Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Eiffel Tower Courtesy of Jane

Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! is a 2021 Netflix comedy-documentary special hosted by Rob Lowe that roasts cinema’s most overused tropes, the special dedicates a specific segment to mocking how Hollywood lazily establish international locations. In the case of Paris, the special deconstructs the ultimate geographic visual shortcut: always letting the audience know they are in France by showing a shot of the Eiffel Tower, usually accompanied by a character walking around holding a grocery bag with a single, massive baguette sticking awkwardly out of its top. This special was released at the height of covid and was a welcomed diversion from lockdown. Because of this show, when I last spoke with Jane, I asked her for a photo of the Eiffel Tower, and she came through for me. Thank you, Jane!

Make America into Galvanized Autokracy

Make America Into Galvanized Autokracy

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe—we put a kill switch behind the upper incisors.”—New Yorker cartoon

Killer robots! Killer AI! Killer Trump! Is it just a question of which horror will get us first? It seems to now be a daily occurrence that some Silicon Valley tech company has announced that one of their AIs has been caught going rogue. Add to this one tech titan after another has confessed that their industry is out of control, and they do not know how to regain it. As devout supplicants they crawl towards government praying for Trump’s deliverance from themselves. Talk about false idols, he now has a pretty young assistant posting for him, because he is now such a doddering old fool that he cannot type for himself. Don’t! Stop! Don’t Stop! They claim to know what they are doing is wrong. Yet they persist. Me thinks that they protest too much. Why their duplicity then? Legal cover. We didn’t annihilate humanity. Our chatbot did it. Not us. We tried to warn you. You didn’t listen. It’s all your fault. You should have stopped us.