Kansas City News Blog

Secret society: I have got to become a "Hallmark Hipster," you guys. There's nothing that says "hipster" like Our Special Thoughts On the Occasion of Your 10th Wedding Anniversary. Unfortunately, my application to this very exclusive social networking site was rejected, just like my applications to the Georgetown University Alumni Association, Curves and the Heritage Foundation, so basically I'm still just a misunderstood outsider drifting from town to town with no visible means of support, helping downtrodden folks and running from the law, like Benji or the Incredible Hulk.

After the jump, a weirdly Eurocentric Daily Briefs. Sorry, bigots, it just kind of happened! Click here or on my new headshot, which we'll be printing next to everything I write from now on:



Der weinerschnitzelkindergarten-
schadenfreudevolkswagen-
aufwiedersehen: Evil Fuhrer and Reichskanzler of Germany, Adolf Hitler, died of suicide in his bunker a long time ago; that's his "laying on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room," you guys. His legacy lives on in the form of assholes who can't quit pointing out that Hitler "kept the trains running on time," completely without evidence that any trains were running on time. We just have to take the word of these Nazi train enthusiasts. That's the Nazi Germany version of phrases like, "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put an interesting show on National Public Radio?"

So it's not often that new work from the fascist genocidal dictator comes to light, which is why military historians and creepy Nazi memorabilia collectors who live in basement apartments are so excited by the discovery of an aircraft concept designed by Nazi engineers near the end of World War II, a design which smacks of exactly the pants-shitting desperation you'd expect Nazis to be feeling at that point in the war:



Here's the desperately insane idea: Dart-shaped gliders equipped with pilots and 1,000 pound bombs would be carried by conventional planes into allied airspace and dropped. The glider pilot would steer the bomb toward its high-priority target -- a factory that printed posters warning G.I.'s about the dangers of venereal disease, for instance -- and at the last minute, release the bomb and activate a balloon which would explode out of the tail and lift the glider to safety, all of which bears a creepy resemblance to certain details in Thomas Pynchon's big, fat novel Gravity's Rainbow. WHOOPS, sorry for the inexcusable lapse into Fancy Ladism, y'all, I am embarrassed to admit that I have read a book. But if the indignant comments occasionally left by Ayn Rand enthusiasts on certain Daily Briefs posts can be believed, I probably didn't understand it, and am also completely retarded, and anyway probably didn't even read it in the first place.

AME-ERICAA-AA! EATIN' MY LU-UNCH FROM A SINGLE BO-OWL! Switzerland, the magnificent Northern European land of chocolate, banks full of unclaimed World War II-era money plundered from German Jews and, I assume, some windmills, officially joined something called the "Schengen agreement," and no longer requires passports at the border. Think of Switzerland as a kind of wooden-shoes-wearing "United States," and the rest of Europe as a kind of "filthy, impoverished Mexico," and then boggle at the severe deficit of nationalistic bigotry that would allow something like that to happen. Yes, I know that if we'd only built a giant wall between the United States and Mexico, those bandolier-wearing Mexican banditos from Iraq or wherever would never have smashed their airplanes into the World Trade Center. But anyway, now the aboriginal brown natives of Europe can travel between countries almost as freely as civilized Americans can travel across state borders. Obviously, Europe has a giant crush on America.

-- Chris Packham