Ken's Blog

When I was a child there was a TV jingle that every kid in America knew by heart:

Hot Dogs, Armour Hot Dogs,
What kind of kids eat Armour Hot Dogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks,
Tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox
Love Hot Dogs, Armour Hot Dogs.
The dogs kids love to bite!

I’ve been struck by the negative tone of the few on-line articles about this jingle, which was written by the prolific Clay Warnick in 1967. All of those articles — as well as many YouTube comments — focus on the claim that you could not air this jingle today.

One such article states “They certainly couldn’t air this commercial nowadays. We are so easily offended.” Another article says “There’s no way this article could pass muster in today’s times.”

And yet, this song is the very definition of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It’s not making fun of anybody. Rather, it is cheerfully inviting everyone to the party.

As those song lyrics show, the spirit of DEI is, fundamentally, the spirit of freedom. Are people today really so Slept that they can no longer see a genuine invitation to wake up and have some fun?

Today, during a conversation about the late great Tim Curry, I showed someone a YouTube video of the iconic Sweet Transvestite number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is the first time they had ever seen it, and their first comment was “He seems to be imitating Freddie Mercury.”

But The Rocky Horror Show began playing in London’s West End in June of 1973, whereas the musical group Queen did not start becoming successful until between 1974 and 1975. Is it possible that it was the other way around?

Maybe at some point a young Freddie Mercury wondered into the Royal Court Theater and ended up seeing a crazy Richard O’Brien musical. Perhaps after watching that charismatic guy up on stage in the black corset, fishnet stockings, and faux-pearl necklace, he got inspired.

And maybe the rest is musical history. I guess we’ll never know.

Erin Scavino inadvertently came up with the perfect phrase to describe what the U.S. president and his enablers are doing to our nation’s capital. Between the destruction of the East Wing and the Rose Garden (and apparently the imminent razing of the Kennedy Center), tearing up the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, that hideous “ballroom”, the even more hideous proposed King Kong Arch, down to the idiotic tendency to cover every available surface of the Oval Office with tacky gold leaf — the list goes on and on.

Yes, it is all aesthetically terrifying, but it also clearly serves a purpose: Distracting Americans with the sheer ugliness of these monstrosities gives the administration cover to do the really terrifying stuff, like removing anyone from the U.S. Military command who might have moral authority and a backbone, delegitimizing the voting process by attacking mail-in ballots, attacking independent centers of thought like Universities, and establishing an armed paramilitary presence in cities that didn’t vote for the president.

Those aesthetically terrifying projects in Washington D.C., to use Erin Scavino’s apt phrase, are there for a purpose: To distract everyone from the truly terrifying projects — the ones aimed not at destroying our nation’s capital, but at our nation’s ability to conduct an orderly democratic transition of power.

It was sixty years ago today
The last gig they would ever play
I’m speaking of the greatest band
That there ever was in any land
So let this be a tribute to
The act you’ve known for all these years…

A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting the lab of Professor Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Luckily for me, that visit coincided with the awesome TRANSFORM project that was going on at that time.

In a nutshell, Transform is a dynamic shape display that move more than one thousand pins up and down in real-time to transform a tabletop into a dynamic tangible display.

To help with the project, I created a little on-line simulator. A code editor lets you vary the behavior of the simulated pins.

The examples I started with were some movements based on sine waves and, of course, some movements driven by the noise function. You can play with the simulator for yourself HERE.

It doesn’t get any better than THIS.

It probably never will.

RIP Tim Curry. You will be missed.

wherever you go
at your journey’s end you will
end up where you are

I was saddened to read of the death of Dolly Parton. She was one of my heroes.

I don’t know of many people who wrote more than 3000 songs, and most songwriters are not also leading philanthropists, with seemingly infinite generosity. She was all of those things and more.

I had the privilege of meeting Dolly Parton once in person, and she was every bit as wonderful as you would think. We will all miss her.

I was saddened, but not enormously surprised, to read that Russian drones used to kill Ukrainian citizens are powered by inexpensive computer gaming chips from Nvidia. The same embedded A.I. capability that makes for a good computer game also makes it possible for a drone to autonomously recognize and target gas stations, where it can kill actual humans — which is what a Russian drone just did.

Anyone who has read Enders Game will feel a tinge of deja vu. I’ll bet Orson Scott Card didn’t know he was writing a documentary.

A dangerous virus is destroying our U.S. military capacity. It is doing this by attacking our most senior and trusted military officers, the very individuals who have the proven talent and decades of heroic combat experience to lead us in the event of war.

Here are just some of the senior brass who have already been rendered inoperative by this virus:

Admiral Franchetti: Chief of Naval Operations.
Admiral Fagan: Leader of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Vice Admiral Chatfield: The U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee.
Vice Admiral Davids: Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Lt. General Short: Senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.

But which of our nation’s enemies released this dangerous virus? What it China? Russia? North Korea?

Whichever enemy it was, they should be proud of themselves, because the results have been fiendishly effective. Our nation’s ability to be war-ready, should that ever become necessary, has already been seriously compromised.

It appears that the virus is still, as of today, running unchecked, so I suspect that things will only get worse, as our nation’s military readiness continues to degrade. God help us all.