Like Santa Claus or love, Arby’s Meat Mountain may be a beautiful lie

By Dan Brooks in Narrative Watch 0 Comment
The "meat mountain," a sandwich containing all meats available at Arby's

The Meat Mountain, a sandwich containing all meats available at Arby’s

The internet likes nothing better than a stunt food, so Arby’s Meat Mountain has gotten a lot of coverage over the last two weeks. Over at Slate, however, LV Anderson wonders whether the ostensibly grassroots demand for this wad of processed protein wasn’t manufactured by corporate. First of all, this story on whether people really want a particular Arby’s menu item appears in Slate’s “Brow Beat” section, ostensibly devoted to high culture. That’s not the kind of high I thought they meant. Second, a technical note: because possessive nouns are difficult to pluralize in American English, this post will use the generally accepted plural of Arby’s, “landfills.”

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“Rolling coal” a knockout game for environmentalists

By Dan Brooks in Being Cool 3 Comments
A Ford Powerstroke diesel, modified to produce extra smoke and marketed to men with perfectly normal penises

A Ford Powerstroke diesel, modified to produce extra smoke for the normal-penised gentleman

The problem with internet journalism is that you never know whether you’re reading about a thing that is happening all around you or just hearing an echo. Case in point: “rolling coal,” the practice of modifying a truck to force extra fuel into the engine and produce billows of black smoke. Much like the knockout game, it is either a thing that jerks across the nation are doing because they hate the environment, or a legend we’re embracing because we consider ourselves victims of a world gone mad. Rolling coal is news or hysteria. It started with this article in Vocativ, which Dave Weigel wrote about in Slate on Thursday, causing everybody to write about it over the weekend.

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Department of Correcting update: Sentences

By Dan Brooks in Go berserk? 0 Comment

spelling-mistake-1

It turns out that we made a lot of mistakes lately—by “we” I mean the Combat! blog interns, whom I made the mistake of hiring, but also society—so I thought we might devote today’s post to taking them back; by “them” I mean the mistakes, not the interns, who will be taken back at the end of the semester by South Carolina State or whatever. Can somebody fix that sentence and bring me a pain au chocolat? Come on, people—get it together.

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Forced into bottle service, “men’s rights activist” loses lawsuit

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media, Uncategorized 1 Comment
Self-described antifeminist attorney Roy Den Hollander, with subpoena and unfair cheese

Self-described antifeminist attorney Roy Den Hollander, with subpoena and unfair cheese

Back in 2010, a bouncer told Manhattan attorney Roy Den Hollander he could only enter the Chelsea nightclub Amnesia if he bought a $350 bottle of vodka. At that same moment, that very same bouncer let in an attractive young woman for free. It was a clear human rights violation, mostly having to do with Hollander’s gender but also possibly his age. As he puts it, Hollander is “middle-aged.” He would not say the exact number to the New York Daily News, leading to this delightful sequence of paragraphs:

“If I’m hitting on some young girl at the club—and I won’t be hitting on an older one because they don’t look as good—if she knows how old I am I’m not going to be able to exploit her infinite capacity to delude herself into thinking I’m younger,” he said.

A search of public records revealed he’s 66 years old.

He is also a jerk, which is maybe what happens when you’re scheduled to live to 132. Props to The Angel Ben Gabriel for the link.

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Precommitment devices, Eva Longoria, Sartre

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

You could have done worse, Tony Parker.

Slate runs three kinds of articles: (1) timely analyses of news items that appeared on Gawker four days ago, (2) Would This Statement Attract More Readers As a Question?, and (3) essays on subjects that the author happens to have just published a book about. For my money, category (3) is the most interesting, since if there’s one thing I like more than reading a book, it’s talking about a book I haven’t read. I was therefore thrilled to encounter Daniel Akst’s report/essay/plug about precommitment devices—not because it’s tremendously insightful or fun, but because it draws attention to two important issues facing society: Jean-Paul Sartre’s construction of vertigo and Eva Longoria.

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