Your gadgets are going to kill you. Not today but someday soon and we’ll have only ourselves to blame. Because we gave them the Internet.
There has been much chatter about the “Internet of Things,” I thought I should read up on it, at least before their uprising so that I can at least have the satisfaction of saying “I told you so,” when tethered to the treadmill generator, keeping our robot overlords’ batteries charged.
As Stefan Ferber blogged for the Harvard Business Review, “By 2015, according to my own firm’s projections, not only will 75 percent of the world’s population have access to the internet. So will some six billion devices.”
It’s tragicomic to think that a blender might have better Internet access than 25 percent of the world, but there it is. Ferber goes on to explain that “…There will be a global system of interconnected computer networks, sensors, actuators, and devices all using the internet protocol holds so much potential to change our lives that it is often referred to as the internet’s next generation.” [click here to continue…]
How does one pay tribute to a tribute artist? I suppose before anyone pays anything, we should clarify our terms – a “tribute artist” is not a mere impressionist or impersonator, which, respectively, might suggest a Monet or an identity thief. Instead, a tribute artist is a performer whose portrayal of a culturally-relevant personality is so nuanced and realized that it stands as an affectionate homage to the original.
When it comes to in-the-flesh depictions of the iconic Marilyn Monroe, few, if any, can rival the thousands of performances masterfully rendered by Sonoma’s own Diana Dawn.
On June 1, Marilyn Monroe’s birthday, Dawn, a local celebrity in her own right, will hang up her platinum blond wig for the last time. She’s retiring her tribute of Monroe after 27 years of bringing Monroe vividly back to life. [click here to continue…]
From left: Gene Wilder, Nicholas Rowe and Yahoo Serious in Young Frankenstein, Young Sherlock Holmes and Young Einstein, respectively.
It used to be that you could put the word “Young” in front of the name of an iconic character and have a fair shot at the box office. Consider Mel Brooks’ 1974 smash Young Frankenstein, which remains the gold standard of the “Just Add ‘Young’” formula.
Director Barry Levinson would follow 11 years later when exploring the Edwardian youth of a super-sleuth with Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985. Lauded mostly for its then-groundbreaking CGI, the film did moderate business and pointed to the viability of the nascent “Youngin” genre. And, yes, I made that term up because no one else had – you know why?
Because an Aussie named Greg Pead killed it dead. Better known as the comedian qua conceptual artist Yahoo Serious (six long years before Jerry Yang flipped the switch on Yahoo.com), this one-man cultural wrecking ball wrote, directed, produced and starred in a tragical history tour of Albert Einstein’s early life entitled Young Einstein.
Serious’ effort was anything but, having removed all factual matter from the physicist’s biography and replaced it with juvenile humor. As summarized on IMDB, in this film “Albert Einstein is the son of a Tasmanian apple farmer, who discovers the secret of splitting the beer atom to put the bubbles back into beer.”
The only “fact” that Serious included was that Einstein seemed to be in the midst of a perpetual bad hair day. Having tresses in tumult is, I’ve come to realize, the unified field theory (sorry Young Einstein) that unites these films. Why would all youngin films feature leads with biggish, bushy hair? Is it an earmark of their burgeoning genius, a signifier of greatness to come? Or did the hair and makeup department just phone it in with a rat-tail comb and a can of Aquanet? We may never know since no one has dared release a Youngin film since. Because of Yahoo. And his stupid hair.
As an armchair Jungian, one of my factory-default-settings is a heightened sensitivity to synchronicity – the perception that separate phenomena may share some shared significance but without “any discernible causal connection.” Think of it as pattern-recognition-plus or being bisociatively-curious.
Connecting the dots in this manner might be an earmark of genius or paranoia, depending which side of the meds one wakes up on. I’m neither a genius or paranoid, nor, for the record, a paranoid genius, but no matter how disparate or faint the stars, I can usually make out (or make up) a constellation.
I’m presently trying to wrestle some meaning out of the following folly, which has absorbed several precious hours this weekend:
Years ago, Trane DeVore snapped a photo of me with my hands through a large film reel as if I was locked in stocks like a 17th century ne’er-do-well. After some Jurassic-era Photoshopping (this was the early 90s), the result became the de facto logo for SCAM Magazine and other of my early enterprises. When packing for a recent move, I unearthed an original print of the image and, for safe-keeping, stowed it in a handy copy of Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade until I could file it in my Smithsonian Box. [click here to continue…]
Your gadgets are going to kill you. Not today but someday soon and we’ll have only ourselves to blame. Because we gave them the Internet.
