The CRABNOX Tragedy-to-Comedy Converter

We all know that person–the one who shows up with steamed turnips at a cookout, the one who sings "He Stopped Loving Her Today" at a karaoke bar, the one who brings Schindler's List to movie night.  While CRABNOX can't yet help with sad culinary selections or depressing sing-alongs, it is pleased to announce that it can now instantly convert tearjerking films to nonstop laugh riots.

Using a combination of natural and artificial intelligence, CRABNOX mixes canned sound effects with movies' original audio, thereby transforming iconic heartbreakers into comedy gold.  No viewer will leave screenings of these films with knees unslapped or ribs untickled.  

Below, please finds clips of three cinematic tales of woe rendered humorous by CRABNOX's exciting new technology.

Terms of Endearment

Titanic

Thelma & Louise

New Yorker Cartoons Remixed

New Yorker cartoons have tickled our funny bones for generations.  The witty compositions have appeared in innumerable digests and page-a-day calendars, graced countless t-shirts and coffee mugs, and more or less become lodged in our collective unconscious.  But eventually, the novelty wears off.  Readers can only view a classic Charles Addams or William Steig offering so many times before its humor dissipates.

In order to breathe new life into old New Yorker cartoons, CRABNOX has applied postmodern techniques of deconstruction and reconstruction to several classic, but no longer amusing, comic panels from the iconic magazine.  Cartoon images were selected at random from the New Yorker's vast database, divorced of their original captions, and paired with new captions randomly harvested from other New Yorker cartoons.

Presented below are just a few of CRABNOX's refunnified creations.  

Soporivision™, CRABNOX's New Streaming Service

TV is often turned on as an aid in drifting off to sleep.  But that technique is flawed for several reasons.  Let's take a look at the three types of late-night TV most popularly chosen to render the viewer dormant, and analyze their faults:

1.  Movies:  "good" films engage viewers and hold them spellbound until the credits roll, resulting in a loss of sleeping time; "bad" films fail to interest viewers, creating a restlessness that leads to more channel-surfing or streaming-service-scrolling.

2.  Show marathons/binge-watching:  viewers are powerless to drowse or even change the channel, so invested are they in the shows' characters and story arcs.

3.  Shopping channels/infomercials:  bright colors, spinning displays, markdowns, and breathless announcements instill feelings of desire in viewers, leaving them unable to doze (a phenomenon related to our storied inability to fall asleep on an empty stomach). 

But now, with CRABNOX's new streaming service Soporivision™, falling asleep to the TV is easy.

The narrative structure of most shows and movies follows a time-tested formula:  hook viewers, keep them intrigued with plot movement and character development, and finally climax with one of a variety of emotional manipulations (a big come-from-behind win, the eventual union of lovers previously considered star-crossed, the stunning revelation of the real killer, etc.).

Soporivision™ offerings subvert this classical structure by first ensnaring viewers with powerful, suspenseful, or hilarious opening scenes but then becoming increasingly boring.  Each will enchant viewers long enough for them to become fully engrossed and decide not to change the channel.  However, after this initial baiting phase, the programming becomes so dull that few will be able to watch it without being lulled into a state of deep slumber. 

Soporivision™ features hundreds of exclusive shows and movies that can be streamed on any device at any time, enabling viewers to select exactly how and when the hypnosis will begin.

Unsure where to start?  Here are the top selections in the US this week:

A black ops agent.  A top-secret document worth millions.  A decades-old thirst for revenge.  These are the elements leading to an explosive, pulse-pounding showdown that quickly restores everything to status quo.  As the film continues, reports are written, proofread, and submitted; government furniture damaged in the crossfire is inspected, replaced if necessary, and, in some cases, earmarked for the next surplus property auction; and at last, the hero is taken out of the field and moved to an office-based managerial position where he receives and must finally handle vacation requests from four different employees.  

Dr. Frankenstein’s monster has been locked away in Thistlecleave Asylum for over 20 years.  After the arrival of a new mad scientist leads to a gripping, edge-of-your-seat battle of brains versus braun, the fearsome beast escapes.  Once on his own, the abomination begins shopping for a home, finally settling upon and signing a mortgage agreement for a split-level ranch in suburban Minneapolis.  But now he can't decide on a style in which to decorate his newfound dwelling.  Victorian?  Colonial Revival?  Hollywood Regency?  If you can somehow stay awake through the subsequent 70-minute consignment boutique browsing scene, a single take filmed in slow-motion and set to a repeating reduced-tempo instrumental cover of Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain", the terrifying creature's ultimate choice may not surprise you.

This 4-hour documentary opens with exciting, never-before-seen footage that gives the viewer an intoxicating inside look at some of New York City’s most iconic clubs—Studio 54, Pyramid, Danceteria—during their dazzling, cocaine-fueled heyday.  The thrilling music, the outrageous fashion, the legendary stars—everything's here in its hedonistic ‘70s & ‘80s glory.  But what happens after the party’s over?  A sequence of undramatic reenactments illustrates how, once the patrons leave the disco and the lights go up, the janitorial staff prepares the venue for the next night’s festivities by collecting glasses, picking up cigarette butts, mopping the floor, and wiping down tables.  Famously monotone narrator Ben Stein describes each cleaning act in granular detail and then, for the film’s lengthy conclusion, reads a 96-stanza poem entitled “Ode to a Dustpan”.  Stein’s somnolent recitation of the opus is played over a slideshow of sepia photographs depicting vintage corn husk brooms.  

According to a recent survey, the average person gives 32 gifts per year. If we assume that the median human lifespan is 81 years (as it is in the UK, where the survey was conducted), and that the average person is an active gift-giver during 54 of those years (we made deductions for childhood, college, and a person's final years, stages in which the gift-giving urge may be reduced or dormant), then s/he will have purchased a staggering 1,728 gifts before shuffling off this mortal coil. The act of seeking a gift, perhaps once a heartwarming enterprise, easily turns into an onerous exercise that leaves the bestower (and often the bestowed-upon) in a state of distress and disappointment.

But now, wearied givers, that Sisyphian chore can become a thing of the past with Crabnox's convenient and free-to-use Gift-o-Matic. Simply enter your recipient (spouse, doorman, that lady in HR who's retiring, etc.) and click "FIND GIFT". We'll select the ideal present from our vast array of exclusive products. To demonstrate, we've started by suggesting the perfect gift...for you!

Recipient:

The Businessman-a-Day™ Calendar

CRABNOX is pleased to introduce its Businessman-a-Day™ calendar, which depicts those suit-clad office-dwellers en route to commence another round of sales projections and expense reports, another slate of meetings and presentations.

To produce the calendar, wily CRABNOX photographers snapped thousands of unsuspecting executives during their a.m. commutes.  From these images, CRABNOX selected only the finest portraits, each capturing a classic businessman on his morning pilgrimage.

As an added tribute to the corporate world, the calendar runs fiscal-year-style from July 1st to June 30th.  What's more, if placed in a work environment, the calendar can be written off as a business expense.

The critics all agree!

Below, some sample pages from the Businessman-a-Day™ calendar.

Overthinking It: Google Image Search vs. AI Image Generator

"Here's Johnny!"

For most people, that brief phrase conjures a sole image:  Jack Nicholson's maniacal Jack Torrance furiously hacking through a door to reach his terror-stricken wife.  A Google search of the utterance, with no further context, yields dozens of images of The Shining's most iconic scene before a single shot of the phrase's originator, Ed McMahon, ever appears.  For decades, any reasonably intelligent person has been quickly able to find a photo of the unhinged, ax-wielding Torrance.

But until lately, unless one was a Photoshop ace, it was difficult to obtain images that address more hypothetical topics, images that answer questions such as: "How would Edie Sedgwick look if she were alive today?", "What would the love child of Scarlett Johansson and Bob Hope look like?", and "What if Angela Lansbury had played the lead role in the Rambo series?".  Fortunately, recent developments in AI software have made short work of realistically rendering such subjects.  

Convincing AI-generated images

Left: Princess Diana, were she alive today

Right:  A-lister Will Smith as an ordinary fast food hireling

With this in mind, we decided to approach an AI image generator with a far simpler directive:  just show us film and television classics featuring their original stars.  If AI can spawn surprisingly lifelike visualizations of highly speculative subject matter, then it must certainly be able to churn out rigorously accurate reproductions of images that already exist.  Our first prompt of "The Shining, Jack Nicholson, here’s Johnny" seemed like a no-artificial-brainer; even Jeeves would have been able to help.    

But instead of simply regurgitating easily located stills of our requested subjects, the AI presented a string of bizarre, often disturbing images.  Each contains identifiable elements of what we sought (some to a greater extent than others), but the overall compositions are surreal and unsettling. Certain motifs—diseased eyes, doppelgängers, grotesquely gnarled hands—recur several times, and occasionally the AI seemed to utilize random features from actors other than those we specified (for instance, the AI's purported Jack Nicholson displays a correctly configured left eyebrow but possesses a honker of Harrison Fordian angles and proportions).  We have presented our findings below, each in a side-by-side comparison with the Google-sourced image that inspired our AI prompt. 

  

Jack Nicholson in The Shining

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.

Sigourney Weaver in Alien

Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show

Bob Barker on The Price is Right

Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune

John Cleese in Fawlty Towers

Mary Tyler Moore in The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in Seinfeld

Kelsey Grammer in Frasier

EXTENDED FEATURE:  Scenes from The Golden Girls

IN-DEPTH LOOK:  Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy

Ford Becomes First Automaker to Use Interracial Crash Test Dummies

In an historic announcement, the Ford Motor Company has revealed that beginning in 2015, it will utilize interracial-style dummies during its automotive safety tests, becoming the first company to make such a move.

"Ford is an American company, an American icon," said a spokesman for the company.  "And the America of the 21st century is a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities.  We sell cars and trucks to a huge and varied clientele, so why shouldn't our crash test dummies reflect that diversity?"

The first safety tests of the new year, scheduled in February, will be conducted with Ford's newly commissioned multi-race anthropomorphic test devices, some of which are illustrated above.

"Accidents are equal opportunity tragedies," the spokesman continued.  "We want our tests to be as close to the real thing as possible because at Ford, safety is first.  Everyone's safety."

We Don't Design Ceiling Fans for Less Than $10,000 a Day

By the turn of the millennium, some of the most iconic supermodels of the '80s and '90s were aging out of the merciless but high-paying job of publicly wearing expensive clothes.  In order to remain relevant, many altered their career trajectories:  Linda Evangelista became the face of L’Oréal Paris; Heidi Klum signed a lucrative contract to co-host Project Runway; Janice Dickinson became a legendarily quarrelsome reality TV habitué; and so on.

A star can generate significant income by selling his or her name. Whether it’s a dazzling red-carpet collaboration (e.g., Lady Gaga donning a multimillion-dollar Tiffany necklace at the Oscars), a sleazy TV endorsement (e.g., a wizened and strangely excitable Joe Namath working himself into a frenzy as he plugs the scammy Medicare Advantage program), or a desperate late-career cash grab (e.g., Richard Simmons permitting his cranial likeness to be manufactured as a Chia Pet), a corporate partnership is one of the easiest ways for a famous person to rake in some extra money. 

But there is a more extreme form of celebrity huckster to which we would like to draw your attention:  the ex-model-turned-home-furnishings-designer.  Today, we will examine the ne plus ultra of this species of peddler:  Kathy Ireland.

Career history:  Ireland was “discovered” at age 17, whereupon she launched her modeling career.  From 1984 to 1996, she was a frequent feature in Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions.  During this time, Ireland rounded out her résumé by starring in various box office failures and playing bit parts in doomed sitcoms.

Entrance to hucksterism:  In 1993, as her modeling career showed early signs of flagging, the entrepreneuse “designed” a line of socks for K-Mart.

Current company:  kathy ireland Worldwide® (kiWW®)

Above:  the kathy ireland Worldwide® advertising aesthetic is defined by hastily-assembled collages of stock photographs. 

Headquarters:  Its website breathlessly informs us, “kiWW® maintains offices and design studios in Honolulu, Hawaii, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara kathy ireland Worldwide maintains Head Quarters in Rancho Mirage,CA.”

Slogan:  "...finding solutions for families, especially busy moms."™  The quotation marks are apparently part of the trademarked slogan, suggesting Ireland, or somebody else, actually uttered the words; the ellipsis, one of countless on the website, implies the statement had a beginning part that failed to make it to the trademarking stage.  (Elsewhere on the website, Ireland alarmingly puts "going to sleep" in quotation marks when dispensing wisdom to harried parents of insomniac children, casting a murderous, Godfatherian cloud over her motherly advice.)

Products:  kiWW® plasters its name on an unsettling array of items, presented on the site in an almost interminable stream-of-consciousness-style list: "furniture, flooring, decorative surfaces, lighting and accessories, window treatments, replacement windows, home office and entertainment, leather and microfiber, infant, youth and adult top of bed, bedding, candles, hand-painted fine porcelain, decorative shelving, apparel, fresh-cut flowers, skin-care for men and women, wall coverings, ceiling fans, mattresses, totes, hand bags, travel bags, frames, wall décor, clocks, Design It Yourself jewelry and crafting supplies, kitchen and bath cabinetry, infant furniture, Ready to Assemble (RTA), decorative shelving, fine jewelry, wigs and hair extensions,  real estate, vacation events, wedding program licenses, music and film licenses, publishing, greeting cards, Kathy is the author of six books."

Qualifications for promoting these items:  It’s not surprising that Ireland would put her imprimatur on fashion- and appearance-related goods like jewelry and wigs; less apparent are her credentials to hawk things like mattresses, kitchen cabinetry, and music licenses.

Evidence of the “designer” at work:  In the clunkily-titled video “ki Home by Shaw Fall Flooring Days”, a particularly haggard Ireland, clad in a white lab coat, observes and gesticulates as swarming technicians subject nearby rug samples to various tests; this behind-the-scenes footage is intercut with clips of the visibly exhausted ex-supermodel haranguing skeptical showroom browsers about her flooring products.  

Above:  the "designer" feigns scrutiny of carpet pile.

Meta-endorsements:  Sometimes, in what we dub "meta-endorsements", celebrities openly declare support for other celebrities’ products or services.  A video promoting kiWW® reveals that the star galaxy takes a generally favorable view of the onetime catwalker’s undertakings. “She’s brilliant,” gushes late fellow pitchwoman Elizabeth Taylor.  “I think she’s a hero,” confesses former chart-topper Anita Pointer.  Only ‘80s primetime soap fixture Joan Van Ark seems reluctant to bestow such ecstatic praise, instead tendering a strictly fact-based appraisal of Ireland’s activities.  “For the women down at the Los Angeles Mission,” Van Ark states mechanically, her countenance expressionless, “she has donated furniture.”

Above:  A grinning Ireland, restrained by Liz Taylor's bloated claw, poses at a World AIDS Day photo-op.  

Representative products:  Interior design rules, advises Ireland, “are made to be broken.”  She also reminds us that “your accessories tell a story about you to guests.”  With these insights in mind, we have selected three sample items from Ireland’s collections for your consideration.

1.  "Brushed copper antique clock with coffee mug graphic"  

Story this product tells your guests:  You purchase and enjoy furnishings that depict food and beverage items.

Interior design rule broken by this product:  Do not decorate your home as if it were a coffee shop in a mid-90s sitcom.

2.  "Reef Reflections Decorative Accessory"

Story this product tells to your guests:  You shop blindfolded.

Interior design rule broken by this product:  When selecting seaweed-motif objets, take care to avoid those that resemble manmade disasters like chemical plant explosions and ruptured oil tankers.

3.  "Sandy Retreat Table Lamp"

Story this product tells your guests:  You also own a pair of khaki slacks embroidered with scores of tiny red lobsters.

Interior design rule broken by this product:  Tacky beach furniture is not an aesthetically appealing decorative accent, even when rendered in miniature.  

Gesture of humility to millions of paying customers:  Following the initiatives of important poet e.e. cummings and Grammy winner k.d. lang, Ireland does not capitilize her initials when they appear in her company's name.

Approximate earnings:  kiWW® raked in $1.4 billion of retail sales last year.  As the helmswoman of the empire, Ireland herself is thought to earn in excess of $10 million annually, far exceeding Linda Evangelista's fabled, but relatively piddling, $10,000 a day.