Author: Bentley Ptythylhlyl

Your personalized weekly diet is as follows: - Monday: Get by on small portions of warm wines that you bought at a discount. - Tuesday: Get by on just sculptured American bagels that are intended for babies. - Wednesday: Allow yourself imitation Chinese dry mustards that you bought at a discount. - Thursday: Allow yourself small portions of sour white rancid Chinese foods that begin with the letter 'P'. - Friday: Get by on just Finnish sour pancakes factory-packed in Europe. - Saturday: Try raw cold reconstituted shrimps sold on the street. - Sunday: Eat cold Finnish Norwegian warm frozen waters that are grown locally.

Bob Dylan Shilling for AI

The Times They Are A-Changin’ indeed. Known for his counter-culture appeal, political opinions, and civil rights anthems, Boomer icon Bob Dylan was promoting IBM’s early AI platform in 2015.

The advertisement for Watson seems to envision a world where humans toil while machines create poetry and music. Dylan appears more amused than alarmed at his impending obsolescence.

Although his public persona involves an adversarial stance towards the media and an anti-establishment posture in general, his financial success has been intimately connected with the media’s willingness to promote his music, keep him in the public eye, and even pay him for the use of his image.

This seer of the 1960’s should, perhaps, take his own advice: get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand.

Broadcast Obscenity

General Electric, the conglomerate that owns ABC, Disney, and makes nuclear weapons, broadcasts a TV show called Wipeout, which is a little like Super Mario Brothers, except in real life and with supermodels instead of Mario and Luigi.

Where the show involves multiple contestants competing to run an obstacle course, the use of instant replay makes the presence of multiple contestants somewhat redundant; each Wipeout is seen multiple times from multiple angles.   The producers of the show seem to recognize this, and consequently boil each contestant down to an arbitrary bit of “human interest.”  This is done often enough primarily as an expedient towards making a contestant the subject of ridicule on the voiceover.

Although in every way presented in the form of a game, the show consistently relies on deception: the game has no rules other than the laws of physics, and the obstacles on the course are in no way impartial towards individual contestants.

If not for the occasionally dance-like footage of bodies cast in exquisite motion, then perhaps for its form, Wipeout resembles Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary about the Nazi Olympics — especially with respect to the use of rapid edits in the men’s diving portion.

New Senate Bill Requires Citizens to Consume Tom Cruise Celebrity Gossip

Transit TV is a company that installs televisions on busses and then sells advertising on those televisions.  I guess if you have to ride the bus to get to work, and are forced to watch these advertisements during that ride, you are, in a sense, part of “a captive audience” just as Transit TV claims.

Transit TV homepage Clipping