Amazon product reviews: skeleton stands

By Dan Brooks in consumerism 4 Comments

Poor Mr. Thrifty

I write this while standing up, because I am a weirdo. In my ongoing, possibly insane quest to fix my rickety body before I get too old, I have constructed a standing desk. It is not a work of great craftsmanship, but it delights me. I have come to suspect that human hamstrings were not designed for eight hours of boneward pressure each day. Standing work makes me very happy, although my standing desk does not, and so I set out to find some new means of raising my laptop to eye level. What holds things at eye level? I asked myself. That is how I lost several hours reading Amazon reviews of stands for model skeletons.

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Psychic, powerless, another man’s sac: Butthole Surfers at the Wilma

By Dan Brooks in punk rock 0 Comment

Butthole Surfers at Manchester in July 2008

I’m so glad I didn’t bring a date to Butthole Surfers. It’s not that I didn’t have a weirdo fantastic time. I did. It’s that while I had this fantastic time, I also watched pretty much continuous video of people’s faces exploding. Butthole Surfers performed a loud, tight set of their weirder jams in front of a 20-foot projection screen last night, and they did everything on purpose. You could tell because the video was admirably synched—even when it was video of, say, a screaming Japanese woman getting her limbs pulled off and therefore gaining the ability to fly, or Scanners. It was gross and then it was interesting and then it was really gross in a way that became hypnotic. Once again, Butthole Surfers made me like them by doing stuff to me that I didn’t like.

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Glenn Beck writes book of “faction”

By Dan Brooks in Literature, Uncategorized 4 Comments

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.”

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