“You couldn’t, for instance, stab a burglar if they were unconscious.”
 — The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland explains a new law allowing homeowners to use disproportionate force against burglars.

by Sam Pattillo

There has been a fashion phenomenon in New York City that has been getting out of control. I refer to it as “over-alt” or “over-intellectualized” style. We see many dudes that yesteryear would have once carelessly put together an outfit that are now heavy in these streets with specifically curated outfits. Did the word ‘curate” just come up in menswear? Yes. To be frank, I think these days a lot of men are taking their style way too seriously. You do not need $300 jeans and wild and nifty pea coats to be taken seriously in this day in age.

Style is an extension of an attitude. So the question becomes: What type of attitude should you be exuding? Most likely not one that can be considered pretentious. Which is exactly what I’m seeing a lot of these days. I don’t want to have to nod at clothes-wearers disapprovingly. That is why Levi’s® Jeans (in this case, the 520s) + Premium White Pocket T is most likely the way to go. From James Dean to Jay-Z, this look has been a representation of what American men’s fashion is. Some things never go out of style.

Get 20% off one item until 10/31 with promo code GOFORTH2012. The exclusive offer is valid at us.levi.com

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The winner of a Florida roach-eating contest collapsed and died immediately after downing piles of filthy roaches and worms. Why did the man do this? To win the grand prize! (The grand prize was “a python.”) This is what happens when an entire generation of Americans grows up believing the key to success (in the absence of hard work or talent) is doing something disgusting for media attention. Thanks, Survivor!

Edward Archbold was 32 when he dropped dead outside the Ben Siegel Reptile Store, 40 miles north of Miami in the strip-mall town of Deerfield Beach. “He seemed like kind of a wild guy,” the snake shop owner told the Miami Herald. “He was wearing a bandanna, wrist bands and a shirt that said ‘Event Staff.’”

The man started vomiting before he could collect the $700 snake, which he apparently planned to sell, and then he collapsed and died outside the reptile shop, the end.

I’m sorry if these are not things an Obama supporter should say at this point. But the demoralization is profound: thebea.st/TcCh8Z

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 8, 2012

Andrew Sullivan is not a useful metric for measuring the opinions, stances or engagement of American voters slowly waking to the reality of a presidential election next month. The Daily Beast blogger and Newsweek essayist is, by any rational assessment, a demographic of one — a conservative liberal gay Republican Obama loyalist and Irish-English Oxford man who sought and secured permanent U.S. residency. But when I returned to the media world last week, after a six-month sabbatical, it was immediately evident that the best way to “catch up” with half a year’s political media freakouts was by studying Sullivan’s blog and Twitter output, backwards. Seared in my brain was an airport-newsstand glance at that Newsweek cover of Barack Obama looking like Augustus Caesar, with the words “The Democrat’s Reagan” followed by the only byline that could possibly go with such a sweeping, over-the-top pronouncement.

Just two weeks later, Sullivan watched the same dull debate I saw, but to him it wasn’t just a lackluster performance from a president who sat out the primaries. It was the worst disaster of the Obama presidency. There are no small moments in Andrew Sullivan’s online world.

I am bored silly by Obama. If I am bored silly by this wonkish lecture, and his refusal to rebut specifics, i.e. lies, he’s in trouble.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 4, 2012

Everything means Everything, all the time, and the only respite is the “Mental Health Break” viral videos and the weirdly depressing snapshots from his readers’ windows. Like some CGI action movie, Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog is all explosions and implosions and dazed weeping survivors seeking only a catchphrase that will keep the wounds and memories fresh until the next apocalypse, tomorrow.

How is Obama’s closing so fucking sad, confused, lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost election tonight. thebea.st/RdXvE9

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 4, 2012

Sullivan’s blog and Twitter feed can be a car wreck — a car wreck witnessed from a window, close enough to be tearfully blogged but too far away to actually walk outside and help — but his online persona is unique for its lack of cynicism and irony. Peggy Noonan’s grand pronouncements read like they’ve been fished from a shoebox of 30-year-old cocktail napkins, and the only believable emotion at National Review’s “The Corner” is Kathryn Jean Lopez’s unrequited love for Joseph Ratzinger. As Obama’s re-election by electoral college votes has been fairly certain all year long, pundits on the right have been transparently trying to wring a daily outrage from a dried-up sponge. For a self-described conservative writer in America, Andrew Sullivan is the only one who seems to believe what he’s writing … which is problematic, for a paid political thinker, when that belief also makes you a supporter of the liberal Democrat president.

I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen candidate this late in game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel:thebea.st/RrBEcK

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 8, 2012

The cable-news hacks and professional political surrogates drip with insincerity. It was an amusement at my last job to collect screen captures of the pundit panelists reading sports sites or shopping online before and after commercial breaks. Sullivan approaches this tired game with the enthusiasm of a TV recap blogger, one of those ultra-fans who can quickly create a deep timestamp philosophy from the shoddiest episode of “Doctor Who.”

This is a rolling calamity for Obama. He’s boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney! thebea.st/RdXvE9

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 4, 2012

What I’ve learned from reading Sullivan backwards is that Obama’s re-election was inevitable, that he would remake the nation in ways unseen since FDR or Eisenhower or Lincoln or whoever, that Obama was “moving in for the kill” with a probable landslide victory as recently as two weeks ago, that Obama intentionally destroyed this safe re-election, and that even Sully’s dogs are suffering wild mood swings.

Look: you know how much I love the guy, and how much of a high info viewer I am, but this was a disaster for Obama. thebea.st/RdXvE9

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) October 4, 2012

Studying the very recent past through the Andrew Sullivan lens is important because his very human up-and-down reactions to the White House horse race are a favorite of the Washington and New York press corps. National media figures lost their real emotions around the time they realized it would take constant brutality to get to the top of the heap, and my suspicion is that Sullivan is read carefully to see what “humans are supposed to feel.” His outbursts of sincerity are processed and regurgitated by the cynical people who create each news cycle’s National Narrative … and that’s why the top story on Google News is still the debate from a week ago.

New ABC/Post poll suggests Obama weathered debate debacle: abcn.ws/SZwmEi

— David Grann (@DavidGrann) October 9, 2012

Ken Layne was editor of the political disaster site Wonkette from 2006 to 2012, and invented blogging along with Andrew Sullivan.

“Since 2011, at least a dozen men have run a 5K while wearing a bear suit in the United States and an additional five have done it in Europe.”

“In this case, the first elements collected seem to show that there is a phenomenon of self-radicalization that expanded in a rather worrisome way. Many of them haven’t traveled to training camps in Afghanistan.”
 — Former anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, on “rising anti-Semitism among young Muslims” in France. Which, you know, is bad. But that quote makes it sound like he’s saying that the problem is that untrained terrorists won’t be good enough terrorists. Which reminds me to remind you that if you have not yet seen Four Lions, it should be right up at the top of your Netflix list.

“One of the most difficult things to witness is when you see some young boy, at 23, who has joined a hookup site and has a dorky and witty profile with a photo of himself in glasses and a frumpy blazer. He says things like ‘Well, I don’t know what I am looking for but maybe to get together with someone and explore! I love Harry Potter and big ideas!’ And then, over the course of a year, you see him understand how he needs to signal, and he ends up naked, on all fours, with a practiced porno look on his face, exposing his anus.”

Let’s be honest, some Jewish holidays are harder to pronounce than others. Also this is happening!

I will be interviewing Sean Howe about his new book, MARVEL COMICS, Tuesday night at powerHouse Books (37 Main St., DUMBO BK) at 7 pm.

— Chuck Klosterman (@CKlosterman) October 8, 2012

I don’t care what day Columbus Day is supposed to be. It might actually fall today, but it might also be one of those “Monday holidays,” which means it might really not exactly-technically be today, but it’s on a Monday, so We The People can get a day off, and today is the Day-Off part! I didn’t get the day off, but I totally support the idea of somebody getting a day off, you know? Maybe someday I will get to enjoy a day of Not Working on one of these lame “Monday Holiday” days! Happy Monday Holiday (Observed)!

I know a lot of people get angry at Columbus Day because Cristoforo Colombo, or whatever-his-name was, didn’t “discover” any “America” (where, first of all, a whole buncha people already lived, and also meanwhile, some Chinese guys and some Vikings already also didn’t-discover it), as I was reminded by the CBS News “Sunday Morning” program, which, if you watch it, I swear, you start hallucinating you are smelling smells like you are in a doctor’s office, waiting for your Appointment, you know? Like, Old Magazines and Medicine and stuff? But I really enjoy that program, and if I’m ever up early enough of a Sunday morning, I always check in, especially for the Nature Moment at the end of the show where they just show some birds or bighorn sheep or something sort of just hanging out being themselves with no narrator. It kind of makes you think about how quiet it was in America before all the Americans arrived, you know?

But then They did, arrive, and the Native Inhabitants got a raw deal and were basically exterminated for pushing back or for not pushing back when the Destiny became Manifest, you know? The ones that weren’t killed by small pox or other evils got pushed into free-form Concentration Camps and now, if they can prove they are Natives, they can have a gambling casino.

Native Americans are getting screwed some more on this Casino business, because now all these different States of The Union are opening up their own non-Indian-Reservation Casinos. I thought it was cool that the Indian Reservations had a big chunk of this action, and I don’t think having Casinos makes up for being Genocided, but at least it’s something, right? So the Natives need to lawyer up and get something else going. I say, America should give back more stuff, seriously, and I’m not just saying that because I don’t own anything good. I thought the Casinos were a good idea, but now we’re taking those away, so people should get cut in on something else. Maybe a tiny percentage of every real-estate transaction? This land is your land, this land is my land, but this land is their land, you know?

Anyway, on “Sunday Morning,” Mo Rocca teaches us how there’s a statue of Christopher Columbus in a building someplace on the Island of Manhattan, and this statue is an Art Exhibit (see photo above), that’s located in what looks like an apartment? If I was gonna get angry about any of this crap, I would be more angry about this dopey art exhibit than I would be about not getting a day off, you know? A statue has a better apartment than most people in Manhattan!

People get mad about America and they blame Christopher Columbus, but he doesn’t live here, you know? He never did. He was an explorer and a megalomaniac and stuff, and he sure wasn’t nice to any Native Peoples, but he didn’t give a Niña, a Pinta, or a Santa María about no America, man. He had good publicity, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt got him a Holiday in 1937, but he just wanted to be the guy who found the shortcut to India or China or whatever, and now everybody is mad at him and not Leif Ericson.

You can do what you want, but I believe that it’s OK to have Columbus Day because, basically, it gives Italian-Americans an official Day to be Italian, and that’s what America is all about, right? Free to be you and me? Like, the Italo-Americans get Columbus Day, and the Irish-Americans get St. Patrick’s Day, and I think anybody who wants one of these Days should fucking get one, and if we (The People) work it right, they can all be on Mondays and then we can all have four-day work weeks. That is my Hyphen-American Dream.

I think the Natives should get a Day for being Indigenous, but also they should get something for a prominent old-school leader, like Geronimo, who was a pretty big figure. Or maybe it could be whichever Chief did the most damage against the Bluecoats, hah? But it shouldn’t be Sitting Bull, I mean, no offense, he got famous for fucking General Custer’s shit up, but General Custer was a bonehead. Personally, I would nominate Chiefs Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongahelas, who were on the winning side against General Arthur Sinclair in the Battle of the Wabash, check it out from the Wiki on St. Clair’s Defeat:

The casualty rate was the highest percentage ever suffered by a United States Army unit and included St. Clair’s second in command. Of the 52 officers engaged, 39 were killed and 7 wounded; around 88% of all officers became casualties. After two hours St. Clair ordered a retreat, which quickly turned into a rout. “It was, in fact, a flight,” St. Clair described a few days later in a letter to the Secretary of War. The American casualty rate, among the soldiers, was 97.4 percent, including 632 of 920 killed (69%) and 264 wounded. Nearly all of the 200 camp followers were slaughtered, for a total of 832 Americans killed. Approximately one-quarter of the entire U.S. Army had been wiped out. Only 24 of the 920 officers and men engaged came out of it unscathed. Indian casualties were about 61, with at least 21 killed.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed during this engagement was more than three times the number the Sioux would kill 85 years later at Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

I say we call it “Three Chiefs Day,” give me a Monday off, and I will go to the nearest Indian Reservation Casino and Observe it.

Previously: Why I Don’t Live At The P.O.

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias. Top photo by Tom Powel Imaging, thumbnail photo by Nicholas Baume, both courtesy of the Public Art Fund.

“In the current study, researchers statistically controlled for race, age and gender, but introduced a story that primed participants to dislike some of the people they were observing: half were presented as neo-Nazis, and half were presented as likeable and open-minded. All study participants recruited for the study were Jewish males.”
 — The study itself found that “liking or disliking a person can affect how your brain processes actions” but I think that part above is the best.