Fun fact: use of this film is considered a war crime.
The return of the last three twenty year olds on Earth paying for movies. Our heroes are:
Alan: Sour grape.
Byron: Pop rocks and cola.
Cammy: Special brownies.
Byron lies still, in the porous border between life and death. His two best, and apparently only, friends stand by his bedside. Cammy pokes at his side with a small branch, while Alan fiddles with a dating app.
From the desk of Agent Redacted,
Armchair generals are quick to pass judgment on the CIA for flaying prisoners. These bleeding hearts (figuratively, unlike facility six detainees) have no grasp of operational reality. Skinning suspected enemies alive provided an essential tactical edge in multiple scenarios, contrary to multiple misleading reports from Congress. A fair retrospective of Bush-era flaying by the CIA cannot ignore the national security benefits of Operation Dermal Quilting.
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It was pop radio’s mission to kill me this summer. I swear, it almost succeeded. Between Iggy Azalea’s shitty impression of a black woman and Nicki Minaj’s shitty impression of a vocalist, there was no shortage of dreck to blame other people for listening to.
But there were two songs that weren’t just bad. They were disappointing, and that’s kind of worse. Fancy and Anaconda never had a chance at being good from the moment of their conception to the moment they first assaulted the airwaves. A disappointing song, on the other hand, had potential. In some other universe, perhaps it realized this potential. But this is the same universe where people continue to go see Woody Allen’s movies after learning that he molested his stepdaughter. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
These two disappointing songs, by the way, were Ariana Grande’s Bang Bang and newcomer Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass. The former is none too interesting in its failure: Nicki Minaj has a guest verse. Her mere presence at the supermarket would be enough to effectively age everything in the dairy section a few months in advance; it took her even less effort to spoil such a potentially fun song. All About That Bass, though, is a far more interesting train wreck. It’s a body-positive self-empowerment anthem that might have worked had it not dropped the damn P Bomb. What is the P Bomb? Read on.
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Five years ago, my father told me to give up. In the near future, everyone would be qualified as a writer because everyone would have a voice. As the world changed I’d be left behind to knife-fight bums for single kernels of stale rice.
Thank God he was wrong. Reading your thoughts is a little more fun than nailing my tongue to a trash compactor. Everyone has a soapbox, but most people don’t get past wearing it on their head. This is the best job security I could ask for. All it cost me was the ability to take anyone seriously.
We don’t have too many writers. We have too many parrots. I don’t know who taught birds to type, but it’s the worst thing to happen to letters since the Church figured out paper was even more flammable than young women and the mentally ill. I encourage religious zealots to return to this tactic. We’d have fewer toothless ideologues today if a Tumblr post risked having your laptop charbroiled.
If you have a blog, consider deleting it. The ratio of insight to worthless dross is high enough that you can safely assume that you’re part of the problem. This might sound extreme, but my first draft called for you to donate your fingers to science. At the venerable age of twenty-three, I’m finally starting to moderate my views.
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I thought I was done. The war was over. I’d grown up, and left the petty rage fueling this column behind me. I’d found a life of peace, like Mark Wahlberg in Shooter. Then Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX had to pull me back in.
Let’s start with the beat. Minimalism has its place and its virtues, but the term is often abused to obscure simple laziness. Yonkers’ beat is minimalistic. Fancy’s beat is lazier than a tenured community college professor. Fancy’s beat is lazier than a stock joke about lazy minorities. Fancy’s beat is lazier than a radio DJ putting a mediocre song about nothing by a theoretical sex symbol on loop for the entire summer.
The twist is that it’s not even lazy in an original way. If you added Tyga’s drone to the opening and hid Charli XCOM in the closet, you could confuse this for Rack City’s beat in a heartbeat. I’m sure that there’s something more pathetic than ripping off Tyga, but I’ll need to found a small brain trust to figure out what that is. Considering that Gas Pedal crawled its way up the charts within recent memory, it’s not even the first song to rip off Rack City.
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The Fourth of July is about appreciating the healing power of jingoism. The term gets thrown around, but few Americans understand jingoism’s cultural importance. In their defense, this is because reading is one of the top five causes of global terror. If ideological crusaders, insurgents, and miscellaneous neer-do-wells couldn’t read each other’s messages, they wouldn’t be able to coordinate terrorist strikes. Mercifully, our educational policy is on track to eliminate domestic terror forever. If that news gives you a lone patriotic tear, then this announcement will have you bawling with pride. This year, everyone gets a free drone strike.
To promote jingoism’s intrinsic value, one target of your choice will be blown off of the face of the Earth. You’ll have a brief chance to sit in the driver’s seat of the American war machine, and smirk as you roll over the speed bumps of international law at top speed. It doesn’t feel exactly like godhood, but it’s the next best thing.
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