AI and the US Presidents

Posted on February 24, 2023 by jimgphynn

There’s been a picture going around the internet lately of AI-generated portraits/caricatures of all 46 US presidents. It presents them in chronological order, with each row representing five consecutive presidents. I figured I’d throw in my two cents about how I think the images look…

George Washington. Looks like his false teeth are hurting a bit too much.
John Adams. I think the AI mixed a little bit of Ben Franklin into the mix.
Thomas Jefferson. I think he just saw how he was portrayed in the hit musical Hamilton.
James Madison. Looks like he’s getting a colonoscopy.
James Monroe. Either the best or worst poker player ever.
John Quincy Adams. If he had that expression more often, he might have been able to scare people into giving up their slaves.
Andrew Jackson. Looks like he got his feelings hurt after that assassination attempt.
Martin Van Buren. Looks like he just invented a time machine in a Delorean.
William Henry Harrison. Looks like a museum curator in an animated Indiana Jones movie.
John Tyler. I think all of the people calling him “His Accidency” really got to him.
James Polk. I can hear him saying, “Have I got a used car for you!”
Zachary Taylor. Wasn’t he one of the bad guys in the movie Up?
Millard Fillmore. Looks like everyone’s high school principal.
Franklin Pierce. Soon to be playing Gaston in the next remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
James Buchanan. Is really thankful William Tell wasn’t his father.
Abraham Lincoln. Look. I know part of his charm was being self-deprecating about his appearance but the AI takes it a bit too far.
Andrew Johnson. Looks like he’s telling congress not to fuck with him. And as we know, Congress didn’t listen.
Ulysses S Grant. Hemorrhoids on the battlefield can be a real bitch, can’t they?
Rutherford B Hayes. Yet another Indiana Jones museum curator.
James Garfield. The hat makes me wonder where Jon, Odie, and the rest of the comic strip crew are…
Chester Arthur. Looks like he wants Senator Conkling to tell him about his mother.
Grover Cleveland. Looks like a stereotypical cop at a donut shop.
Benjamin Harrison. Looks like he’s trying to avoid the same fate as his grandfather (William Henry Harrison).
Grover Cleveland. Zooming out from the picture doesn’t help any. That toothache must really be getting to him.
William McKinley. Looks like his last words before being assassinated were “Who farted?”
Theodore Roosevelt. Is not amused. By anything.
William Howard Taft. Not only did he break up a few monopolies, he ate them.
Woodrow Wilson. If you’re racist and you know it, clap your hands!
Warren Harding. Looks like his mistress didn’t care for his love letters.
Calvin Coolidge. Served about a decade too early to go out and punch Nazis.
Herbert Hoover. Kids, this is what happens when you get blamed for a financial crisis that was at nearly a decade in the making before you were elected.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Give him a violin and he’ll start singing a blues song about wanting to walk again.
Harry Truman. Gave up the job in haberdashery to become a private dick.
Dwight D Eisenhower. That’s the face he made every time he talked about what Hitler smelled like.
John F Kennedy. Not shown within the borders of his portrait, is Marilyn Monroe blowing him.
Lyndon B Johnson. Looks like he wants to wipe the smirk off of Wilson’s face.
Richard Nixon. That’s pretty much an accurate portrait of him. He always looked that constipated.
Gerald Ford. Looks like he ended up being a news reporter on Soviet television after he left the presidency.
Jimmy Carter. The expression of someone who lived a good life. Seriously.
Ronald Reagan. There’s a part of me that wants to put him and Coolidge in a cage together to see who steps out alive.
George H W Bush. Did he lose his teeth when he threw up on the Japanese prime minister?
Bill Clinton. That look seems to be a bit resentful that, of all of the presidents who came before and who cheated on their wives, he’s the first one to actually get in trouble for it.
George W Bush. Really does look like Dick Cheney’s lapdog.
Barack Obama. “Did I tell you that I took out bin Laden?”
Donald Trump. If the skin tone was less pink and more orange, I’d say the AI nailed his likeness.
Joe Biden. In competition with Martin Van Buren for building that time machine. Or maybe they’re the same person after successfully building it. Not sure.

Bill Maher has jumped the shark

Posted on January 20, 2022 by jimgphynn

I have been fan of Bill Maher since he hosted a panel discussion show called Politically Incorrect on the Comedy Central station. I enjoyed watching that show, both on Comedy Central and then after it moved to ABC. After he lost that stint because of a less-than-politic statement about the September 11 terrorists, he got picked up by HBO with a weekly series called Real Time with Bill Maher, which is scheduled to return for its twentieth season tomorrow.

And, for the first time since he started this show, I won’t be watching.

I keep thinking about how Dennis Miller, the Saturday Night Live alumnus who went on to host his own show on HBO before Bill Maher, stopped being funny in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Everyone reacts differently to trauma. With some comedians, that includes ceasing to be funny and acting more like an old man getting angry at the clouds.

That’s what happened with Bill Maher after the COVID pandemic hit. I’m not specifically complaining about the why his show had to adapt to not having an audience in the early days of the pandemic, but that’s undoubtedly where the decline started.

I get it: if you’re a comedian, you need laughter to keep you going, and, without an audience to provide it, that can be pretty devastating. I give him full credit for making the best of the situation at the time.

But he always was at his worst when talking about matters related to health and nutrition. Hell, I called him out on that nearly nine years ago, building on another article that listed him as one of the five most awful atheists out there.

But when so much of the news is dominated by a deadly pandemic, a news-oriented comedy show (or is it a comedic news show?) hosted by someone whose grasp of matters relevant to public health makes for television that can run the gamut from boring to dangerous.

During the most recent season, he uncritically interviewed a conspiracy theorist whose sole argument is that because nobody is talking about the possibility that COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, it must have been so engineered (to which I say that the mortality rate isn’t high enough to be a bioweapon; evolution explains it just as well, and without the baggage of unnecessary assumptions) and then asked Senator Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN) if we can declare the pandemic over. (Where the only “fairness points” I’m willing to give him, are that the omicron variant hadn’t been identified yet.)

And on top of that, he has gotten quite cranky lately in his criticism of the Millennial generation. Barely a week went by where he didn’t say something casually dismissive of trends that the younger generations are causing.

And amid all of that, he just stopped being funny. His shows became painful to watch, and even the witty “New Rules”, which were a staple of every season since season 2, seemed dull and uninspired. I still chuckle over the early “new rule” that was taken from an FBI report of teenage and twentysomething girls prostituting themselves in malls so they can make money to buy things in malls. (“I’m lucky if I can find an escalator that goes down” and “If you take your daughter to see the mall Santa and she gets in his lap face first….”)

But those days are long gone. The girls he talked about in that new rule are now in their 30s and 40s, possibly with kids of their own, and he’s ranting about how they are causing a guacamole shortage because they like avocado bread.

Dennis Miller had the sense to realize his time was up in his HBO series before he moved on to other projects (including a very brief stint as a football announcer). I think it’s time Bill Maher did the same.

Make it stop!

Posted on December 25, 2019 by jimgphynn

I realize that what I’m about to say might make people roll their eyes at me. And if they’re young enough, they might even say “ok boomer”. For the record, I’m solidly Gen-X.

George Carlin once complained about the phrase “have a nice day.” He wasn’t wrong about his observations but there’s a much worse phrase than anything he mentioned in that routine, and it bothers me whenever people say it to me.

“Have a blessed day.”

(And I don’t care if it’s pronounced with one or two syllables.)

I know that the people who say this mean well, but this phrase never sounded right to me. It’s not just because I don’t believe in the supernatural. But I recently realized what it is that rubs me the wrong way about it.

If you wish me a nice (or good or great) day, you’re expressing a hope that I do something that may make my day a bit more enjoyable. It’s my prerogative whether or not I act on your expressed hope and if I either choose not to have such a day, or if my day doesn’t work out as hoped, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s my own.

If you wish me a blessed day, you’re invoking an external entity to intervene on my behalf. This demonstrates a complete disregard for whether or not I want that intervention. If I don’t want to have a nice day, I don’t have to act in a way that could result in a nice day. If I don’t want a blessed day, who do I go to in order to decline the wish?

“Have a nice day” may be a flabby, meaningless wish, but it’s still light years ahead of a blessed day.

And I for one, would love to see the latter done away with in the language.

I Knew I’d Seen Him Somewhere Before

Posted on April 25, 2013 by jimgphynn

There may be another blog entry of a more serious nature about this, but I can’t help but think that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the sole surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber…

… bears an uncanny resemblance to Bob Dylan, circa 1964…

The Onion Fucks Up

Posted on February 26, 2013 by jimgphynn

The night before last, at the Academy Awards, the movie Argo took home the award for best picture. While director and producer Ben Affleck was speaking on the stage, thanking the academy and everyone involved in the production of the movie, the satirical newspaper The Onion crossed a line, with regard to the 9-year-old star (and Best Actress nominee) of the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, with the following tweet:

(I’m using an image of the tweet because it has since been deleted, but this is the internet and nothing is ever truly invisible…)

The Onion is known for its satire, often hard-edged and at times offensive to the people or groups whom they lampoon. That much is a given.

And there’s no question about it: this was offensive. And wrong. And, to be frank, not funny. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, nor do I know anything about Quvenzhané Wallis, other than the fact that she’s the youngest nominee for best actress in the history of the Academy Awards. So maybe there could be something here that I missed, but I sincerely doubt it…)

So the fundamental question is whether or not, even in a tongue-in-cheek sense, there are times when calling 9-year old girl a “cunt” is right. And I admit it: I can’t think of one.

This coming from a guy who believes that there is no such thing as a topic that’s so taboo, so off-limits, that we can’t make fun of it. Yes, attempts at humor with some topics can make you more enemies than friends, but I strongly support the right to make these kinds of jokes.

So the Onion did the right thing, the noble thing, the admirable thing, and apologized. As far as I can tell, the apology is sincere, although the line about “taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible” raises more questions than it answers.

The one big question that bears asking, is whether or not this was merely a lapse in judgment on the part of an indeterminate number of staffers at the Onion, or if something far more systemic was at play here. Hell, I don’t even know how much time elapsed between when the concept was first considered, and when it got posted. Or was this a natural consequence of a work culture that tries to be biting, hard-hitting, in-your-face, and, well, crude? That question will likely never be answered.

And, I’d like to reiterate that the Onion did the right thing by apologizing. One other question that does come up — and we won’t know this for quite some time — is whether this is going to have a lasting impact on the quality of the satire we see coming out of that website. The last thing we want is for a bigger named celebrity (in the realms of either entertainment or politics) demanding an apology because of the way The Onion lambasted them.

If it means anything, I’m hopeful at least about the quality of the satire, as evidenced by today’s satirical take on a big news item from yesterday: U.K. Cardinal Resigns in Wake of — Get This — Sex Abuse Allegations .