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NERGAL-SHAREZER THE RABMAG INTERPRETS YOUR BLEMISHES.
On the forehead. Your cousin Albert thinks less of you than you realize. Perhaps you ought to send him a big box of those expensive gift pears that come wrapped in foil, so he can see that you have enough money to buy expensive gift pears that come wrapped in foil.
On the left temple. The police are quite mistaken about you and will realize it eventually. On the right temple: the police are quite mistaken about you, and they will never realize it.
On the lip. The price of coconut fiber is about to go down precipitously, and about three days from now would be a good time to stock up for all those hobbies you have that involve coconut fiber. Pay no attention to the reason for the drop in price, as it would only depress you.
Under the chin. Avoid blue or blue-grey automobiles of any sort today.
On the neck. Red roses might improve your relationship with whatsername. Make sure to get them before Tuesday, for reasons that will otherwise become obvious on Wednesday.
On the shoulders. The letter from the IRS is probably only an advertisement for something you don’t want, so go ahead and recycle it.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: Since there has been a bit of a storm over me on social media over the past few days, I thought it would be wise to use your forum to explain myself and address the fundamental misunderstandings that lie behind the vocal objections by certain fanatics.
As a film director, I take pride in my work and my reputation. I believe a mere list of some of my works—Heavens II Betsy, Atlas Shrugged IV: Who Moved John Galt’s Cheese?, Othella the Mare of Venice, and the acknowledged classic Herb and Irv Hit Themselves on the Head with Hammers, for example—would suffice to establish my bona fides as an artist. When, therefore, I make an aesthetic decision, it is not made on a whim. It is a carefully considered choice made on the basis of a sound understanding of aesthetic theory.
No discovery in aesthetics has been more profound than the discovery that the only truly cinematic colors are orange and teal. It has forever changed the way films are made. Now set designers know to paint all walls teal, and costume designers know to specify only teal fabrics, and lighting artists know to place an orange filter over their lights, so that the actors will appear to be orange heads bobbing in a sea of teal. The heads can be made even oranger, and the backgrounds and costumes tealer, in post-production. No other aesthetic is truly cinematic.
Unfortunately, this discovery limits the kinds of actors we can employ. The orange lights will be effective on White actors, and on most East Asian actors as long as they are not from too southern a latitude. But they simply will not work on Black actors. It is not possible even in post-production to make a Black actor’s face look orange in a natural way, according to the highly artificial convention of naturalness that the orange-and-teal dogma requires. This is not racism: it is simple hard cinematic fact.
So it is perfectly true that I posted a sign on the casting office that said “NO BLACKS NEED APPLY,” but this was meant to be a kindness that would spare potential applicants trouble and embarrassment. The paper grocery bag hung by the sign for comparison purposes was meant to be a handy guide that would help applicants know in advance whether they were wasting their time, although it is rendered useless by the thick encrustation of very impolite graffiti that seems to overwhelm every bag I hang up there. In everything I have done, I have been true to my aesthetic principles, but I have also attempted to be kind and accommodating to the people affected by those principles.
I hope therefore, that, having made this explanation, I may be permitted to continue filming my all-orange-and-teal cinematic version of Two Trains Running without the interruptions that have plagued the production in the past few days.
Sincerely,
Monty McCarrion,
Director,
Pantocrator Pictures
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
SCENES FROM ANCIENT GREEK MYTHOLOGY.
No. 1.—Antimonos having accidentally felled a shepherd on a hunting expedition, Mentholatos suggests chicken wings instead.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE.
Answer (click or tap to reveal):
The colossal head of George Washington is on Mount Rushmore, not on the desert sands of Ceylon.
INDEX VERBORUM PROHIBITORUM.
Dr. Boli is well aware that taking this principle too seriously would extinguish his celebrated Magazine, but he has never been one to let a foolish consistency stand in the way of telling other people what to do.
As regular readers are aware, Dr. Boli has been building an index verborum prohibitorum: a list of words we are not allowed to use anymore in serious discourse. The penalty for violations—that is, for using these words in serious discourse—is that Dr. Boli will not take you seriously.
Today we find it necessary to prohibit the word content, as it is applied to publications on the Internet.
Immediately Dr. Boli hears the protests from Web designers: We can’t get along without that word. How do you expect us to describe that stuff we pour into our design?
When you cannot imagine doing without a word in your profession, that might be a sign that you ought to get rid of it. It often means that the word has become a substitute for thought rather than an expression of thought.
Our usual reason for placing a word on the Index is that it has lost all meaning. In the case of “content,” however, we have a word that is actively pernicious, not just void of meaning. The word “content” both describes and—more importantly—creates a certain assumption about the things we publish on line.
Our longtime correspondent Charles Louis de Secondcat, Baron de la Breed et de Montemeow, gave us a good example the other day when he went looking for information about dryer sheets. A Maytag site told his Lordship that “Dryer sheets balance the positive and negative electrons in your fabrics that cause them to stick together.” You may look up “Electron” in Wikipedia if that does not strike you as a little bit off.
We went looking for information, but what we found was content. That is, we found a page where some meaningless blather superficially related to the subject was poured into a container to fill a certain amount of screen space. And the meaningless blather was there because the word “content” dictated what was to be on the page. If we are thinking rationally, we ask ourselves, “What information do we have that people need, and how can we give it to them in the best and most useful form?” But if we have the word “content” stuck in our heads, then we ask, “How can we fill up this empty space with words?”
In the current state of our technology, the easiest way to fill a page with words is by telling an AI bot to do it. The AI bot will then scour the Internet for the information it needs, and it will find mostly articles written by other AI bots. This is arguably an improvement over the state of the art five years ago, when the easiest way to fill a page with words was to steal an article from somewhere else and use article-spinning software to change all the words into synonyms. At least now our slop is grammatically defensible. But it is still slop.
This idea of “content” is what drives much of the rapid adoption of AI. If you think in terms of “stories” or “history” or “cooking” or “advice,” or whatever it is you like to write about, then the reason you are writing is because you have something to say. But if you think in terms of “content,” then writing is happening because there is a vessel that looks empty until it is filled with words. If you had something to say, it would not be empty. But you have nothing to say, so you instruct a bot to fill the vessel. It could also be filled with a repeating pattern from a William Morris wallpaper design, but then it would not attract suckers who are looking for information and find our “content” instead.
We live in a strange world where there is money to be made by the appearance of information. People are looking for information all the time. If they think we have it, they will visit our page, and then we can sell advertising space. That gives us a strong motivation to create pages that will lure the information-hunters, even if we have no information to give them. We create a page to trap those people who are desperately longing to know what dryer sheets really do, and then, having created the page, we need words to make it look like information. What the words say is almost immaterial.
If you are stuck in that business model, then of course you will need content. But Dr. Boli will not take you or your content seriously.
For the rest of us, though, the word content is now prohibited. Instead, we must say what we mean by picking another word that describes what kind of information it is we have to offer. Do we have a story to tell? Do we have a picture to show? Even the nearly meaningless word “article” is preferable, because it does not create the subconscious assumption that the vessel is the important thing, and the writing or picture or video is just what fills the beautiful vessel.
Therefore, by the mighty power of not caring what people think of him, Dr. Boli declares that, henceforth, the use of the word content to describe written matter, videos, audio files, pictures, and other such publications is prohibited.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
