Internet Chronicle

INTERNET — The “Idea Channel,” a horrifying YouTube production from PBS which aims to educate and entertain within five lighting-fast minutes, has translated television pedagogy to the internet. Surprise! It’s incredibly bad. The painfully hip mustachio’d host Mike Rugnetta rattles off jargon and drops names in front of a backdrop of trendy old vinyl covers as images of his references flash by so quickly one show in 2012 reportedly triggered a wave of epileptic seizures. This “educational” program, tailored to victims of new media whose attention spans have evaporated, generally glosses over deep topics with a few bad jokes and glib statements. The fact that it seems jammed full of good information makes this insipid programming even more dangerous.

In the episode above, Rugnetta asks the question, “Are Cell Phones Replacing Reality?” Among such intellectual gems as, “Ubiquitous computing is awesome and important,” Rugnetta crosses into dangerous territory by calling French Post-Structuralist Jean Baudrillard a “Grumpy Gus.” After a pitiful thirty-second explanation of Baudrillard’s theory, Rugnetta presses the idea that cell phones might replace reality is “alarmist.” To really fill out his unintentionally ironic performance of precisely what Baudrillard has warned against, Rugnetta coldly delivers the verdict, “Being bored stinks, and also we’re more connected and more knowledgeable.” Thank goodness PBS is paying for the “Idea Channel” and funneling all this great knowledge straight to our cell phone. It would really suck to slog through years of sucky, boring media theory.

LONDON — Margaret Thatcher, first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and high-ranking Illuminati member, succumbed to old age, making one bitcoin gambler and trained assassin, Ronnie Nitro, a millionaire overnight.

So-called death pools invite owners of bitcoins to bid on the time of death for celebrities, incentivizing free agent hit-men with the kind of big money that was once available only from the evil hands of super-rich. While Margaret Thatcher appears to have died peacefully, others believe her death was orchestrated and timed by subversive bitcoin owners fighting to quell Illuminati machinations.

If this is true, then for the first time, bitcoin has given the masses the same kind of money-moving inertia once available only to the super rich, and the proliferation of death pools may very well shatter their iron grip on government and business, clearing the way for young aspiring hip hop stars who are surely being suppressed by the Illuminati in the same way Michael Jackson was repeatedly poisoned, framed, maimed, and eventually murdered for their Satanic purposes.