Late Night - Diane Sawyer's Expose

 

The Letterman channel has been uploading segments from Dave's Film Festival lately. It's an interesting concept and new to me but there are more misses than hits.

I like this Diane Sawyer piece, partly because I miss Diane Sawyer. I'm going to send this to my parents, I think it's especially for the Boomer crowd.

Late Show Staff - Will Forte

 

Former writer Will Forte talks about his experience working on the Late Show.

I'm amazed. Firstly, I didn't know Will Forte was a writer on the Late Show. Secondly, I didn't know there was a MacGruber TV show.

Calling Out Josh Groban

 Or: "Partially Ruining a Christmas Classic"

Driving to my parents house with the Christmas music on the radio and Josh Groban's rendition of "O Holy Night" comes on. I noticed something askew.

It's a high quality rendition of a classic song for the most part but I couldn't stop noticing something absolutely inexplicable about it.

The first two minutes, everything's as it should be. Once we get to 2:00 Groban sings "O Knife Divine." Thereafter, almost every instance of "night" is replaced by "knife." The only exception is at 4:15 where there's a legitimate "night" but even that is followed up 2 seconds later with another "knife." So it's "O night / O knife divine."

And now I will never un-hear "O Holy Knife." This is the biggest lyrical scandal since "Poker Face."

Living in Cyberiad

 "The Cyberiad," by Stanislaw Lem, is a whimsical collection of science-fiction fairy tales, in a similar style as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It's episodic but it generally follows two intelligent machine rivals who try to outdo each other with their own invented machines. My favorite story in "The Cyberiad" is "The first sally (A), or Trurl's electronic bard."

The following contains spoilers for "The Cyberiad."

Through much hard work and countless hours of toil, Trurl has created a machine that, he hopes, can write poetry. He invites his rival Klapaucius over to test it (or to show off.) Klapaucius accepts, and after some false starts and tweaks, recites a short poem. Klapaucius is not impressed - the poem was just a pre-recorded message written by a person. Trurl invites him to make a request as a real test. Klapaucius thinks, trying to figure out the hardest request he can imagine. Finally he suggests:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

Trurl begins to object...

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking 

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

The story goes on from there with other bizarre requests and other poems but I'll focus on just this one, as it's my favorite. I was so used to seeing this story as a wonderful, whimsical flight of fancy (I first read this story in 1998-1999) that I completely failed to see that it's now a reality. Or is it? I was wondering, if I give this same prompt to ChatGPT, what would be the result?

Here is the experiment.

In truth, I usually see ChatGPT as just a more advanced search engine. I was fully expecting it to just lookup and return the poem from "The Cyberiad," at which point I would have had to try a similar prompt. But no, it simply went straight to its own attempt. Also surprising is that it doesn't follow the "only s" rule, for some reason. I mean, if a computer program doesn't write great poetry, we can all understand why but I absolutely do expect it to understand and follow basic, concrete rules.

I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am astonished by the sophistication of ChatGPT. Still, it definitely falls far short of the goal.

Let's try Bing:

Arguably better; it at least follows the 's' requirement, but still wanting.

And You!:

Terrible.

We live in a science-fiction future but the world of "The Cyberiad" still retains its mystique and fascination.

Finally, a small factoid that I just learned from Wikipedia: "The Seventh Sally was also an inspiration of the game SimCity." According to the New York Times, "In the Lem story a banished tyrant returns to his despotic ways after being given control over a simulated city."

Popcorn in Bed - Sneakers

 

The people in the Pocorn in Bed community say "Sneakers" is "so underrated" and a "hidden gem". The community is correct.

Recalling the Luleelurah

 

Listening to a vanilla, adult, mainstream radio station and this song by Fall Out Boy comes on. I guess we're in that point of time where music from this era stops being out of fashion and comes back around as nostalgia. And listening to this song, I couldn't help but remember the lyric video that goes with it.

I think Emo was an interesting phenomenon for me in that it was the (pretty exact) point at which I fell out of fashion. I was the young guy who knew the current trends in music implicitly and then one day I hear there's this new genre I've never heard of. Where did it come from? Who's listening to it? It all had to be explained to me.

To be honest, I don't fully understand to this day. But none of that matters. This video is a classic of the pre-youtube days and everyone should see it.