"Do you have any idea what's going on?" (Credit: lance Ulanoff)
The slap
By now we’ve probably stopped talking about the most shocking live television moment in memory–or maybe not.
Since the Oscars telecast is my Super Bowl, I might’ve been more emotionally invested than the average viewer, which meant the moment struck me as hard as a slap. For the three of you who haven’t heard:
Chris Rock made an unkind and in-poor taste joke at the expense of Jada Smith
Will Smith took offense
Smith walked on stage and slapped Rock on live television.
Like the moment a decade ago when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson during the actual Super Bowl, millions rewound their DVRs to see if Smith had in fact slapped the comedian. Unlike that time, we have more platforms to instantly disseminate and dissect the moment. Within a few minutes, photos and clips (from multiple angles) of the incident were online and on social media.
Memes followed almost as quickly. It was all being consumed, analyzed, and parodied before most of us could even recover.
For my part, I was shook and upset for everyone. Sure, this is actually a very small incident. One person insults another’s family member, the other takes offense and delivers a slap (not a punch, thank goodness). It’s almost Elizabethan, except for Smith’s profanity-laced rant immediately after.
There are bigger problems in this world, but so few are delivered in such bite-sized, Full-HD packages. It was a terrible moment delivered for modern media.
Let’s be clear, no one looked good in this. Rock made a terrible joke about someone with a medical condition (the jury is out on whether or not he knew). Smith made a large-scale emotional error. He was rightly angry but there’s no script or screen direction that says, “Biggest actor in the world and soon-to-be- academy award winner assaults host.”
How Rock carried on and the show continued is beyond me. I honestly thought it might end right after The Slap. But the old adage, “The show must go on,” is apparently an indelible thing.
And so it did.
By the way, I accurately predicted the game-changing Best Picture winner.
And one more thing
And, with this, we can all stop talking about The Slap.
Robot sludge, I love you
Perhaps by now, you’ve seen the video of the magnetic, robotic sludge that might someday be used to remove swallowed objects from our stomachs, maybe even in our colons to remove polyps, our brains to open clogged blood vessels, and other parts of our anatomy where people feel comfortable with black muck running programmatically through their bodies. Most of these other tasks are not ones anyone is suggesting, just yet.
Yes, it looks creepy and scary, immediately bringing to mind the Spider-Man 3 Venom symbiote that comes from outer space and then somehow slips into Peter Parker’s body. Most people online responded with quick “Nopes!” Robots are creepy enough without looking like interstellar slime.
I see it differently. A robot that can be any shape and size and that you can program and control without wires is, potentially, a major breakthrough.
I promise we have not heard the last of robot slime.
Who dis? My number
The other day I got a text from me. There was my name and a number I’d used with a test phone texting me. It was a scam and one that’s being repeated on phones across the country.
Clearly, scammers have access to a new database of our leaked info and have figured out how to spoof these numbers in a way perfectly calculated to confuse, upset, and maybe convince you to act.
My reminder to you is…don’t. Just don’t. I don’t care if the text is from “you” to yourself. You know when you’ve texted and when you haven’t. You also know that you never text yourself. Ignore it. Block it. Delete it. Just don’t respond to click on a link.