I’m in the Times and the Indy, talking that mess

A newsstand seen through Roddy Piper’s magic glasses in They Live

It’s a big Thursday for Combat! blog, because I am in the New York Times. Apparently everyone who works there drinks, since they deigned to publish my Letter of Recommendation: Pedialyte. Do you know Pedialyte? Our hypocritical modern society markets it as a formula for children, but really it’s for adults. Specifically, it’s for adults who drink and work out to the point of vomiting, even though they are old now and should probably know better. I am old now. But I know nothing! Head on over to the Times and see how I somehow manage to make a living anyway.

In other news, literally, I wrote about John Carpenter’s misunderstood 1988 horror-satire They Live for the Missoula Independent. I first saw They Live in 2006, when it was presented to me as a so-bad-it’s-good eighties misfire. It is that. But at the time, I completely missed the subtext about Reaganomics and the amoral materialism that inspired Carpenter to make the movie in the first place. Today, Reag-o-nomical horror feels relevant again. The country is in the midst of some sort of nightmarish eighties throwback, but the people who most need to hear They Live‘s message have determined the alien conspirators who live among us represent…Jews. Seriously—Carpenter had to go on Twitter to tell internet Nazis it was about yuppies and not the Rothschild conspiracy. That, right there, is a neat encapsulation of our political moment. Even if you don’t care about politics or weird-toned eighties camp, They Live is worth watching for this the greatest fight scene in film history:

Meanwhile, in yet more news or at least opinion, Rep. Barry Usher (R–Roundup) has begun to walk back a bill that would ban bicycles from most of Montana’s public roads. Usher claimed his proposal, which would make it illegal to ride a bicycle outside of a municipal area on any two-lane road without a paved shoulder, was in the interest of bike safety. It seemed more like a motorist convenience bill, designed to save drivers from the danger of having to slow down and wait to pass. Little did he realize that almost none of the highways in the state have paved shoulders. Because the bill also applies to pedestrians and people in wheelchairs, it would make it a crime for people in rural areas to leave their properties, unless they were in cars. For once, though, public outcry has carried the day, and Usher now plans to rewrite his bill if not scratch it entirely. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

Victory is sweet. This is the last Combat! blog of the week, because I am going to Seattle tomorrow morning for a fencing tournament. Will I win? Absolutely not. There will be Olympians and shit, and I started fencing last year. But will I have the opportunity to frustrate vastly superior fencers with my weird style, throwing them into the tantrums characteristic of the preppie class? You bet your sweet, unguarded hand I will. I’ll see you Monday, probably with a bunch of weird bruises on my leg.

Elocution bombshell: Trump saying “big league,” not “bigly”

Donald Trump expresses the same emotion as the : / emoticon

Donald Trump expresses the same emotion as the : / emoticon.

Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to impressionists since at least George W. Bush, if not since Nixon himself. In addition to talking like a Jerky Boys character, his word choice is so consistently weird as to offer anyone who mimics him a readymade vocabulary: tremendous, (h)uge, great, believe me, trust me, you’ll see, I do not have a personality disorder, I’ll sue you for defamation, et cetera. Maybe none of the entries in this lexicon is as strange as “bigly,” a word Trump says—or people think he says—a lot. According to the New York Times and linguist Dr. Susan Lin, however, he’s actually saying “big league.” I thought we all agreed on that.

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Close Reading: Donald Trump on cybersecurity

Donald Trump calls Apple CEO Tim Cook to find out if his laptop has the internet.

Donald Trump asks Apple CEO Tim Cook if his laptop has the internet.

Alert reader/covert breeder John Smick sent me this passage from the transcript of a New York Times interview with Donald Trump. The story that emerged from that interview, in July, focused on his now-infamous refusal to commit to defending NATO allies. But he also had this to say about the importance of cybersecurity:

But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber.

The management would like to remind you that this man is 70 years old. Close reading after the jump.

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How am I to react to “men should stop writing?”

Author and feminist Eileen Myles

Author and feminist Eileen Myles

You may have noticed that Combat! blog has gotten later and crappier recently. That’s because I changed my workflow. I generally break my writing day into two-hour slots, with 15-minute breaks between. Combat! used to be the first slot of the day, because it’s an unpaid, non-deadline project and therefore the easiest thing to not do. Now that I’m actively writing prose fiction, though, that’s the easiest thing not to do. So I do it as soon as I wake up, when I am still groggy and mistakenly remember writing as fun, after breakfast but before I do anything else. I used to read the newspaper a little, just to get my brain going, but I changed that policy after I read this interview with Eileen Myles in the New York Times. I quote:

I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation. There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.

What am I to do with that?

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A heartening note from a fact-checker

Ted Cruz makes his truth-telling face.

Ted Cruz makes his truth-telling face.

Over at the New York Times, Angie Drobnic Holan has written an interesting guest editorial about her work as a political fact-checker. Holan works for PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning project of the Tampa Bay Times to determine the accuracy of public statements. When you think about it, every news organization in America should do that—especially since Holan notes that fact-check stories get a lot of internet traffic after debates and other news events. Now is a good time for fact-checking. “I see accurate information becoming more available and easier for voters to find,” she writes. “By that measure, things are pretty good.”

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