Decades of Drudgery

#resist

The lede tells me that one of America’s most widely read right-wing journalists said something nasty about someone who went and said something spectacular in his own right, but I find myself wondering how anyone, even conservatives, still pay attention to the journalist who is essentially criticizing his commercial competition.

The most part of accepting that professional wrestling is not real combat comes down to just that, accepting the obvious. The hardest part about supermarket tabloid gossip was always the idea that anyone might believe it. Twenty-some years have Republicans denigrated themselves for a horde of alleged journalists whose apparent basis for competition has something to do with finding ways to pitch more extreme alternatives to a worryingly hungry audience.

What portion of what is happening, and how we got here, has to do with words like, “unwell”?

And to what degree does is it relevant, or is any notion of apropos merely a matter of aesthetic priorities, that over two decades after the widely-read conservative firebomb journalist accidentally helped a cartoonist win a Pulitzer …―

An established muckraker questions the psychiatric health of a competitor and market heir, and something goes here about the Pulitzer joke and nearly bringing down a presidency, and here we are all these years later and still drowning in rape culture because … I mean, say what we will about Republicans and conservatives and all that, but the rest of the nation has been finding ways to enable them. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn’t vote for them, either, but it is also true that we’re Americans, and we just don’t go lining them up in front of the ditch, so we should probably consider that somewhere in between we still simply haven’t done enough to forestall such spectacles as two excremental puckers fighting for headlines because that is the priority.

____________________

Image note: Detail of Lucifer, by Franz von Stuck, 1890.

Dear BuzzFeed: No

MEMORANDUM

To: BuzzFeed

re: Do you really need the explanation

I figure I am being pedantic. That must be it, right? I mean, it’s true that I occasionally mistake BuzzFeed for a news organization, mostly because whenever I encounter it someone purports to be telling me something about the news. It is, of course, my own fault for taking you seriously; thank you for correcting that erroneous notion.

No, seriously, as fatally ironic metahumor goes, I suppose someone, somewhere needed to try that one. And I do confess my curiosity as to just how many clicks that tease accrues. Still, though, I think the problem is that the only thing funny about it is the fact of someone wasting their time trying.

Were you hazing the intern? Taking bets on who could most embarrass their own mother for the fact of their own birth? (No, really, who won, and how?)

Still, though, God works in mysterious ways; you can always use that for an excuse.

____________________

Image note: “23 Pictures That Really Need To Be Deleted From The Internet” ― Sidebar offering from Buzzfeed.com, 3 November 2016.

Another real headline

Another real headline:

Terrorists ‘could use exploding breast implants to blow up jet’

The story, via the Daily Telegraph:

Radical Islamist plastic surgeons could be carrying out the implant operations in lawless areas of Pakistan, security sources are said to warned.

Explosives experts have reportedly said just five ounces of Pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate packed into a breast implant would be enough to blow a “considerable” hole in the side of a jumbo jet.

It would be virtually possible for airport security scanners to detect the explosive if hidden inside a breast, medics have said.

Joseph Farah, a terrorism expert, told The Sun: “Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery.”

Plastic surgeons may also have inserted the chemical into the buttocks of would-be suicide bombers.

The discovery was reportedly made after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a London-educated Nigerian, attempted to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas day with explosives packed into his underpants.

Hours after his attack failed, British intelligence services reportedly picked up “chatter” from Pakistan and Yemen that alerted them to the bizarre new method.

I’m waiting for the B-class horror version: Tits of Terror, starring Nicole Eggert and Karen Black, directed by Uwe Boll.

And, yes, we’ll skip the predictable clichés.