I just saw an article over at Maddow Blog, Rachel Maddow on the TV Machine All Day. “TV machine”? I thought that was my phrase. I thought that I had come up with it independently. It is, after all, my kind of jokey philosophy. The Luddites, after all, were the Android programmers of their day. So I like to push the idea that devices are just clunky machines. It’s good to remember that nothing we do is really hard. Heart transplants are downright trivial, although we did have to kill a lot of people before we perfected them. But I’m sure that was true of the secret of fire too.

But “TV machine” also sounds very Rachel Maddow. So I guess I must admit that I just stole the phrase from her. But I doubt she has all the great Luddite and secret of fire subtext that I do. Yes, I was never a Rhodes Scholar, but that doesn’t mean I can’t out pretense her.