· Sep 4, 08:39 PM by Andy
A 10 Monkey 5 Minute Manifesto
The basis for this little slice of cyber-living, research tells me, is the Borel-Cantelli lemma which is a theorem of probability theory which involves a whole bunch of variables, superscripts, subscripts, and sequences of this or that.
A special case of this neat little theorem is the infinite monkey theorem whereby and hence if there were an infinite number of monkeys typing away at an infinite number of typewriters eventually they’ll bang out every book in France’s Bibliothèque nationale de France which is what, 25 or 30 copies of the The Little Prince, half of which are in English or German? Anyway, when I first heard this theory it was about Shakespeare – same number of monkeys, still using the typewriters but this time writing the collected works of Shakespeare – which may or may not have actually been written by Shakespeare but that’s another issue.
Which brings us to the glorious summer of 2002. I got my first real six-string. Bought it at the five-and-dime… Uh, never mind. Anyway, I find myself in a nice little gin mill on Polk Street waiting for a friend’s band to play when the random clattering together of various instruments ruins any chance of my enjoying my beverage or conversation. After a few minutes of this noise it struck me that if it took an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite amount of time to write the collected works of Shakespeare then a subset of said monkeys, say 10, could write this bands songs in a subset of infinity, say, 5 minutes.
In retrospect, I think I was being generous to the band.
Fast forward 2 weeks and I mention this comment/theory to a friend and BAM, WHAMMY, and POW the idea for this here piece of cyber-estate was dreamt up.
The more astute may notice that this leaves us 3 years of gestation. Good job. I see your public school attendance gave you the tools to do basic math. You are obviously overqualified to help me out at Walmart.
Which is the tone we’re are going to take in reviewing of (mainly) pop culture.
I’m reminded of a movie review, I don’t remember which but want to say it was Battlefield Earth, in which the reviewer said something along the lines of “being anally raped by giant sewer rats is probably worse than watching this movie, but not much.” That, my friends, is pure genius. When something is bad, don’t fucking say the cinematography was beautiful but the direction lacked focus. What the fuck is cinematography anyway! The movie sucked. We’ll say it, try to find new and creative ways of saying it, and let you whether its worth your time and/or money.
On the other hand, not everything sucks so we’ll be generous to. How generous? I don’t know! I haven’t figured out this whole scale yet – we’re making this up as we go but we will be generous. Oh yes, we will be.
Currently we’re stuck with whatever it is that we’re looking at – what we’re willing to plunk down our hard earned bucks on – so don’t expect a lot of tv reviews or any blockbuster Hollywood has put out. In the future, if we find out that anyone is actually reading this shit and that this isn’t some sort of virtual masturbation, then maybe we’ll branch out and accept suggestions of what to review. And by “suggestions” I mean free copies of stuff. Christ, like we actually care that Brittney from Fayetteville would like us to review the latest Coldplay album.
So uh, sit back, grab some corn and uh, lets, uh let the reviewing begin.
