Monday, June 9, 2014

10 Entertaining Yet Damning Links


Sometimes the good comes tragically wrapped with the bad:

1. Libertarian science writer Michael Fumento sounds very depressed in a recent online interview after all but disappearing into Colombia, if anyone’s inclined to send him a supportive e-mail.

2. Yesterday marks three months since the disappearance of Flight 370, and I’ve decided to dedicate the great Fixx song “Lost Planes” to its passengers in karaoke if I get the chance (I have also finally created a Pandora channel for the Fixx, now that that site’s algorithms have gotten more refined than when I first tried that about eight years ago).

3. On the tougher end of the New Wave/punk spectrum, the Damned get some kind of ahead-of-the-curve points for doing this in 1979 (and this is an amusing German TV appearance by them).

4. For one more month, the original cowboy from the Village People stars in a stage musical version of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, I kid you not.

5. Musical opposition to coercion may sound lame to some, but hey, it beats...well, beating -- which apparently is what our faces evolved to withstand.

6. And the blue states noted here -- specifically in this model redistributive states -- have more income inequality anyway, so as usual, the left is wrong by every imaginable metric including its own.

7. Then again, egotistical self-promotion can go too far for aesthetic comfort, as Maddox amusingly demonstrates (h/t Matt Pritchard).

8. So I’ll instead plug a screening (this Thursday 7pm at the Galapagos art space at 16 Main St. in DUMBO) of the booby-related short comedy film The Slip-Up by Matt Brandenburgh (who just coincidentally directs the YouTube chats in which I appear, of which another will be unveiled shortly).

9. If you prefer Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, you might be pleased to hear that September already brings another monster movie from him, one that I would imagine will suddenly get a much bigger media push than planned.

10. And if we’re on the lookout for real-life monsters, it may be best to watch out for anything that seems to have the mind of a teenage Ukrainian boy but isn’t actually human, since a computer program fitting that description can now sometimes pass the Turing Test (for convincingly passing as human in conversation). 

I don’t know if we want A.I. programs to mimic teenage Ukrainians with that region already on the brink of WWIII. 

No comments: