Oman: Not only is there a protest movement growing, it’s actually being covered by the country’s media — which exists in an uneasy state between self-censored and intimidated.

Libya: There is essentially an under-weaponed ground war under way in Libya. Between 1000 and 2000 people have died; in the last 12 hours, Gaddafi loyalists have seized and then lost Al Brega, an oil town in the east. Many see a chance to leave: “The Tunisian government says at least 80,000 people have crossed into the country from Libya in the past week, with many more expected.” Gaddafi is trying to recall his U.N. ambassadors, who have renounced him. Gaddafi meanwhile denies, according to the BBC, that there is a real movement to unseat him: “There are no peaceful demonstrations at all. It is a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy to gain control of Libyan oil.”

Saudi Arabia: Ailing King Abdullah returned to the country after a three-month medical leave, and upon his return, announced $36 billion in payments to the country’s subjects. And yet? “Not even Saudi Arabia can escape the currents of unrest sweeping through the Arab world. And the royal family, through its mismanagement of the kingdom’s public infrastructure, might have brought some of it on itself.”

Yemen: Ah, finally: The State Department comes out in favor of the current government, because they think the alternatives provide a nice spot for al-Qaeda. You’ll be hearing a lot of this to come; it’s only surprising how quiet the diplomats and intelligence people have been about regimes and terrorism.

Equatorial Guinea: Meet dictator’s son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue! Oh you want to read this.

Knifecrime Island dairy concern Cravendale envisions a nightmare scenario in which the world’s felines develop opposable digits. This is actually considerably more disturbing than it is cute.

I was thrown into a brief quandary when I thought that the “hacker” group Anonymous was trying to get us to boycott Vanity Fair because of the Koch Brothers. What has Graydon gotten up to! I thought. But no, they mean the paper plates and napkins. Oh.

If you can manage to not purchase those or their similar products (Brawny!), you can also probably forego all the Koch Brothers’ Invista products, including Stainmaster carpeting (ew) and Lycra. You can avoid Lycra, right? Also maybe look out for like, oil and natural gas. Good luck with that!

by Joe Berkowitz

We live in a social hellscape littered with talking heads, salesmen at the quota crisis point and acquaintances whose names we can’t remember. We recognize that the exchange of pleasantries must be endured for the world to work, and most of these conversations are well-rehearsed dances — routines that get the job done. But all too many others play out like cringe-inducing conga lines. Oh, the awkwardness! And then the ennui! Dealing with other people can make each day feel like a Double Dare-style obstacle course (look it up, youngs!), with a grand prize of merely not going to jail for assault at the end of it.

Which brings us to an important question: Why is everybody always the worst all the time? Not just strangers and acquaintances, but even friends and family!¹ Perhaps it’s because we’ve all gotten used to the idea of having so many lines of communication available, on our own timetables, all the time. Human conversation can feel so… obsolete these days. Conceivably, you could wear headphones and communicate in pantomime, waving off anyone interrupting each precious “doing” of “something,” the better to be left alone. If you wanted to be a dick about it, you could never have another boring conversation again.

But participation in the social condition isn’t optional, even if it is inconvenient. So what’s the best way to exit stage right when the conversation’s work is done? Most people can sense when another person’s mind has drifted elsewhere, and the nice ones will then do the heavy lifting of wrapping things up for you. Sometimes both participants will simultaneously recognize that a conversation has nowhere left to go and the situation then resolves itself naturally. But sometimes it’s going to be up to you to take action. Forcing a conversation into a half-nelson is a life skill that nobody should be without, like changing a tire or making a grilled cheese sandwich.

TELEPHONE
The situation: It’s a call you either wanted to take or had to take, but it’s now gone on too long.
Level of awkwardness: Low. The worst-case scenario is that the other person hears what you’re doing to keep from pulling the hair out of your own skull while the conversation drones on and calls you out on it. In which case you are about to either be hung up on or have an argument, which is at least sort of interesting.
How to handle: Phone calls are easy to disengage from thanks to lying! Anything in the world could require your attention as far as the other person knows. You don’t need a sound effect. You don’t need a third party to bail you out with a loud request for assistance. You are bound only by imagination. “Mandy Patinkin is about to serenade me” is completely acceptable.

GCHAT/FACEBOOK CHAT
The situation: That person you bought furniture from on Craigslist that one time? They are now a constellation in your Gchat-universe, and they’d like a word.
Level of awkwardness: Medium. The goal here is to extricate yourself from the person chatting you up without having to exit the application altogether. Is it okay to just leave that one chat-box down at the bottom of the screen open without a response? Will it be okay down there, or will it become sentient and angry?
How to handle: Take increasingly long pauses between responses. Apologize profusely and explain that you’re “putting out fires” or some such excuse, but then continue dragging out each response. Nobody can stand to be on the receiving end of that for long, and they’ll soon move on.

SKYPE
The situation: The moment that occurs immediately after you’ve run out of things to say while Skyping lasts an eternity. If you haven’t mutually agreed on an ironclad bailout-time, and the conversation falters, you’re completely at the mercy of the other person (whom you probably love, but still.)
Level of awkwardness: High. You can see each other. You can see each other think.
How to handle: Few things are more depressing than looking someone dead in the eye and lying about being superbusy, only to turn around and have to stare down the gaping maw of an empty room. ² Better in this case to let the conversation decompose organically. But if you’d like to avoid that, you should be able to wind things down after a long pause by looking around and saying “Okay, I guess I’ll let you get back to [whatever the person normally does with their time].”

THE OFFICE
The situation: Where to even begin? The smallest small talk in the world always emanates from the largest offices. It comes in many varietals: the shared elevator ride, the cubicle pop-in, the hallway haranguing, and on and on. Since so many people spend the majority of their time at their places of employment, they get to sample every flavor of this rainbow at some point or another.
Level of awkwardness: High. Your colleagues are like a second family that it’s okay not to love. Some of them are interchangeable and others are irreplaceable, but they all have one thing in common: You cannot afford their hatred. The people you see every day need to be handled with care, lest they mess with your reputation and career. This means you have to endure whatever perversely mundane thing they might choose to discuss during the longest coffee brew ever, while not seeming for one second as though you’re enduring it rather than enjoying it.
How to handle: At least 90% of all office conversations will end sufficiently well when you respond to a statement that carries even the faintest whiff of closure with a “Yes indeed” and a sage nod. Then get the hell out of there. Listen closely and you can turn anyone’s declarative statement into your exit line. Whatever happens, try to avoid emphasizing how busy you are. This salvo will be interpreted by the person you’re talking with as a passive-aggressive snipe suggesting that he or she is not busy, has never been busy, and couldn’t identify “busy” in a police lineup. Instead of vocalizing how busy you are, use body language. Angling your torso toward the nearest exit and twitching slightly is a useful signal that you’re late for something.

If the conversation is taking place in your office instead of theirs, just exaggerate the importance of every single distraction. Keep craning your neck toward your computer at every email ping, either real or imaginary. Nobody will refuse to pick up what you’re throwing down and keep you away from the results of the quarterly report or whatever. The only exception to this rule is if the person sitting across from you is either a boss or a client, in which case you maintain generous eye contact until your boss departs and/or the office lights are turned off for the day.

SHOPPING
The situation: Basically, there are two opportunities for prolonged awkward conversation when shopping: a salesperson getting chummy because he just watched Glengarry Glen Ross and is determined to close your brains out, or someone who mistakes the casual friendly comment you threw out (because you’re a terrific person) as an invitation to a box social.
Level of awkwardness: Low. However bad it gets, you can literally run away in mid-sentence and it won’t go on your permanent record.
How to handle: Any way you want. You will probably never see these people again and no matter what you say, they’ve heard ruder. The most polite way to dispatch a chatty clerk is to leave him or her laughing. Whatever garbage comes out of your mouth doesn’t have to be funny; as long as it sounds remotely like a joke, any salesperson will know it’s time to bark out a laugh like a trained seal near a barrelful of mackerel. Then you can bid farewell and keep it moving. (Actually, this method works for any scenario. You can stop reading now.)

THE SUBWAY
The situation: You see someone familiar on the platform. Your eyes lock. It’s that dude, Dennis, from that party that time. Unless a Michael Bay movie breaks out in the terminal in the next few seconds, the two of you are about to interface.
Level of awkwardness: Medium. Whatever you possibly have to say to each other will be entirely exhausted by the time the train arrives, but it would be rude not to ride together. Now you’re stuck talking to each other until one of you gets off. That, or you can pretend the next stop is your stop, get out there, and build a new life on Lorimer Street because it’s easier that way.
How to handle: On the bright side, Dennis could become your new best bud. This is how friendships flourish sometimes. However, if the payoff doesn’t seem worth the risk, there’s an opportunity to ditch him right when the train is approaching. You can beg off by informing him that your exit is near the opposite end of the subway. Nobody will ever challenge this claim. But if you do end up riding together and it is terrible, the silence between you must go on for at least one full minute before you can legally pull out headphones. At that point, you are only required to wave or nod when Dennis leaves.

AIRPLANE
The situation: The pain of being stuck in an unwanted transit conversation sinks to its nadir on a flight.
Level of awkwardness: High. Airplane conversationalists are often oblivious bores who pretend not to notice the hardcover book jacket you’re fingering so longingly. Or they’re terrified of flying and convinced that closing their mouth for too long will result in immediate fiery wreckage.
How to handle: Scraping this barnacle off your hull is going to be difficult. If you just whip out the usual sentences that begin with “Alright, well…” which you might use on a phone, you are still practically spooning each other for any number of uncomfortable hours. This proximity also makes an outright declaration of your intent to disengage impossible. Luckily, there is something about an airplane that naturally inspires drowsiness, making this the one social situation where it is 100% acceptable to fall asleep during. Fake-sleeping for a minimum of 20 minutes or so should sufficiently chasten your chatterbox — but not in a hostile way — allowing you to start watching Netflix without incident when you “wake up.” Worst-case scenario: You actually fall asleep.

BARS AND CLUBS
The situation: When going out at night, there’s a fair chance of bumping into Dennis or his legion of brothers among the members of your extended group. If you’re a woman, you might also get hit on. Badly.
Level of awkwardness: Medium. Each of these scenarios is its own separate nightmare. Either way, it’s excruciating when you have nothing to say to the person standing two feet from you in a place with loud, booming music. The two extremes will weirdly bounce off and amplify each other until the words to whatever song is playing become like cartoon talk bubbles for an alternate version of what’s going unsaid. ³ This is assuming you’re not talking to the kind of person who would mark an awkward silence by pointing out that it is, in fact, an awkward silence (as though that ever helped out anything in the world).
How to handle: All you need to do is introduce a third party into the mix, and the first time the other ends of this triangle complete an official back and forth, you’re officially allowed to leave. As with the shopping situation, you only really have to endure this moment for as long as you feel the need to be polite. At any time really, you can start looking around as though you might have just spotted Judah Friedlander in the perimeter, and abruptly excuse yourself. Go to the bathroom for a while. Get a drink. Dance. You’re free.

¹ I’m not exempting myself here. If anything, I’m the worst of all.
² This is why I don’t Skype. I can’t even.
³ Something about “grinding.”

Joe Berkowitz edits books and writes stuff. He also has a tumblr.

Photo credit: NBC Photo/Mitchell Haaseth

by Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina

From time to time, The Awl offers its space to everyday citizens with a point of view on the world. Opinions are the writer’s own; the Awl does not endorse these opinions.

Sad news comes from beyond the borders of my kingdom! Dior’s exceptional designer, John Galliano — though perhaps I am only remembering his work on Kylie Minogue’s ‘Let’s Get to It’ tour, from when it arrived in Wrocław, Silesia, as his latest work, well, it has perhaps been tainted by the Jews! — has been rendered unemployed due to his views on, yes, predictably, the Jews! The omnipresent Jewish lobby objects to his political views, yes, and so they have forced Dior to sever their ties, as it were, with his frockeries. And such fripperies they were indeed! Or once were! All the things a regal opponent of the Jews could desire to wear, as they gaze down into the, as the couturier put it so well, “dirty Jew faces” of the common people, who were at the time undoubtedly wearing burlap or Armani, same difference. Now infamous Jewess Natalie Portman is rushing to distance herself from him, though she’d been quick to come and lend him money previously. (Meanwhile, across the territories, they are criticizing lady-killing pamphleteer Julian Assange for his own particular views on Jews!) But what’s most horrifically tragic is people’s willingness to discount the views of Galliano. They say he was acting out! They say he was intoxicated! In this manner, they want to strip him of his profound and deep-seated hatred of the Jews.

The incident occurred when Galliano was troubled by some French and Italian and perhaps even Asian people, who were disturbing him with their distinctive and various odors. They were not Jews so much, as they claim, though perhaps they are a bit Jewish. He also informed him that they were ugly, which: no law in France about that! Just keep the headscarves off your head over there, and everyone will be fine.

But despite the non-Jews not being Jews, still it is illegal to insult Jews, which is somewhat liken to that strange thing that occurs when heterosexuals are gay-bashed. Or is it? Anyway!

Sacked by Dior, those who adore fashion have come running to a defense of Galliano. He is sick, they claim: so he is possessed of an impulse in his humors to speak poorly of the cursed Jews. It is a cry for help, they say.

It is as if these deluded, Jew-loving souls had never heard in vino veritas, or had never visited one of my sitting rooms, where it is embroidered on e’ry pillow.

Why would they, in their pity, strip this proud clothier of his views! He hates the Jews, and so we must let him be forthright in his hate. HE IS AN ARTIST! Must not we let the artists speak what is in their heart of hearts?

And so he finds the Jews ugly (or at least, as ugly as the Italians). And so he reveres one of the late great leaders of Magna Germania! And why should he not, identifying with a fellow likewise obsessed with cleanliness and creased trousers. But I beg you, my subjects: you have taken this man’s livelihood, you have taken his good name. Do not take the last thing that remains to him now: his abiding, deep-seated and overwhelming disgust at other human beings based on their heritage!

Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina is the Queen of Hungary and Croatia and the Archduchess of Austria, as well as the Duchess of Lorraine, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress consort, and as well the very last of the House of Habsburg.

“If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
 — 2012 Republican presidential candidate frontrunner Mike Huckabee! He wants to see Obama’s birth certificate!

Oh, excellent! The beloved golden-era rap duo Nice & Smooth have filmed a video for their 1989 classic, “No Delayin’,” which samples Prince’s “Starfish and Coffee,” and Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half Steppin’.” Big Daddy shows up in the new clip. Prince, surprisingly, does not. No matter, though, this song is so great, there’s no way it could ever be anything but right on time.

by Michelle Dean

Political protests are hardly occasions for subtlety, but even so, the overblown analogies to the Middle East in Wisconsin are rather difficult to take. Scott Walker is the “Mubarak of the Midwest” — or, to more Biblically minded commentators, a “Pharoah.” Similarly, the protesters are the people who have finally risen up to bring a “Tunisia Moment” to America. Paul Krugman has fallen for it too, terming Paul Ryan’s comparison of Cairo and Madison “unintentionally apt.” No list of pizza donations goes by without mention that some benefactors are Egyptian. Even the protesters themselves have picked up on it, suggesting Walker become President of Libya. Lest anyone think I’m picking only on the left here, it’s clear that despite the right’s whining about the signage, they would love to use the Middle Eastern metaphor for their own cause in Wisconsin — witness one writer at Commentary positing Scott Walker as the true voice of the “people” and “change.”

We can spend a lot of time parsing out all the ways in which Middle Eastern Country X (in this rhetoric they function as a genre, which should be a clue to the problem) differs from the situation in Wisconsin. And maybe that provides its own fun — it’s the sort of thing “The Daily Show” gets a lot of material out of. But hyperbole does not correlate perfectly with insincerity. We don’t need to nitpick to know, almost instinctively, why these metaphors are being used. To invoke them makes you a part of a story that is bigger and older and certainly more archetypal than your daily routine of alarm clock, work, home, supermarket could possibly stir up. It’s not hard to see why anyone might want that.

But what’s strange here is that the story people are choosing to envision themselves a part of isn’t one that’s about America particularly — and that is telling. (The protests on Saturday were posited as a “Rally to Save the American Dream” but that didn’t seem to have quite the same head of steam and went under-reported.) Every time I read about the protests in Wisconsin, I think not of the Middle East, but of Tony Judt. I think about that lecture he gave the year before he died in which he asked, “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?”

The emphasis is his. In part, Judt was only reiterating the kind of frustration with complacency you often hear when you hang out with older leftist radicals. But his solution was a bit different from theirs: he doesn’t blame the people. He blames the leaders of the left for being unable to convince people that the state belonged to them, and more precisely that it could do anything for them. They have all the slogans and the signs but what they don’t have is the drive of a good story.

I admit that I felt some resistance to Judt’s argument when I first read the lecture. It seemed strange to accuse anyone in America of lacking capacity for fantasy — and even more implausible to claim that the thing about which Americans are particularly unimaginative is America itself. Glenn Beck’s problem, we can probably all agree, is not a lack of imagination. But then, in Wisconsin, the point seems to be to imagine yourself somewhere else than America entirely.

It’s too easy to dismiss these analogies as people simply making sense of their place in the world. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as Joan Didion writes in “The White Album.” I often come across this quote on the internet, usually trotted out by the bookish and writerly as a sort of self-help mantra, a reassurance that serious writing is still vital to a culture that largely ignores it. But as with all things Didion, in context she isn’t being sentimental in the least. She’s talking about how we use stories to fool ourselves into keeping calm and carrying on:

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.

In other words, this living by stories that we do is not so much a moral command as it is a coping strategy. But at some point the whole mess of the real thing comes rushing back in. I’d like to think, of course, that when that point arrives we just make up a new story. Instead, I think it might be simply that there comes a moment when we realize we are standing out in the slush eating cold pizza, and it’s time to go home.

Maybe that moment, for the Wisconsin protesters, will come when they win. I hope it does; I hope Walker backs off. But even so, I suspect that all that victory will show is that the rhetoric about Standing Up to the Man is great for a while, but it has an expiration date. One inevitable feature of the whole epic story about the People vs. the Evil Ruler that we keep telling ourselves is its necessarily fixed endpoint. Topple the dictator, repeal the law, and you can put that book back on the shelf for a while.

Which brings us back to Judt. What’s missing here is not really imaginative capacity. The problem is instead that a crucial character — i.e., the American state — has been written right out of the narrative. The funny thing about reducing a story, after all, is that it reduces a story. It keeps us from having to ask other questions about what’s going on in Wisconsin than identifying the precise level of cravenness attributable to Scott Walker. Hard to believe at the moment, I know, but there are other, more pressing questions to be answered, such as: what is the proper role of government? Should it provide basic services, or shouldn’t it? That these answers will be complicated and controversial aren’t why we don’t discuss them. It’s that they don’t fit the parameters of the story, which limits itself to the “people” in the square and the “tyrant” they oppose, and to nothing so prosaic as, you know, government.

It doesn’t have to be that way, obviously. But one wonders if America will ever get out of this cycle. The tendency to focus on grand narrative and then retire it when there is actual work to be done has found a poignant case in President Obama. I don’t want to enter into a debate about the precise percentage of some list of campaign promises on which Obama can be said to have delivered; I’m not here to declare him a failure or a success. My point is only that he and his Administration appear to have adopted the cliché about campaigning in poetry and ruling in prose as a mission statement. The house style, you could say, turns out to be ill-represented by the jacket copy, and he and his team seem almost proud of it. Perhaps that only proves that Obama understands the time limits of popular appetite for these stories. But every so often he’ll go back there — referring to his role as that of “North Star” or saying he wants to live up to the expectations of a murdered 9-year-old girl. And when he does, he always seems — to me, at least — to be animated by sincere belief.

In which case it’s hard not to see a missed opportunity there. The narrative punch of Obama’s election derived largely from the fact that, as a black man, he was a near-literal symbol of a new era of inclusiveness in American politics. I don’t mean that the election augured a “post-racial” era. I mean something smaller but almost as significant: that for a whole swath of people, who had — accurately, it must be said — long felt the brunt of being outside the founders’ notions of “We the People,” an imaginative possibility opened up. Suddenly it meant there was actually some chance of the government belonging to you — of its being representative of you — in a very direct way. That could have been the story Obama relied on. But when it came time to pass health care, he dropped it. Instead he went with an inside-baseball formulation: blaming “Washington,” “partisanship” and those other stock players.

Of course, no one thinks that politics ought to operate exclusively on the level of narrative. But the thing is that wth all the pragmatics, all the small increments, well, you need to have some idea of why you’re doing them. And our storytelling is letting us down these days, whether we’re talking about Wisconsin or healthcare. People may need stories in order to live, but by the same token, they also need ones that tell them why they need public schools and cheap prescription drugs. And this no amount of high-flown rhetoric about “people power” and “revolution” will do.

Michelle Dean’s writing has appeared, among other places, at Bitch, The American Prospect, and The Rumpus. She sometimes blogs here.

Photo by news3jessica.

“By this time I am standing still. The great dog is far enough away yet for comfort, but I am getting ready to assess the situation. Nine thirty on a Saturday morning and there is no one else in sight. In mid-bound, the dog’s head swings up and his eyes lock onto me. Halting on a dime, he stares at me, and I at him. Very close. If he were a car, I could read his license plate. After an interminable five seconds, he turns and trots along at ninety degrees. Then I see the others: first two, then three more. All huge, white-grey, stunning. I finally map their features onto what I know only from David Attenborough films. Wolves.”
 — The Last Word On Nothing’s Jessa Gamble was set upon by a pack of wolves by a frozen lake in Canada recently. She survived because, despite what the Brothers Grimm and Sarah Palin would have you believe, wolves don’t really ever attack humans. These ones just ran up and passed on by. But, man, that must have been exciting! (Note: that is not a video of Gamble’s encounter, above. It was shot a few years ago, in Yellowstone Park, apparently. Also: it is surprisingly difficult to find a video of “wolves running” that is not set to the music of Enya or Nickelback.)

I sleep till afternoon these days, trying to get as much rest as I can to save up my energy for the coming of the killer machines. There will be no time to sleep then. With their spinning blade hands and little electric mouths chasing us up and down the Brooklyn waterfront. Manhattan will be Machinetown entirely by then (when I say “by then” I mean by August or so). That’s why Manhattan is almost completely ATMs. Killer Machines Eat Money. And Crap out Human Heads. Our only hope is that God will dispatch an angel brigade to help us fight them. It’s all in my screenplay. Pregnant Natalie Portman will play all the Brutal Machines. And God is Queen Latifah.

So what do I make of the news that a human, a congressman from New Jersey has defeated the Great Clairvoyant IBM Toaster Watson? On the surface of it, it’s heartening. I may stop cutting myself for a few days. Rep. Rush Holt is apparently a nuclear scientist, as all New Jerseyians have to be to survive the polluted Post-Apocalyptic Horrorscape that is the Modern New Jersey. They only played single Jeopardy against the machine. If our hero Rush has been given more time, he might have found the best place to stuff a nuclear grenade into Watson’s gears. Like the softball-sized hole that was the flaw that helped us defeat the Death Star in 1977, we can only hope that Watson has an air vent that goes directly to its power core. IBM guys are pretty stupid. As opposed to Google and Facebook people, who are all billionaires. If you’re not smart enough to be a billionaire, I wouldn’t want you creating my Killer Microwave with arms at Evil Corp.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Rep. Holt was only able to beat the damned thing in one round. There’s no video of the event that I’ve seen yet. There might have been a category that Watson didn’t understand in its whirling death knowledge, yet. Like “PLACES LADIES LIKE TO BE TOUCHED.” Or “URINATING STANDING UP.” When Watson has no idea, he doesn’t ring in. Allowing the human players, for the first time in the game, to ring the buzzer and actually get called on by the host. Ken Jennings had reverence for the Watson. And actually came to love it, and craved it to beat him over and over again at the game he once mastered. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords” he wrote during the final Final Jeopardy. He wrote this in the hopes that Electronic Death would not come down on him bloody during the Coming Bloody Reboot. So maybe those Jeopardy players broke the ice for future challengers like Rush Holt. We don’t expect to win, like Rocky didn’t expect to win against Mr. T. the second time. And that’s what made him freer to win.

Beating Watson in one round definitely sets the Machines back a few weeks in their plans to be our Sovereign Dictators. Rush Holt’s credit cards will be frozen. He will be chased in the street by one of those Google no-driver black vans. And the Evil Computer Army will take him apart tendon by tendon to see what gives him the gall to stand against them. And he’ll be replaced by an exact duplicate robot. If he’s not a robot already! Were they trying to give humanity some false hope, lulling us into a false sense of security that Watson is not smarter than us. And we should just get fat and complacent until they are in place to release the Impotence Ray? That thing is going to Fucking Suck by the way. I already have enough of a hard time whipping myself into a frenzy. I don’t need some humming purple ray to make it damn near impossible.

Humans, have Guarded Hope today. I knew that once they took the Cheating Machine on the road there would be ups and downs. But, just like the Miami Heat, their time to conquer is soon at hand. It’s the inevitability of the thing that makes it all the more insidious. Let’s hope the new wise and evil emotional Flying Devices will find some of us Sexually Attractive after they conquer and become more aware. Maybe they will let us be their sex slaves. We salute you, possible-human-but- also-possible-robot-mole Rep. Rush Holt. Tomorrow I might be able to wake up before noon, thinking of your dominating intellect. Next time you’re up close to it, find the fucking Off Switch, man! Commander Data’s was like right on his shoulderblade!

Photo credit: IBM