You’re listening to your politicians—
They claim to speak to God.
Can’t you see it’s just a fraud?
Your rituals and superstitions —
Don’t you find them kind of odd?
Might as well kneel before Zod.
— Electric Six, “Rip It”
Now, though, it turns out that you don’t actually have to choose between the electoral process and Krypton’s most notorious malefactor.
The question has hung in the air for over half a decade now. Friends have asked it. So have strangers. I’ve never known exactly how to reply.
On Tuesday, lying in a dentist’s chair, listening to an FM radio station burble a non-stop stream of Christmas songs — not the occasional Christmas tune interspersed with more generic easy listening, but one long, unbroken, treacly strand of artificially-sweetened “holiday cheer” — I thought I could almost discern the outlines of an answer; the buzzing of the drill, however, made it hard to be sure.
Yesterday I wandered the aisles of Home Depot, subjected to more uninterrupted Christmas music. It might have been during the chorus of “Jingle Bell Rock”, a song that has always made me want to inflict grievous bodily harm upon its original perpetrators, that I recognized, in a moment of blinding clarity, the truth that had always been right before my eyes:
This is why I hate America.
Wil Shipley takes a break from inventing new games to compile the feel-good list of the year. Personally, I can’t decide if my favorite is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 2: We Still Do Not Require Any Form of Identification, or Garfield 3: 2 in the Head, 1 in the Chest.
John C. Welch on why the first version of Amazon’s e-book reader is not going to take the world by storm:
The other major problem with replacing books is that there isn’t an online store that you want to browse the way you will a book store. Jeff Bezos can hump his Kindle until it’s as sticky as a stripper’s shoes, but you don’t browse Amazon, not really. You might link-hop a bit, but face it, Amazon’s strength is that it lets you get shit done like a SEAL sniper. You find your target, take the shot, and get out. That’s not bad, not on any level. It’s one reason why I use, no why I love Amazon so much for buying gifts and the like. They have a lot of stuff, it’s easy to find, and it’s usually pretty cheap. It’s also really easy to get through the whole “trading money for stuff” part of the transaction.
The consistently-brilliant John Rogers takes most of what’s made me want to sob brokenly about this country and its politics for the last year, and actually manages to make it funny. Read it while you cry in your beer and practice saying, “Regular or synthetic, Master?”