesting read if you can get past the prose, which is a monument to Dan Barry’s writing really, really hard.

Finally, The Cure points out that I wasn’t the only person to to justify my use of advanced media technology to say the word “faggot” yesterday. Hawaii football coach Greg McMackin apologized for his description of a performance by Notre Dame as a “faggot dance.” You’re right—it doesn’t seem as rakishly funny when someone else does it.

In an effort to mitigate the fallout over his assertion that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates was “stupid,” President Obama will have a beer with Gates and arresting officer Sgt. James Crowley this afternoon, in what mindless newspaper hacks are calling the Suds Summit. See, when the President meets with someone in an official capacity, it’s often called a summit. And they’ll be drinking beer, so we should probably—Jimmy! Jimmy, what’s a word for beer that starts with S? “Suds Summit.” Man, that’s rich. You’re the king, Jimmy.

Sorry—I kind of blacked out on hate, there. Seriously, though, the President and Henry Louis Gates and the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates are going to drink beers together and work this thing out, which sounded absurd to me until I realized that that’s how I solve all of my interpersonal problems, too. The Los Angeles Times justifies its existence with this report on what each participant will be drinking: Red Stripe for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley, and for the leader of the most powerful nation on earth not currently overrun with Chinese people, Bud Light.

Two things strike me here. First, when you’re brokering a make-up session between two guys who got in a stupid argument and you ask them what kind of beer they like, and one of them says “Red Stripe!” and the other says “Blue Moon!” you say, “Well, you assholes are getting Bud Light, because it’s my house.” You don’t buy three different kinds of beer for a party that you know will only be attended by three dudes, one of whom is a cop.

Second, there is no way that the President’s favorite beer is Bud Lite. I believe that Henry Louis Gates likes Red Stripe, although it seems a little affected. Red Stripe was, for many years, my favorite beer, too. I’m sure it seemed even more affected when I drank it, but it is totally delicious and the short necks make it virtually impossible to hit anyone with the empty bottle—hence its ubiquity and the ska and punk shows of my youth. I also believe that James Crowley drinks Blue Moon, when logistics prevent him from drinking Jameson directly out of the bottle while watching a train pass by the front of his squad car as he thinks about his custody settlement. I refuse, however, to accept that President Barack Obama, when considering all the beers in the world that he would most like to drink, settled on Bud Light. There are three reasons why the story seems implausible:

1) Bud Light tastes like the hair near the genital area of a very old dog.
2) Of the people you know who drink Bud Light, how many of them are A) black dudes or B) Harvard graduates or C) Presidents?
3) Of all the beers I could think of, Bud Light seems the least assailable.

You might think that Budweiser would have been the safest choice, but that is also the favored beer of people who have never tasted beer. Bud Light implies that the President has made his selection from among at least two American beers. That his choice should be domestic goes without saying; one can only imagine what today’s 24-hour news cycle would be like had he said his favorite beer was Heineken. As it stands, Barack Obama will sit out back of the White House this afternoon and drink a beer—something that I think we can all agree is, in the variety of human experience, pretty fucking cool. When he gets to live out this fantasy, though, he will have to do it while drinking a Bud Light. Perhaps he can prevail on Gates to let him try a Red Stripe. If he cannot, though, he will have to suffer the retribution owed to a very mild act of dishonesty. As is often the case when we lie, the punishment fits exactly the crime.

Combat! Junior Crimestopper Ben Fowlkes recently pointed out that, while the rest of us were fixated on ice cubes and Sarah Palin,* Glenn Beck was “shucking and jiving without consequence.” Ben sent me this clip, which he presumably saw while watching TV in the day room:

I love shopping online; it’s fast, it’s convenient, and my anxiety disorder makes any trip to an actual store a crippling ordeal. However, because my obsessive-compulsive disorder forces me to pick up a product and look at it from all angles before buying it, turning it over and over in my hands while staring mutely for several minutes, internet purchases entail for me a certain element of risk. Descriptions are of little value, since virtually every product of our post-consumer economy is described as “revolutionary.” Fortunately, I have access to the only genuinely revolutionary product of the internet shopping age: the user review.

It was with this luxury at our disposal that my brother and I went shopping on the internet for ice cube trays. The ice cube trays currently in my brother’s house—where I live, it should be pointed out, completely rent-free in a very nice neighborhood of Washington DC, with essentially unlimited access to air conditioning and high-fiber cereals—are fucking terrible. They were made by the Ikea corporation, and are heart-shaped and Kit Kat-shaped, respectively. The heart ice cubes are never used, because their combination of points, crevices and rigidity make them impossible to remove from the tray. They will be used as samples of Washington, DC drinking water by anthropologists centuries into the future. The Kit Kat ice cubes are slightly better, but they are designed in such a way as to maximize surface area, which also makes them difficult to remove from a tray that, for added inconvenience, features grooves narrower than the spaces between the bars on the freezer rack. Fifty percent of the time, when you refill the Kit Kat tray and put it back in the freezer, one end of it slips down through the rack, coating the frozen food below with water. This is unacceptable.

So we went on Amazon and typed “ice cube tray,” which yielded fifty results. Fortunately, people all across America have taken the time, after their internet-purchased ice cube trays arrive in the mail, to use them for a few months and then—this is amazing—go back on Amazon and rate them using a star system. Those ratings reflect a stunning diversity of quality in the field of ice cube tray manufactury. For example, the innocuously-named TRAY ICE CUBE 2-PK, a product of the Rubbermaid corporation, gets two stars. In her review—“somewhat stylish design, but lacking in execution”—Erin Lynn Barr of Victorville, California says:

I liked the look of these trays and got two sets at my local
walmart (or somewhere… I don’t remember now) I have
had these for years. The problems with these are as
follows:

They do not create equal sized or shaped cubes.
The cubes are difficult to get out.
Some cubes come out, while others are stuck in the tray.
I used these to freeze homemade baby food (sweet
potatoes) and while twisting unsuccessfully, the tray
handle cracked, and still no cubes came out.

Other than that, it makes ice. You can’t expect more from
an ice cube tray, but this frustrated me, so I thought I’d
share.

In addition to inadvertently writing a haiku, Erin Lynn Barr saved us from making a terrible mistake. Despite the attitude of suicidal quietism embodied in her assertion that “you can’t expect more from an ice cube tray,” you definitely can. Check out the 2867–RD–WHT White Ice Cube Tray, also by Rubbermaid, which gets four and a half stars in 24 glowing reviews, like this one:

It may seem strange to rave about ice cube trays, but I
have too much experience slamming my old plastic trays
on the countertop to loosen the cubes, causing crack that
leaked water onto my freezer after I tried to fill them.
These trays release the cubes very easily. One less source
of daily frustration.

That’s from Rob T, who claims he is from Los Angeles, CA but clearly leaves in a Raymond Carver story. His review is titled, “Absolutely amazing,” an outpouring of wonderment contextualized somewhat by the title of the preceding review, “Ice Cube Tray.” Mike and I bought that one, which based on its picture was a white plastic tray divided into several small compartments shaped like cubes. It cost six dollars, which is probably insane.