FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See, I like new music. Well, new-ish.  Well, and it has to sound like Heaven 17 or something else I recognize from my youth.  Fuck, don't listen to it then if that's how you feel.
• Anti-gun-control conservatives like to portray themselves as the rational, cool-headed ones: Look, I am not flustered by this mass shooting that has you libtards all worked up for some reason! (I think they roll right past the preliminary "of course this is a terrible tragedy" bit anymore because they think it weakens their argument.) But you read something like this, from Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at National Review, where he tells his readers the Orlando massacre shows nightclubs would be safer if you let people bring loaded guns to them, and you have to wonder:

I must say, I find this way of thinking somewhat bizarre. Certainly, one could argue that there would be more accidents/shootings/suicides if more people carried in general (although this isn’t borne out by the data). Likewise, one could argue that nightclubs are bad venues for concealed- or open-carriers because they are dark and loud, and because people tend to drink a lot and/or take drugs while inside them. But those are aggregate, not specific arguments. When one gets to the specifics, can one really say with a straight face that the victims at Pulse wouldn’t have been better placed had one or more of them had been armed?

"One could argue" that loaded guns at the disco on a Saturday night is a bad idea! Motherfucker, talk to a bartender! Ask him or her if it's a bad idea. And "those are aggregate, not specific arguments" is the last act of a desperate man. I bet Cooke has a flowchart showing drunks in a bar turn into "polite society" if you give them loaded weapons. (Though, under a "Bring your guns, ladies drink free" policy I suppose the Mateen shooting might have been prevented by Pulse being shut down long beforehand, due to its frequent dance-floor gun battles.) While I am on the whole glad that our immigration laws are as yet sufficiently relaxed that we still allow even Thatcherite twats to become citizens of this country, I wish the authorities had first taught Cooke some of our folk wisdom.

• I keep saying on Twitter that I have a new funny thing at The Sherman Oaks Review of Books but Twitter obviously is over because my item has not blown up. So go have a look why don't you, and then stick around to look at the other stuff at the Review which is also funny. It's a humor site. We're humorists. And we mean that in the old-fashioned sense of producing laughter, if that's the sort of thing you go for.

• Remember when a couple of posters of Obama as The Joker in 2009 meant Obama was washed up? Well, they work this same routine every so often, and it currently is being worked with a clutch of rainbow-flag "Shoot Back" posters in West Hollywood. Gay folks in the neighborhood don't seem to appreciate the sentiment, per the L.A. Times, but the artist, Sabo, interviewed by PJ Media, tries strenuously to counteract that impression; "it's important that people know that this image came out of the gay community," he says, meaning out of him. This reminds me of the post-Orlando Red Alert Politics story (amplified by the ridiculous Washington Examiner), "Gays rally around Trump after Orlando attacks," based on the testimony of... four allegedly gay guys on Reddit, and two allegedly gay guys on Twitter ("'I am a gay man and this disgusting incident has persuaded me to join the Trump train!' Snowduckling wrote"). It's like they want to co-opt the gay vote but know it's useless and so aren't even putting the usual effort into their propaganda. Maybe they should get a high-ranking Trump surrogate to go on air and talk about how he loves cock.