"Bob" vs BOB

[Linus Minimax]

purple used to say Twin Peaks was about him,
but there's very little speculation about a possible inspiration-connection
between the "Bob" Church for weirdos and the BOB TV show for weirdos

well we saw them again in 25 years... and what did we learn?
we learned that 'Project Blue Book' created 'the Blue Rose Task Force' to study TULPAS
(cf. the Book of the SubGenius "Researching the public's fear of the unknown since 1953!"
and "The UFO Made Me Do It" chapter which dismisses hardware saucers and warns of TULPAS)

and what did we learn about BOB specifically?
BOB emerged from The Trinity Test (he was created by J.R. "Bob" Oppenheimer)
BOB was punched to death by a magic glove (he was Removed by a Stark Fist)

That's some pretty tight resonance between the two pop-culture pillars o' Bob!
but what about Coopelgänger? the fake Cooper who resembles Dale but lacks his Slack?
he's defeated by UNDERSTANDING MEDIA ("I understand cellular phones now!")

very curious ... and resonant with purple's claim that "Blue Rose" was the trigger-phrase
which would send Michael Blake Read into a trance so he could channel 'The Evergreens'
there's an interview with MBR where there's a single blue flower in a vase on a side-table behind him...
...just like Cooper finds in the 'space station' in episode 3
so, yknow, maybe not so crazy after all?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itYBfLt2-o0

[User]

https://archive.org/details/gayniggers-from-outer-space-1992

[Linus Minimax]

That's him, officer! That's the UFO what made me do it!
I never would've done it otherwise I swear I'm not into that kind of thing.

[Linus Minimax]

On Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 2:54:07 PM UTC-5, Linus Minimax wrote:
>
> That's some pretty tight resonance between the two pop-culture pillars o' Bob!

As a Torontonian McLuhanatic, I obviously love Videodrome, a classic homegrown flick with a character inspired by Marshall McLuhan.

But as a McLuhanatic I also have mixed feelings about Brian O'Blivion -- the stuff he says is mostly a caricature of how McLuhan was MISunderstood by people who (like the host & guests of the talkshow in the movie) weren't paying attention.

Especially what he says about TV itself. But the rest of the movie -- and the Videodrome TV show especially -- is a very astute exploration of what McLuhan actually said about TV & 'tactility'.

There's no story and no movement, just one room which we never leave with a soft & wet textured wall, and the action consists of nothing but blows, just striking people, just touching & feeling.

-----

But VIDEODROME is not the only artifact from 1983 which exhibits this strange quality. In the Book of the SubGenius, p.127 -- not just any passage but the alleged words of "Bob" himself! -- we find the following:

"... while absently tinkering late one night with an experimental television receiver of my own design.

... my vision of the room was short-circuited from within by the glow, but I could, after a fashion, 'feel' the walls and shelves around me, as if the air space between them and my skin did not exist... they seemed continuous with one another.

... The roaring sound seemed to come from no external source, but from deep within myself: this time, I felt, from my groin. Yet it was emanating outwards, evenly, in all directions; it was encompassing all the world. I could 'reach out' with the sound. I felt I had become a Radio of the Universe, deafened by the static chatter of an electrical cosmos."


That's quite precise: both the 'audio' and the 'video' channels of perception have been replaced by TACTILE versions of light and sound, with explicitly tactile phrases emphasized ('feel' & 'reach out')!

And both of these visions are presented in the explicit content of TV (Max Renn is searching for new content for his TV station, J.R. Dobbs is inventing a new form of TV set) ... and weirdly, both involve BOB. J.R. "Bob" Dobbs goes without saying, but why is the McLuhan-proxy in Videodrome named B---- O'B------?

[%]

this stuff all died years ago ,
it is seen as being off topic to talk about it now

[Creon]

With all due respect, I'm enjoying reading Linus; and I
hope he buys a $5 lifetime blocknews account and continues to
post after G-day.

--
-c

[Linus Minimax]

On Tuesday, February 20, 2024 at 4:55:00 AM UTC-5, Creon wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:00:24 -0700, % wrote:
>
> > Linus Minimax wrote:
> >>

> >> And both of these visions are presented in the explicit context of TV

> >> (Max Renn is searching for new content for his TV station, J.R. Dobbs
> >> is inventing a new form of TV set) ... and weirdly, both involve BOB.
> >> J.R. "Bob" Dobbs goes without saying, but why is the McLuhan-proxy in
> >> Videodrome named B---- O'B------?
> >>
> >>
> > this stuff all died years ago ,
> > it is seen as being off topic to talk about it now
> With all due respect, I'm enjoying reading Linus; and I
> hope he buys a $5 lifetime blocknews account and continues to
> post after G-day.
>
> --
> -c

Thanks for saying so, but that's definitely not going to happen.
I'm just here to drop some extremely belated things-left-unsaid into the time capsule before the user-friendly portal closes

I didn't look closely I thought it was just bots buzzing in this box. To be cordially informed by a real person that my SubGenius-related posting is off-topic was a real 'Moment of Zen'.

I was always told I was off-topic no matter what I posted -- told for example by one of the supposedly lear-eyed & fact-based resident kookologists that I NEVER NEVER post anything but Deanie shit despite my deliberate ettiquette of making sure to post MORE non-Deanie shit than Deanie shit. They were somehow always able to continue believing in their little patterns even after all the supporting facts had disappeared.

Nothing too remarkable about that, just basic Nietzsche (careful if you wrestle long with Deanies, lest you become a Deanie yourself!). But these jerks had a major allergy to being reminded that they were still vulnerable to such basic bitchery. They seemed content to become what they beheld as long as they could keep getting those HITS in. It was depressing and creepy and I had a tendency to nope out of that vibe without properly underlining my point... and I was tempted to do the same thing again yesterday, since the off-topic comment seemed like a sublimely fitting punchline to the whole 20-year sketch.

Nah, fuck that. I will drop another few retorts at least, and continue tracing the precarious subsymmetrical Tower o' Bobs that used to drive me nuts, which I am now able to contemplate more calmly as an abandoned building.

[Linus Minimax]

On Monday, February 19, 2024 at 3:00:39 PM UTC-5, % wrote:
> Linus Minimax wrote:

> > In the Book of the SubGenius, p.127 -- not just any passage but the alleged words of "Bob" himself! -- we find the following: ...
> >

> this stuff all died years ago ,
> it is seen as being off topic to talk about it now

https://twitter.com/LinusMinimax/status/1759705213777178941

[Linus Minimax]

On Monday, February 19, 2024 at 2:16:55 AM UTC-5, Linus Minimax wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 2:54:07 PM UTC-5, Linus Minimax wrote:
> >
> > That's some pretty tight resonance between the two pop-culture pillars o' Bob!
>

> And both of these visions are presented in the explicit content of TV (Max Renn is searching for new content for his TV station, J.R. Dobbs is inventing a new form of TV set) ... and weirdly, both involve BOB. J.R. "Bob" Dobbs goes without saying, but why is the McLuhan-proxy in Videodrome named B---- O'B------?

I don't know. More on that later perhaps, but what makes the question even more interesting, to me, is the way that Strange Brew is a 'sister film' to Videodrome: two Toronto movies from 1983 about bizarre mind-control technologies.

Strange Brew is of course the Bob & Doug McKenzie movie. Not only does it also have a main character named Bob, but Doug is the "real" name of Rev. Ivan Stang. 'Bob & Doug' are the two Faces of the Church of the SubGenius, and 'hoser' overlaps 'slacker' considerably. And it is of course plausible that prominent weirdo comedians like the SCTV crew might've been early fans of the Church.

So these two movies already, in 1983, anticipated the thematic dyad of 'the Canadian McLuhan-related Bob and the American SubGenius-related Bob' that would go on to vex the HELL out of alt.slack. But if Strange Brew is the 'American sister' of the 'sister films', why are Bob & Doug so 'Canadian-coded'?

Because Bob & Doug McKenzie are only the Canadian half of another pair of 'sister fake-brothers'. The Americans have Gene & Dean Ween, and whaddya know: those fake slacker brothers also evoke THE VERY SAME DYAD: the SubGenii & the Deanies.

More specifically, the Canadian Bob calls his rival 'Doug' while the American SubGenii call him 'Dean'. Hence, the McKenzie brothers and the Ween brothers already form an ANALOGICAL RATIO of sister-brothers in uncanny resonance with the

Which is pretty weird on its own. Never mind the additional resonance with Videodrome, and the sinister Canadians of Twin peaks. But I have another story to add to this Tower o' Bobs.

[Brennus]

Linus Minimax <linusm...@gmail.com> wrote in
news:0d0bed3c-969b-4190...@googlegroups.com:

Nobody cares about the defunct sub-tard club anymore. Haul ass, douche.
LOL!

[%]

Brennus wrote:
> Linus Minimax <linusm...@gmail.com> wrote in
> news:0d0bed3c-969b-4190...@googlegroups.com:
>

i think i'll get them to tell me more about bob

[Linus Minimax]

> Which is pretty weird on its own. Never mind the additional resonance with Videodrome, and the sinister Canadians of Twin peaks. But I have another story to add to this Tower o' Bobs.

On Bob's notorious Tiny Note Chart, each Quadrant* has an iconic film attributed to it. For the final Quadrant, the Dobbs Quadrant (the one Bob identifies with), the film is The King Of Comedy, about an unhinged fan of a late-night talkshow comedian who so badly craves a stand-up slot on the show that he takes the host hostage in order to demand it.

In one of these threads Joe Cosby urged Bob to try out his stalker schtick on David Letterman, as if that was his own Funnie New Idea. I guess he never bothered to glance at Bob's chart over all those *years* and MANY THOUSANDS OF WORDS he spent refining his armchair diagnosis... why bother to let him tell you about himself when you can look it all up in your gut, amirite?

It was stranger when Stang reported that he'd only just seen The King Of Comedy for the first time, and that for him it wasn't a comedy at all but a terrifying horror movie. If I had an honest-to-goodness psycho stalker who was providing clues about how he saw his relationship to me, I would uhhhhhhhhhh not ignore them?

But he does have a very conventional excuse for not having seen it before: for the first decade-plus since Bob put it on his chart, The King Of Comedy was still considered to be a misfire and an unfortunate stain on Scorcese's otherwise stellar reputation.

As 'web 2.0' and twitter became prominent environments, enabling random lunatics to talk back to celebrities, opinion started to shift. 2012 didn't see 'Lockdown Bobrule' but it did see The King Of Comedy officially rehabilitated as an important film. By 2019 the biggest film of the year was an homage to it. Nowadays Scorcese's gangster flicks are of course classic canon but The King Of Comedy is PRESCIENT.

Well, sorry not sorry to say, that means Bob was prescient. 2012 is the year associated with that quadrant, and that was pretty much the year that The King Of Comedy was salvaged. That prediction worked out pretty well.

But what really weirds me out is the fact that the 'real name' of the comedian-stalker (the name of the actor who plays him) reduces to Bob DeN.

...

I don't always *enjoy* Bob's interactions with alt.slack, but they form part of a larger epic quarrel that I find to be Very Funny in a post-everything, gods-laughing-at-humans, "my god this man is more stretched out than Monk!" sort of a way. In some sense, I can agree that he is The King Of Comedy...

... even without the astonishingly perfect 'Bob DeN' punchline.

-------------

*"why are they called Quadrants when there are 5 of them?"
- the Disney movie about a magic ritual at the SkyDome

[Linus Minimax]

On Wednesday, February 21, 2024 at 11:42:13 PM UTC-5, Linus Minimax wrote:
> >
> But what really weirds me out is the fact that the 'real name' of the comedian-stalker (the name of the actor who plays him) reduces to Bob DeN.

But what about the question I abandoned: "why is the McLuhan-proxy in Videodrome named B---- O'b------?"

I don't know! [snip extensive comments on that subject which y'all don't deserve]

But it sure was weird that the 44th President of the United States (Bob having long identified with the number 44) from Hawaii (where Bob has long been based) was ALSO named B----- Ob--- !

Weird it was... but not, like SCARY weird.
SCARY weird was the fact that the actual 'ticket' that people voted for, the actual alphabetic code that was 'voted for', was OBAMA-BIDEN...

... which is an anagram of I AM BOB DEAN!!

...or, even better, IMABOB DEAN
('Imabob' being the category of superkook that purple Bob is officially classified under, in the SubG taxonomy)

...

Ladies and Gentlemen: the Tower o' Bobs!!!