Is it okay to have an opinion about this photo?

The photo above was uploaded to Facebook by my friend Lucas. Here I use friend very loosely.* I haven’t seen Lucas since high school, when he was a year behind me. While we were friendly acquaintances, we never really hung out, and we certainly haven’t kept in touch since then. We became friends on Facebook sometime last year, presumably due to the “people you may know” feature. Lucas is a person I might know, had we not both left our hometown essentially for good at the end of high school. As it is, he is someone I know not at all, except I knew immediately when his wife went into labor and that he lives in LA and where he goes to lunch pretty much every day.

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Friday links! Spades are spades edition

I think this picture is what's been missing from our increasingly tedious Friday visual puns, if you know what I mean.

It’s the end of the week, and TGIFF, you B’s. Maybe it’s just the unseasonably warm weather here in Montana, but I can’t help but feel that a veil is falling away. Ours is an impressively euphemistic society, where bitter spite goes dressed in the robes of parliamentary procedure and cold depredation smiles warmly from the podium. Unlike a lie, though, the truth is there whether you’re talking about it or not, and like the gay director of your church camp, it will eventually out itself. This week was a surprisingly good one for calling things by their right names, to the point that even our usually gloomy Friday links have taken on the rosy glow of…god, I can’t think of the word. What’s that thing that’s the opposite of despair? You know, the thing that rich charlatans laugh at? I know it’s a political strategy of some sort, but I feel like it has an archaic definition, too. Ah, well—I’m sure I’ll think of it, and if I never do I’ll still have consumer electronics. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s link roundup, in which a mighty herd of telling it like it is goes sweeping across the nation, paradoxically leaving a little less bullshit in its wake.

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