'The General's Fiction': A Military Internment of Literature — No. 1

Note: For discussion of Muslim figures in literature, we turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. His multi-part series on Libya, Slouching from Benghazi, resumes later this year.


Amazing Gaze: The Western Eyes of Soulful Scribbler Caleb Powell
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"'Algonquian women in New England,' wrote William Wood in 1634, were 'more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious than their lazy husbands.' Wood imagined that oppressed Indian women would gladly embrace European gender roles with their presumably lighter burdens of female domesticity."
— Kirsten Fischer

The holidays are long over. Liquor sales have stabilized; few of the year-end suicides remain undiscovered, and, if you are like me, you have a major haul of gifted books. Stacked on my bedside table, towering over my bloated, holly-jolly frame, the books are a leering accusation: "You're like all the others," sniffs The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. "Just direct me to the bookshelf best situated to intimidate your landlord."

As I limply cast aside the hose of my opium huqqa, ash sprinkling the datemaki sash of my authentic silken Nipponese kimono, I despair: literature is dead. Then suddenly, there is a change. There is a Powellful discovery. Who is Caleb Powell? A question I pondered not two weeks ago — now I have some sense of the answer, of an author who asserted himself in my mind's eye. Thus far, his vision has been inscribed only within a few brave avant garde presses, like Prick of the Spindle, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zyzzyva. I aim to change this.

In this special inaugural issue of "The General's Fiction," I invite you to imbibe deeply of the rose-colored drippings of Caleb Powell — author, stay-at-home father, poet. Let us, in the words of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, "let in daylight upon the magic."

Shantytown on the Fourth Estate

I think we were very deferential because in the East Room press conference it's live. It's very intense. It's frightening to stand up there. Think about it. You're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.
— Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times writer, March 20, 2003

Yesterday, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane solicited reader input with an opening sentence so viscerally and efficiently dumb that it's almost sublime: "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Essentially, the ombudsman of the most important newspaper in America crowdsourced the idea that reporters might do their jobs.

The response was electric, and a majority of it featured the word "stupid," all of it deserving. Brisbane managed to pull off a stupid trifecta even before moving on from the lede:

1. He asked a question whose reply — YES — was almost guaranteed, making the asking a waste of everyone's time.
2. He asked a question whose obvious reply the Times might not embrace, trolling its readership with the illusion of valuing its voice in the discourse.
3. He showed the world that he was a person who had thoughts this simple and that the New York Times is willing to pay a person like this to head up its public accountability department.

Then, after provoking a giant readership on a topic this compelling and distressing, either Brisbane or someone else closed the comments section on his piece. Instantly, it evinced to critics that reader input — which was almost uniformly critical — would not be needed if it continued to fall on the undesirable side of the issue.

Still, as easy as it is to dismiss this as the unsupervised elementary thought experiment of a hack shunted to the reader complaint bureau, it's hard to shake the notion that the experiment was cannily structured. It's worth taking a look at how much work all its stupidity manages to accomplish in its favor.

Albert Pujols Still Strikes Out Where It Counts

Three nights ago, after the Cardinals' tough loss in an exhilarating World Series Game Two, Yahoo Sports writer Jeff Passan criticized All-Star slugger Albert Pujols for disappearing from the clubhouse, refusing to answer questions and showing a failure of leadership after a tough error cost the Cards the game. Since we lack the credentials to respond to Mr. Passan, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn to award-winning LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke. He has not eaten a penis on video since 2008.


Three Rounds of Dinger Therapy Can't Cure Clubhouse Cancer

by BILL PLASCHKE

Last night, Albert Pujols joined Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson as the only men to hit three home runs in a World Series game. While driving in six runs, his five hits in six at-bats tied Paul Molitor's record for most hits in a Series game. The one thing he didn't do was prove Jeff Passan wrong.

Here's what Passan wrote following Pujols' no-show after Game Two: "Real leaders, you know, lead. They own their mistakes, like a ninth-inning error in the World Series, and they damn sure don’t let the pups in the clubhouse, the ones in their first postseason, stand and answer questions they’re not equipped to answer.

The Emmys Are for Idiots, Part IV: 'Modern Family' Is Trash

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) held its annual awards show last night. Last year, I looked at the Emmys' structural badness and historical oversights in Part I, then covered all the major nominees and nominations in Part II and Part III. Many of those shows were nominated again this year, so going into this year's slate in any detail will only run the risk of repeating myself too much.

Funnily enough, I do want to repeat myself and then add a few comments about Modern Family, but only after some stray thoughts about pleasant surprises and expected but still unfortunate disappointments this year.

A friend and I found ourselves chatting over the nominees last night, before the awards started, and both of us thought Melissa McCarthy (an overweight woman) and Peter Dinklage (a dwarf) were a lock to win. Neither of us thought them undeserving, far from it. Dinklage has been hilarious in Elf, 30 Rock and Death at a Funeral, and he was a compelling and powerful lead in The Station Agent. Although I haven't seen enough of him in Game of Thrones, what little I have caught appears to be some of his best work. McCarthy's received fewer plaudits over the years, but she provided an irreplaceable comedic and emotional cog in Gilmore Girls for the entire series run, something for which she was wrongly overlooked.

What struck us as funny was that we, independent of each other, both looked past these two actors' undeniable strengths and just assumed that they'd win just as much for their gimmick social value. The actual probity of ATAS voters is so dubious that even what should be a mortal lock on a talent level, in Dinklage's case, seems likelier only if you attach an unnecessary political rider to the vote. You can easily imagine an avatar of the perfect ATAS voter — doesn't watch much beyond network fare, three-camera sitcoms, cop procedurals and primetime soaps — thinking that Dinklage was a lot worse than someone else, somehow, then voting for him because, "Voting for a dwarf makes a statement about the ATAS." Or, in McCarthy's case, "We need to reaffirm positive self-images in heavy women, so let's go with her."

The GOP Welcomes You to the New Jim Crow

Depending on which nation or state you live in, you might have missed the Republican party's commitment over this last year to returning the U.S. to Jim Crow levels of voter disenfranchisement. Rolling Stone had an excellent article on the subject this week (and you should read it as soon as possible). In it, and in every right-wing pundit's gloss on the strategy, it's clear that the GOP believes it must rely on voter suppression and restriction to win elections.

This is one of the rare instances in which the Republican party has evinced even the slightest interest in math. They're playing percentages. Their ideal voter model is 2010 or any low-interest midterm contest; their nightmare is more of 2008. The fewer black, brown, filthy or foreign "Them" who can vote — not to mention college kids who are obliged to keep reading actual books about economics and American history — the greater force with which old, white, privileged evangelicals can shove this country back to the 19th century. They're not even particularly subtle about it. Just a few days ago, Salon's Alex Pareene ran an excellent breakdown of an odious piece of GOP opinion by Matthew Vadum. Pareene describes it as "positively Swiftian, if Jonathan Swift had been an actual cannibal." Let's look at what Vadum has to say:

Let's Help Lourdes Garcia-Navarro Understand Things

I turned on NPR during a long drive home from a ballgame yesterday and found myself listening carefully to the news from Libya. I tend to listen carefully to NPR, because only through any strain on the user's end of the exchange can one divine actual information from the verbal miasma of "both sides of this confusing and open-ended story are equally valid!"

NPR dutifully reminds you that it just can't make the call on the events of the day; it would be unseemly. The verb "seem" triumphantly stomps action and causality into speculation. Immediately thereafter, great wet beltway farts gurgle out to explain the two ways to look at all this uncertainty, with the Brookings Institute "on the left" and the Cato institute "on the right" handwaving away any crazy notions not their own. Sometimes EJ Dionne says something, that poor doomed bastard.

It was during this close reading that I heard what can only be described as a "Look at That Wacky Gaddafi!" update from Lourdes Garcia-Navarro's "News of the Weird" dispatches from the front. The entire tone of the piece pointed up what a nutty family those Gaddafis have, despite the fact that it takes all the education available from a PC game about World War II to understand why. From All Things Considered yesterday:

Understanding 'The Sharia Threat'

Despite their 2010 mid-term success, the Republican National Committee will probably not spend 2012 banging the socialism drum again to the same degree. Sure, their mid-term victories supposedly "stopped Obama," but the administration's policy juggernaut also raced forth with all the horsepower of a kid riding a big-wheel with one of those plastic handbrakes jammed in the "on" position.

Scaring people with socialism again will be a tougher sell because it's a retread and because the specter of taxing wealthy people to create government jobs for a stagnant economy isn't so spooky in states that have suffered over 10% unemployment and staggering underemployment. A safety net won't so easily represent doom to those still falling. Thankfully, based on the rousing success of "THEY'RE COMING TO THE GROUND ZERO MOSK," the latest lurking horror to send you screaming for the Party of Reagan is "Sharia." Don't take my word for it. Take theirs.

How to Score While Seeing 'Atlas Shrugged'

Two years ago, I joined The Atlasphere, an Ayn Rand fan "singles" website. Since then, its regular email newsletter had provided me a weekly dose of unintended joy and even helped me to make a new friend. Today, both the site and I can teach you how to selfishly take what's rightfully yours: lovin'.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I opens in theaters today, a detail which, if you know anything about income tax, summarizes the film's production beautifully. In most years, April 15 is tax day, a release-date coincidence that would drive home the film's toddler-snit cry of government injustice with a bit of calendric irony. This year, tax day is April 18, while April 15 celebrates the emancipation of black people from their economic and biological "superiors," capping off a litany of ironies about the production of Atlas Shrugged that impeach it even on its own terms.

For a film about the truly elite making their own destiny and setting the world aright by turning their backs on lesser peoples, at their discretion, it has: a cast that can in no way be construed as elite; a roster of elite actors who turned it down; two screenwriters and a producer you've rightfully never heard of; a 30-year history of the TV/Hollywood marketplace saying, "You are not desirable and cannot successfully compete," and, as such, a production funded via handouts and charity from ideologues trying desperately to foist their message on others.

The Essential Weirdness of Christmas Music

After some time in the employ of some of America's finest retail clothing establishments, I went off Christmas music. I didn't stop liking it for what it was, but spending 240 hours with it blaring in the background, in the six-week period around Christmas, eliminated my ability to take much joy in it for a few years.

I imagine I otherwise might have gone to a store to buy CDs of Christmas songs, but over-saturation drove the impulse from me, for a couple of seasons. Besides, like any good family member, I spent most Christmases with family. Having my own copy of James Galway flautin' the bejesus out of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was unnecessary.

So this year, as host of Christmas festivities, I had nowhere to turn when it came to listening to music I had long since come to enjoy again. I turned on the cable box and cued up the "SOUNDS OF THE SEASONS" channel. If you've purchased a digital cable package anywhere in America in the last decade, you know exactly what kind of channel I'm talking about. You also know exactly why the Christmas music I listened to might be plainly weird.

Good Riddance, Joe Morgan; or, 'We Won't Really Be Safe Until We're Sure the Head Has Died'

On Monday, ESPN announced that it would not invite Jon Miller and Joe Morgan back for a 21st season as play-by-play and color-commentary men for their flagship baseball show, Sunday Night Baseball. Response across blogs and message boards ran the gamut from celebratory to orgasmic. Wishing that Joe Morgan would somehow please shut up has been common practice amongst fans for nearly a decade, to the extent that I'm sure some enterprising viewer has tried to deliver a pizza to the announce booth to contrive a way to at least temporarily stuff Morgan's word hole.

Morgan exemplifies old-school baseball thought. For intelligent and progressive fans, he's an antique impeding smart new approaches to understanding the game. For those afraid of change, for traditionalists, for the incurious, he's a relic that must be preserved, locked in the booth and left to talk until he dies. Even then his body should be encased in lucite, some tiny Easter Island head monument to calling the game the right way: gritty, devoid of senses, wrong. Naturally, it didn't take long for the defenders of the old school to lament his release. Because I have both cool friends and awesome readers, it also didn't take long for a guy named Nate to pass along a link to a truly disastrous piece of sports editorial.

The author in question is Milton Kent, one of those poor sorts saddled with two first names that could be read forward or backward and sound lame either way. Rounding out the bookishly forlorn picture his name conjures is the fact that under his byline he's listed as "National Reporter." It's just a sad distinction made on a major website, so unnecessary that it seems more like an affirmation than anything else. It brings to mind Wile E. Coyote holding out his business card labeled, "Super Genius," or those sorts of waterproofed pants that toddlers wear, the ones with names like "Big Boy Pants." Milton Kent is a big boy now. He's readed all over the America by grownups. If only he'd aimed his editorial at them as well.

When he sent in the link, Nate asked for only one thing: "Please go after this guy." With pleasure.

SAVAGE SEZ: Free Lemonade Leads to Gov. Lemon-Aid

Terry Savage yells at her family in closed cars when they misinterpret the economic interests of children and lemonade. Then she yells at children. Terry Savage has made a career writing columns that tell you about the important things you don't know, and sometimes she's forced to improvisationally dictate these columns literally in your face, because you have failed to pick up a newspaper for mediated in-your-faceness. Terry Savage is sick of your bullshit, kids.

She is a successful writer. Most people probably know her for her book The Savage Truth on Money* (or other books that have "The Savage Truth" in them and are also about money; it's a theme). It offers the economic wisdom that an intelligent and dedicated person could write herself by reading scores of identical retirement-planning books already in existence, resolving contested issues by going with whatever interpretation or course of action was advocated by the most books, then rewriting all the information in her own folksy language. Terry probably didn't write her book this way, but she benefited from the luxury of having accredited letters following her name when she produced a work of similar content. Planning ahead: that's what separates people who sit in a car yelling about lemonade and those who have to sit there and pretend not to be mortified by them.

Meet Thomas Sowell: A Moron

One of the smartest things I've ever done began as a lark last year and still sends me spam mail weekly. I'd just finished reading a hilarious, mammoth message-board thread, "Must Love Horses," one man's months-long haunting of a Northeastern Craigslist personals board, during which he sent letters of reciprocating obliviousness to arrogantly "arty" lonelyhearts. Countless people were drawn ineluctably toward the fictional person he presented, recognizing the one most irresistible quality about him: that he looked like what they wanted to see in themselves.

I closed the window on the final page and said to myself, "I bet this would work even better on objectivists."

Within about five minutes, I was fleshing out my profile on The Atlasphere, evidently the internet's premiere objectivist dating site, with the mission of "Connecting Admirers of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged."

My efforts didn't pan out so well. I loaded my profile with economically and socially attractive traits, claimed I graduated from George Mason, attached a sexy photo, then sat back and waited for the objectifish to take the bait. Nothing happened. I'd gravely miscalculated. No good objectivist is going to make an effort to get you to like them: it's your job to get them to like you.

I had hoped naively for unsolicited interest from group members ideologically predisposed to believe themselves the inevitable inheritors of the world's dominion. Impudent facts like what kind of jobs/credentials they had and whether they had the slightest tincture of appeal were inconsequential when dealing with the self-appointed Elect. They would not deign to come to me. Their superiority needed to be taken as a given, even if, look, the proof of it will eventually be along any day now. It took me only a few dozen profile clicks to begin to suspect that everyone on there has probably been single and on the site for years, sullenly orbiting each other in ellipses of studied indifference, determined not to allow their motion through life deviate via the pull of any neighboring body.

Field of Schemes II: Obama's Not a Natural-Born Man

The other week, while talking to a friend of mine, I extolled the awesomeness of the multiple baseball games I could watch on Opening Day with MLB Extra Innings, and expressed dismay that my backlog of article ideas seemed to be all book reviews. At this moment, President Obama threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, and I thought, "Hel-lo, let's see what's happening at the National Review."

A little over a month ago, Mr. Awesome had this idea about Newsweek: "I bet I could go to Newsweek.com, like, right now, and the first story I'd see would be a complete puff piece with no information or insight." He's right, and to a certain extent, this is always true of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Only instead of puff pieces without information, the daily fare is venomous attack propped up by fraudulent claims to research, baseless appeals to history or the rich chutzpah of either lies "linked" to sourced material or spun from whole cloth. It's just as vacuous as Newsweek, but the vacuity is tinged with contempt and malevolence. It's like the difference between staring at an empty cardboard box or at an empty shipping crate studded with rusted nails and graffitied with death's heads and a picture of someone having sex with your mother.

Anybody could write two articles per day, forever, just refreshing the Weekly Standard or National Review and breaking down the current iteration of craven dishonesty. The trouble is that it's exhausting. American conservatives are on to a sweet deal, here: making shit up is not a time-intensive gig. And somehow the burden of proof always falls on the people who note the absence of credibility. Forthright people are probably already busy reading difficult books with facts in them, so merely trying to course-correct the national dialogue involves doubling their workload. For the most part, this is why I don't bother. I have shit to do, like write about Amish pornography.

The Soft-Bigotry of No Self-Expectations

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, a law student who is not a pundit and fears nothing. He previously paid us a visit to describe how Newsweek Sucks Really Bad. Robert J. Samuelson is a contributing editor to Newsweek and an op-ed writer for the Washington Post.

Robert Samuelson Uncovers the Sinister Threat of Giving a Shit
by MR. AWESOME

You cannot rely on American journalism to explain the Health Care Reform Bill. Doing so will leave you disgusted and uninformed. Our news media, by and large, has little or no interest in explaining what the HCR bill actually does and doesn’t do. Perhaps editorial boards don’t believe this makes for exciting copy. The statutory text is boring, dense and complex; spitting slack-jaws harassing congresspeople is exciting culture-clash American-identity stuff. That’s rich and compelling. That begs questions about the role of government and the character of American society. There are novels in that. Sure, writing a novel is hard, but invoking the conceits of novels is pretty easy, and journalists love the easy part of writing.

Field of Schemes: A Glimpse at the Neocon Playbook

Occasionally, we get an IM, an email or read a comment saying, "That might have gone a bit far." For instance, Ezra Klein's recent deconstruction of Megan McArdle in the Washington Post tonally paralleled a lot of what Mr. Awesome had to say about her column, and some readers reacted as if Klein had been infected with a kind of political rabies. One can only imagine their reaction had they read our piece here. Probably something on the order of setting fire to this portion of the internet to prevent the contagion from spreading.

We're not insensitive or insensible to such criticism. Admittedly, sometimes snide jabs here veer wide of the mark or hit it with a viciousness that's perhaps inappropriate. For some time now, I've regretted saying that, "Glenn Beck is such a glutinous wad of overfed white Americana that he looks like 185 pounds of lard and bull semen poured into a 5-foot 8-inch man-shaped condom." Condom was all kinds of wrong. I should have said "tapeworm."

Joking aside, sometimes the content excoriates individuals, but despite whatever attempts I make at handwringing, I can't bring myself to feel much shame or dismay at it. The targets of that acidity willfully fabricate evidence, often in service of ideas that can bring direct harm to people. Mr. Awesome flayed McArdle's column, but the column itself was like watching Harry Lime in The Third Man explaining his indifference to the specks of humanity on the ground, then interrupting his impious sermonizing to shout through a megaphone at them that his defrauding them and their being prey to indifferent death is to their benefit. Whatever I may say about Glenn Beck cannot elide that the man has stood in front of The Alamo and fetishized it as a symbol of armed insurrection, lionized a man who shot minorities in the back and killed them, then turned to his audience with a wink and a smirk that looks like it was carved out of a bucket of Country Crock, as if to say, "I'm just thinking out loud! I'm not advocating anything. By the way, the President is a Fascist because he is a Communist, like Hitler. You know what to do, gang!"

It's nearly impossible to be washed over with guilt at unkind words when these people so readily just make shit up, then couple it with equally unkind words intended to demonize the people they're already misrepresenting with contrived evidence. To give you an example of how thorough and pervasive this is, how arrogantly false it is, how almost proudly full of crap the sort of people we occasionally assail are, take baseball.

'Poor People Can't Have Health Care Because I Fear Dumb Shit'

Note: unlike many of the other guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's editorial response comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, a law student who is not a pundit and fears nothing. He last paid us a visit to relate his tale of seeing Barack Obama with The Devil.

Tripping the McArdleverse
by MR. AWESOME

Megan McArdle is a libertarian blogger for The Atlantic, a prominent DC-area think-speak magazine. Like all DC-area magazines, the quality of its contributors varies by an enormous margin likely explained through the dense, varicose veins of patronage and glad-handing that runs through that town. Sometimes, you can find incisive, solid commentary under the banner of The Atlantic. Sometimes, you will find contrarian white noise, and sometimes you will find grossly dishonest crap. Megan McArdle produces the last two, with gusto.

Baseball Morons: A New Challenger Has Entered the Ring!

Any time you've got Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan calling games on a Saturday and Sunday, you have to be a potently stupid bastard to win the distinction of biggest baseball idiot of the weekend. But, hey, let it be said from here on out: anyone who underestimates Thom Brenneman has no one to blame but himself.

There was something unsettlingly familiar about hearing Brenneman on Saturday, calling the Rays-Mets game with McCarver. Maybe it's that Brenneman is now famously incompetent, netting his own post label at Awful Announcing. Maybe it was his legendarily terrible commentary during this year's BCS Championship Game, which I suspect I would have remembered more if a drunk hadn't obliterated my neighbor's brick mailbox with a Chevy Malibu during halftime. Or maybe it was just the soothing noise of Tim McCarver being stupid next to someone generic, undertalented and wedged into the booth with the full force of papa's influence. That explanation seems most fitting of all. Like Joe Buck, Thom Brenneman was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple: he got his start calling Cincinnati Reds games in the booth with his daddy.

I Saw Barack Obama with the Devil

Note: unlike many of the other guest pieces on Et Tu, Mr. Destructo? today's editorial response comes from a mysterious Mr. Awesome, a current law student who is not a pundit. He is an actual, real person. We hope he will be sending in more of these in the future.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy, and he knows which way the wind blows. And right now, the wind blows east, to Mecca. (Provided you are in America. If you are not in America, please disregard the wind.) Gaffney has smelt a wind and knows it to be dealt by our President, Barack Hussein Obama. The wind is Islamic theocracy. And we stand before a fast approaching windfall, unknowing legatees, drawn down to Sharia rule.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. can tell we are in really bad shape. Let's ride with him on the southbound night train, on down the line to the horrible truth.

"And the kids at Camp Wealthy won't win anything because they lack heart!"

With my favorite baseball blog, Fire Joe Morgan, officially shuttered forever, it's fallen to scattered and ragged bands of sports fans sitting in post-apocalyptic basements in mom's houses strewn across America to try to forge a new society of abuse for misbegotten sports writing. I haven't nearly the patience for number-crunching that those FJM guys did, but I believe I can do my part in at least the "abusive thinking" department.

Today's sample comes from the Chicago Tribune's Rick Morrissey:

Chicago Cubs need to shed their nice-guy persona
Jake Peavy once fired Agent of Darkness Scott Boras. This suggests a man with fine judgment and perhaps even a good heart.

Thus, he was the last guy the Cubs should have been pursuing during the recently concluded winter meetings.

What's great about this is that you can read the title and know that there's almost zero chance you'll encounter anything that makes sense in the rest of the article.

Merry Christmas, Shit-for-Brains

I don't know if either of these amount to sayings for anyone else, but most people I know and read have long since taken it as a given that the following two statements about The Wall Street Journal are true:

Its news section is usually right about business.

Its editorial section is usually right of Goebbels.

Today's latest offering from the America's proudest tower of Fuck You for Being So Incompetent and Poor comes from deputy editor Daniel Henninger, a man who's got a friend in Jesus and who's doing his level best to counteract all the goodwill 30 Rock has tried to engender for The Cleve. His insightful thesis?—the War on Christmas is actually what ruined the economy.

In honor of the sad passing of my favorite blog, FireJoeMorgan, I'm just going to bold-quote and fire away in the style of FJM contributor Ken Tremendous (a.k.a. Michael Schur, staff writer for The Office and occasional screen sensation as Dwight Schrute's bizarre cousin Mose).