High Masculine Tones

An astonishing slice of quiz show history...

...there was something Michael Larsen hadn't told anyone.

Back in his home state of Ohio, he didn't have just one television, he had several. Each television was hooked up to a private networking farm of VCRs in his living room. In November of 1983, he recorded every episode of Press Your Luck over the course of several weeks. He studied these videotapes, slowed them down, and froze the images to examine randomized tile sequences frame by frame. If you haven't already guessed, Michael Larsen discovered that the Big Board on Press Your Luck was not a randomized display, but an iterative, sequential pattern which gave itself away once you knew what to look for.

Actually there were six patterns, each of which consisted of eighteen elements apiece -- and Michael Larsen had memorized them all. As long as his concentration and hand-eye coordination held out, Larsen would enjoy full control of the Big Board, and nothing would be left to chance.

When Larsen's total reached $80,000, already a show record, the studio grew silent.

Keep in mind: everyone in the audience believed Larsen was simply experiencing a bubble of good fortune destined to pop at any moment. Host Peter Tomarken remained incredulous throughout each of Larsen's forty-five consecutive and financially successful spins. Who in their right mind would risk so much money so fucking often? In the history of game shows to this point, there had never been anyone this lucky. The more money he accumulated and risked against Whammies, the more he looked like an insane gambling addict totally out of control. The host was freaked, the audience was freaked. There were difficult, heart-wrenching moments when even Larsen's opponents had concerned looks on their faces. One reached out and touched his elbow. Are you sure you want to keep doing this?

Larsen was winning so much money that the running total on his digital contestant podium no longer had sufficient enough real estate to display the dollar sign character. Perspiration dripped from his face. Under the hot lights, surrounded by a bloodthirsty arena of screaming audience members, bracketed by two pissed-off players who hadn't won a goddamn thing, staring straight into the Guy Smiley face of an agitated, loudmouth host who'd long since run out of different ways to proclaim Michael's performance "incredible" -- Mr. Larsen was experiencing a horrible secret side-effect of his plan which he could share with no one: he had failed to locate an exit strategy.

In order for Michael to keep his winnings, he'd have to remain trapped on the stage of Press Your Luck forever. His situation was an infinite loop from which there was no escape: he'd learned how to trigger only plunger-hitting patterns nailing a cash prize and a free spin. According to the game's rules, this "free" spin would eventually have to be spun. In other words, each plunger push would lead to another. Nobody else could play, and Larsen himself could never stop playing.

And the coda to this story only gets weirder.

:: See the video of Michael Larsen's reign of terror at Game Show Central.

:: Via thought peach.

... for a timely reality check as we see progress from sheer shrieking nutbar delusion, and enter a new phase in which the beginnings of skepticism are driven by self-serving sanctimony:

All of the front-runners in the Democratic race borrow the language of pop therapy to discuss the war and the toll it has taken not on Iraq, a country so absent from their campaigns it may as well be on another planet, but on the American people themselves. To hear John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean tell it, the invasion was less a war of aggression against a sovereign nation than a civil war within the United States, a traumatic event that severed Americans from their faith in politicians, from their rightful place in the world and from their tax dollars.

"The price of unilateralism is too high and Americans are paying it -- in resources that could be used for health care, education and our security here at home," Mr. Kerry said on Dec. 16. "We are paying that price in respect lost around the world. And most importantly, that price is paid in the lives of young Americans forced to shoulder the burden of the mission alone."

Conspicuously absent from Mr. Kerry's tally are the lives of Iraqi civilians lost as a direct result of the invasion. Even Mr. Dean, the "anti-war candidate," regularly suffers from the same myopic math. "There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if we hadn't gone to war," he said in November. On Jan. 22, he put the total number of losses at "500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded."

But on Feb. 8, while Mr. Kerry was in Virginia and Mr. Dean was in Maine, both of them assuring voters that they were the aggrieved and deceived victims of President George W. Bush's war, the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion reached as high as 10,000. That number is the most authoritative estimate available, since the occupying authorities in Iraq refuse to keep statistics on civilian deaths. It comes from Iraq Body Count, a group of respected British and U.S. academics who base their figures on cross-referenced reports from journalists and human-rights groups in the field.

We've seen this before. Vietnam is typically cast as a snare and a delusion, a victimized America brought down by an excess of idealism... as if the Viet Cong were itching for a fight, and lured G.I. Joe into their cunning trap. We hear plenty about the 58,000 Americans who died in the war, we hear less about "between one and two million Vietnamese deaths" (give or take a few hundred thousand), not to mention the widespread chemical weapon attacks on the civilian population.

:: Naomi Klein, Globe and Mail: Missing in action in Iraq

See also...

:: New Scientist, Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq

[blank] eye for the [blank] guy, not including "queer" and "straight".

"Of course, we are an empire, but we are different," he says. "Our empire is not defined by territorial ambitions but by ideas. A lot of ideas, like free trade, like democracy, like copyright laws."

Copyright? Was my host really suggesting that we had carried out one of the largest land invasions since World War II to protect copyright laws?

"Well, yeah, our empire is about promoting free trade, it's about promoting democracy and the ownership of ideas. Sure, it's about McDonald's and Microsoft and everything else. But the reality is we are not here only to do that. We are here to protect the security of America. That's what the mission is about.

"That, and to help the Iraqi people build their own future," he adds.

:: The Imperial Imperative

See Infocult for some perspective...

... comes from Ira Glass, on the subject of work:

"There are people who are fundamentally lazy, who only get anything done because they put themselves under dreadful deadline pressure. Those people are all my brothers."

Spotted at thought peach.