Extra Evil - Love Carpet-Bombing

Today’s Fortune: Patience pays off. Long after you needed it.

Feb 14, 2024

Newsreel

Conspiracy theorists drew John Madden circles.

Ukraine’s short on most nouns.

Migratory birds migrated to heaven.

The Abu Ghraib reboot premiered.

Pundits weighed age against despotism.

Bluesky pounced on 2022’s opportunity.

Today's Mood

War Journal

The Cut’s content vortex includes a game called Truth or Drink. The rules are what you’d imagine. It features variations in relationships (exes, newlyweds, etc), which is a rookie mistake. The money’s in variations in drinking.

Imagine an alcoholic couple’s race to the bottom. Just kidding, that’s the warm-up. Imagine the straight-edge deathmatch. A couple might enter, but a divorce leaves.

Or the wild card: a vanilla couple, and a drug they’re not used to. I don’t know what would happen. You don’t know what would happen. And there lies multimedia joy.

Of course, all dating shows are kayfabe-adjacent. But the same goes for C-Span. I just want a quality circus to go with all this bread.

Valentine’s Day calls for reflection on Conan the Barbarian. Specifically, his timeless romance with a fortune-telling cannibal.

That was his first post-slavery romance. Conan’s a smart guy, as the ubermensch formula demands. But I like to imagine that, for some time, he assumed magic cannibalism was a standard sexual risk. Like crabs, or love bombing. Every flirtation was a calculated risk of becoming lunch.

And yet he persists. In excess. Isn’t that a real belief in love?

A common topic around Christmas/Love Day: dump someone as soon as you feel done, or ride out the holiday?

My pitch: dump them on the holiday. You’ll both have that memory forever.

The Present

The second-dumbest, second-meanest show I’ve covered. Together, they may add up to the worst.

"Dear Miss Martin: how do I get out of this trunk?"

Thank you for the kind words on my voice last week.

Dunk the Negro! It was a real game! Imagine the leaderboards today.

Everything Abridged is why paper exists.

The Past

My lob at the Modern Love format. Including an outline of the divorce nonsense I throw oblique jokes at every other article.

The Future

I can see the light at the end of the editorial tunnel. My next book, How to Dodge a Cannonball has:

The edgiest joke I’ve made.
The dumbest joke I’ve made.
My favorite joke I’ve made.

They’re all the same bit. If you remember this come this summer, let me know which one you think it is.

Not Brought to You By

Scientology’s beautiful, hilarious Super Bowl ad had me wondering: how do they do in print? Anyone can bunt a video spot with a celebrity or four, but print’s an ad purist’s (they exist) proving ground. There’s either an idea, or money in flames.

The hunt took me back further than I expected:

“The road to a better life with fewer problems” might be advertising in a nutshell. Which is raw failure: the entire point’s hiding the nutshell. We’re all allergic. It’s why we don’t have more bars called The Cirrhosis Hole.

But this is early, and a classified. Let’s give Hubbard a Mulligan.

Now we’re in the arena. And still failing. For all the prattle about truth in advertising, a cult ad’s sole job is avoiding obvious madness. The “three Conditions of Existence” trips every alarm our culture has for “bank account poison.”

Creativity: F+
Persuasion: D-
Sanity: Nope