Chat GPT; A weekly agentic theater survey - for me.

 I set up a scheduled, repeating task for Chat GPT to do - search multiple LA-related websites for local theater I might enjoy (based on a list of favorites and preferences.)

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Here's a sample of its weekly scan and output to me.

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LA Theater Editor — Sample Report, Friday July 31

1. F**king Strangers — Echo Theater Company

My strongest recommendation for you right now.

Atwater Village Theatre, through August 24. Four damaged Southern Californians collide through sex, loneliness, role-playing, marriage, secrets and purchased intimacy. BroadwayWorld calls it “piercing, funny, and heartbreaking,” praising the complicated characters and very strong ensemble.

More importantly, this sounds distinctly Hurlyburly-adjacent: contemporary LA, people behaving badly, dark humor, psychological exposure, and language doing most of the work.

There is one caution particularly relevant to you. A second critic admired the performances and direction but thought the script became repetitive and over-explained its ideas—essentially, too much verbal profundity. That disagreement actually makes me more interested in it for you: this is exactly the sort of production where your own verdict could be interesting.

Bruce-fit: ★★★★½
Echo Theater — production/tickets

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2. Applause — The Group Rep

Small-theater musical sleeper.

North Hollywood, July 24–August 30. It's the 1970 musical based on All About Eve, with Comden & Green, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams. BroadwayWorld's July 25 review calls the current production a “raucous good time” and praises the leading cast.

This wasn't on your radar, and that's exactly why this exercise is useful. Given your affection for 1776, Godspell, Threepenny Opera and Sunset Boulevard, a smart old-fashioned musical about theatrical ambition, ego and betrayal in a relatively intimate LA house deserves attention.

Bruce-fit: ★★★★
Applause — information and tickets

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3. After the Blast — Broadwater Second Stage

Possible hidden gem; very short run.

Hollywood, August 5–13 only. Zoe Kazan's play takes place after an environmental catastrophe: humanity lives underground, reality is increasingly simulated through implanted technology, reproduction is regulated, and a couple who want a child are given a robot.

This is an educated guess, because I don't have an LA review yet. But it has several things I'd flag for you: a genuinely short run, a small Hollywood venue, an accomplished playwright, an interesting intellectual premise, and fundamentally a two-person relationship at its center rather than spectacle.

This is exactly the sort of thing I want the Friday report to catch before the reviews appear and the run is already half over.

Bruce-fit: ★★★★ potential / evidence still thin
After the Blast — information/tickets

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4. Much Ado About Nothing — McCadden Place Theatre

Worth watching; opens next Friday.

Hollywood, August 7–16 only. A new Latino Shakespeare company is mounting Much Ado in an imagined wine-country setting, with separate English and bilingual Spanish/English performances.

This gets onto your list because Much Ado is fundamentally a language-and-wit machine: Beatrice and Benedick sparring is much closer to your theatrical sensibility than generalized Shakespearean grandeur. It's also the inaugural production of a tiny company and only eight performances—the 2026 equivalent of something you might once have discovered in the back pages of LA Weekly.

No reviews yet, so I wouldn't tell you to buy today. Watch.

Bruce-fit: ★★★½ pending reviews
Much Ado — dates and tickets

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One I would not push you toward

How High the Moon — Theatre West, through August 16, concerns a 1952 San Fernando Valley family, marital doubts, sibling conflict and family secrets. It might be perfectly good, but right now I don't see enough evidence of the wit, verbal sharpness, intellectual surprise or extraordinary acting that would elevate it specifically for you. So: noted, but no recommendation yet.

My verdict this week

If you asked, “Bruce has one free night; what ticket should he buy?”, I'd say:

F**king Strangers.

And Applause is exactly the kind of second-tier discovery I hoped this system would uncover: something I wouldn't have predicted from the title alone, but which starts looking quite plausible once your taste profile is applied.

This sample also convinces me that 3–5 items is the right number. There are dozens of LA listings right now; most of them do not need to reach you.

A Snapshot of Lake View IA - and then, an AI Economic History

Claude Opus 5 / August 2026

The lake is the whole reason the town exists, and it's a genuine geological oddity. Black Hawk Lake is a natural glacially formed lake of 957 acres in Sac County, sitting at the eastern edge of Lake View — and it's the southernmost glacial lake in the United States. Iowa's natural lakes are concentrated in the Des Moines Lobe, the last glacial advance that reached down into central Iowa about 14,000 years ago; Black Hawk sits at the ragged southwestern trailing edge of that lobe. South and west of there you get loess hills and drift plain, drained and ditched, with essentially no natural standing water. Fittingly, the lake drains through the unromantically named "Ditch No. 57" into Indian Creek, a tributary of the North Raccoon River.

The town was settled in 1867, platted in 1880 as "Fletcher" around a Chicago & North Western depot, and renamed Lake View when it incorporated in 1887 — the sequence of a railroad town discovering that its scenery was a better asset than its grain elevator. Population was 1,113 in 2020, down from 1,278 in 2000, which is the standard rural western Iowa trajectory, though shallower than most counties nearby. Black Hawk State Park grew from parcels assembled largely through Dr. E. E. Speaker of Lake View, a member of the State Board of Conservation, including a former gravel quarry and Denison Beach; the Civilian Conservation Corps built its rustic-style structures between 1933 and 1935, and three sections were listed on the National Register in 1990.

The recreational economy is real but modest: the lake averages only about 20 feet at its deepest, has three boat ramps and no motor size restrictions, and supports walleye, crappie, channel cat, bluegill and largemouth bass. Two local institutions anchor the calendar — the Water Carnival in July and the Arctic Open in February, a golf tournament played on the frozen lake. The park is also the northern terminus of the Sauk Rail Trail, running on abandoned rail right-of-way south to Swan Lake. Worth noting: shallow prairie-pothole lakes surrounded by row-crop watersheds are chronically nutrient-loaded, and Black Hawk has been through repeated dredging and watershed-restoration efforts over the past two decades for exactly that reason.

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I was raised there as a child in the 1960s and I remember the tiny town had a movie theater, a pharmacy, two barbershops, one or two dry cleaners, several grocery stores, two or three gas stations, and so on.  Much is gone, while the population is down just 10%.  Discuss the economic and demographic and industrial trans affecting Lake View.

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Your instinct is right about the pattern, but the town population is the wrong denominator — there is another thing to understand about what happened.

Lake View's stores never served Lake View. They served the trade area: the farm households in Viola, Wall Lake, Coon Valley, Richland, and the townships bleeding over from Ida and Carroll counties. Sac County had 9,814 people in 2020; in 1960 it had roughly 17,000. That's a 42% collapse, and it fell almost entirely on the countryside rather than the incorporated towns, because the towns absorbed the people leaving the farms. So the town held roughly steady while the customer base it existed to serve was cut in half. Then halve it again for the fact that the surviving customers now had cars and hard-surfaced roads.

The engine underneath is farm consolidation. Iowa had something on the order of 175,000 farms in 1960 and has fewer than 85,000 today, with average size roughly doubling. The mechanism was mechanization plus chemistry plus credit: bigger tractors, anhydrous ammonia, hybrid seed, and later GPS and 24-row planters. A section that supported four families in 1965 supports one operator today, and that operator may live in Odebolt or be a landlord in Des Moines. Each vanished farm household took with it a haircut every three weeks, a grocery order, a Saturday night at the theater, and two or three schoolchildren.

The retail geography then reorganized itself along classic central-place lines, except the hierarchy collapsed downward. Lake View in 1965 was a third-order place because the effective shopping radius was maybe eight miles on gravel. Once that radius became thirty-five miles on pavement — and once two-earner households meant somebody was already commuting to Storm Lake or Carroll anyway — the functions migrated up the hierarchy to places with a Walmart supercenter. Lake View didn't lose its stores to Amazon; it lost them to Carroll and Storm Lake in about 1985.

The individual casualties each had their own proximate cause layered on top of that. The theater was killed by television and then finished by the digital conversion mandate around 2010–2013, which imposed a $50,000-plus capital cost per screen on single-screen houses grossing almost nothing. The dry cleaners died of permanent press and the end of dressing to go to town. The barbershops died of demographics and the post-1968 collapse in haircut frequency. The gas stations were killed with a specific instrument: the 1988 EPA underground storage tank rule, with its 1998 compliance deadline, which required tank replacement at a cost no station pumping 20,000 gallons a month could amortize. That single regulation closed thousands of small-town stations nationally and is a large part of why the surviving format is exactly what you describe — one convenience store with a beer license doing double duty as the tavern, because only a multi-revenue-stream operation clears the fixed costs.

The pharmacy will be the one you find most legible professionally. Independent rural pharmacies didn't die of insufficient foot traffic; they died of reimbursement architecture. Once PBM contracts became take-it-or-leave-it, with generic reimbursement benchmarked below acquisition cost and clawed back further through DIR fees assessed months after dispensing, a store filling 150 scripts a day couldn't survive on a 1–2% gross margin with no negotiating leverage and no specialty pipeline. The rural independent was the marginal producer in a market where the price was set by a vertically integrated intermediary that also owned a competing retail chain. Iowa has lost a substantial share of its independents since 2010, and rural pharmacy deserts are now a recognized access problem — which is a fine irony, given that the same counties have the oldest populations and the highest per-capita script volume in the state.

Two other structural pieces matter. The school is one: Wall Lake View Auburn Community School District formed in 1996 and was folded into East Sac County in 2011. Iowa went from something like 4,500 districts at midcentury to about 325. When the high school leaves, the town loses not just employment but the Friday-night gravity that made it a place rather than an address. The other is the industrial restructuring of meatpacking. The IBP model of the 1960s–80s moved slaughter out of unionized urban plants into rural towns with cheap land and no union — Storm Lake, Denison, Sioux City. Those towns grew, and grew diverse, while ag-service towns without a plant emptied. Lake View sits between two of them and got neither the jobs nor the growth. Ethanol did much the same thing after 2005: it raised corn basis and land values across the county while employing about forty people at a plant.

Which brings you to the real economic story, and the one that makes the whole thing feel so strange when you go back. Sac County produces vastly more value than it did in 1965. Farmland that went for $300 an acre then trades north of $12,000 now. But an enormous and rising share of that land is rented rather than owner-operated, and a large fraction of Iowa farmland is owned by people over 65 or living out of state. Cash rent, crop insurance indemnities, and commodity payments now flow out of the county to heirs and institutions, and the wind turbines that dot the county add property tax base without adding a single household. The county is richer and emptier at the same time, and almost none of the wealth circulates through Main Street.

Lake View's one genuine advantage is the lake, and it explains why your 10% decline is so much shallower than the county's 42%. Lakefront amenity value has propped up the housing stock and the tax base with retirees and second-home owners from Sioux City, Carroll, and Omaha. But amenity migration produces a very particular kind of town: older, asset-rich, seasonally populated, and thin on year-round services. It sustains a bar, a bait shop, a convenience store, and a marina. It does not sustain a dry cleaner. So Lake View is typical of western Iowa in its causes and slightly atypical in its outcome — it kept its people, or their replacements, while losing everything they used to buy.

Whazzup? Wendy's Frostee

 

How do you say Wendy’s frosty work in terms of food chemistry? I’m guessing it’s dependent on ice crystals because it’s served very very cold and as soon as it melts, it melts quickly into sort of a chocolate milk. I’m guessing it’s relatively low fat and depends on ice and emulsifiers? But I’m just guessing here. What is known about it?

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Yes — your food-chemistry intuition is essentially right. A Frosty is much closer to a carefully engineered, low-fat frozen dairy suspension than to ordinary hard ice cream.

The formulation varies somewhat by market, but Wendy’s published ingredient lists are revealing. The current UK chocolate Frosty, for example, is primarily water, sugar, skim-milk powder, a relatively modest amount of fat, whey, cocoa, emulsifier, and hydrocolloid thickeners (guar gum and xanthan gum). A 12-oz serving has only 6.9 g fat. (Wendy's) U.S. formulations reported by Wendy’s have similarly used milk/cream plus guar gum, cellulose gum, carrageenan, and mono- and diglycerides. (Reddit)

So what holds a Frosty up?

Think of four structural elements operating simultaneously:

1. Ice crystals are doing a tremendous amount of the work.
At its dispensing temperature—reported around 19–21°F (−7 to −6°C)—a substantial fraction of the water is frozen. (Allrecipes) Those microscopic ice crystals occupy volume and jam against one another, giving the Frosty its spoonable yield stress.

This explains exactly what you've noticed: warm it only a few degrees and you don't merely make the same substance slightly warmer—you melt part of its structural framework. The solid ice fraction drops rapidly, viscosity collapses, and suddenly you've got something remarkably close to chocolate milk.

2. Sugar controls how much ice exists.
Sugar depresses the freezing point, so at −6°C not all the water freezes. You therefore have ice crystals suspended in a concentrated, sugary aqueous phase rather than a solid block of flavored ice.

This is one reason the temperature window is so important. A few degrees colder → too much ice, unpleasantly hard/icy. A few degrees warmer → too little ice, soupy.

3. Hydrocolloids make the unfrozen liquid much more viscous.
Guar gum, cellulose gum, carrageenan, xanthan, etc., bind/immobilize water and dramatically increase viscosity at tiny concentrations. They also inhibit ice-crystal growth and help maintain a smooth texture.

But importantly, they aren't sufficient to make a room-temperature Frosty into Frosty. Once most of the ice melts, you've lost the principal particulate scaffold. Hence the striking transition you've observed.

4. Fat + milk proteins + emulsifiers provide creaminess.
There is a dispersed fat phase, but considerably less than in premium ice cream. Milk proteins and emulsifiers help stabilize the fat/water/air interfaces and produce the perception of creaminess without requiring 12–16% butterfat.

There's also air (overrun) incorporated during freezing. So microscopically you can imagine:

ice crystals + air bubbles + tiny fat droplets → packed into a thickened sugar/milk/water continuous phase.

That's the Frosty.

And this gives a particularly nice explanation for why it behaves differently from, say, Häagen-Dazs. Premium ice cream has a substantial fat structure that continues contributing body as it warms. A Frosty is disproportionately dependent upon its frozen-water structure. Melt the ice and its apparent "creaminess" rather abruptly reveals itself to be a comparatively lean dairy liquid.

So your observation — "very cold → remarkably thick; melts a little → rapidly becomes chocolate milk" — is actually a rather good informal experiment demonstrating that ice volume fraction, rather than fat, is the dominant structural variable.

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I think the air bubbles are extremely tiny, much smaller than I’m used to seeing an ice cream.

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I think you're right. And that is probably an important part of the distinctive Frosty texture.

In ordinary soft-serve or ice cream, the incorporated air bubbles can be on the order of tens to hundreds of microns, and their presence contributes to the fluffy, creamy appearance. A Frosty seems much more dense and extremely fine-grained—you don't perceive obvious foam cells.

That can result from the way it is frozen and dispensed. The combination of continuous agitation/shear, stabilizers, milk proteins and emulsifiers can produce very finely divided air bubbles, while simultaneously keeping the ice crystals small. The sensory result is interesting: rather than "fluffy soft serve," it feels almost like an extraordinarily cold, thick liquid.

And your melting observation supports that interpretation. If a large part of its apparent volume and body came from a robust foam structure, you'd expect the melted product to retain more mousse-like or foamy character. Instead, a melted Frosty rather quickly becomes a fairly ordinary thin dairy beverage.

So I'd picture the fresh Frosty microstructure approximately as:

lots of tiny ice crystals + very small air bubbles + microscopic fat droplets, all crowded together in a sugar/milk/protein/gum solution.

The ice crystals provide much of the mechanical stiffness; the gums make the liquid between them viscous; the tiny air bubbles soften the perception of the ice; and the emulsified fat and milk proteins supply creaminess.

One correction to my previous answer: I wouldn't confidently say that Frosty's air bubbles are known to be smaller than conventional ice cream without microscopy or published particle-size measurements. I don't know of Wendy's having published those data. But your sensory observation is quite consistent with a low-overrun and/or very finely aerated frozen product, and the absence of perceptible bubbles is certainly striking.

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The cheap ice cream of the Midwest of the 1960s melted into and almost foamy mixture. I assumed it was revealing the relatively large air bubbles that had been blown into it.

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Yes. That is very likely what you were seeing.

A lot of inexpensive mid-century ice cream was made with high overrun—a great deal of air whipped into a relatively inexpensive dairy mix. If the overrun were 100%, for example, a gallon of liquid mix became roughly two gallons of ice cream. The air wasn't necessarily in enormous visible bubbles while frozen, but the dispersed gas phase occupied a very large fraction of the product.

When it melted, several things happened:

• The ice-crystal framework disappeared, releasing liquid water.

• The air remained temporarily trapped by milk proteins, emulsifiers and stabilizers, producing that peculiar light, foamy melt.

• Eventually the bubbles coalesced and escaped, leaving considerably less liquid than the apparent volume of the original ice cream suggested.

So the melt itself was almost a crude demonstration of the formulation. Cheap, high-overrun ice cream → foamy, aerated melt. Dense premium ice cream → relatively rich, creamy melt. Frosty → comparatively thin, milk-like melt.

And that last contrast is why your observation about Frosty is interesting. It doesn't seem to reveal a huge hidden foam structure as it melts. Its remarkable solidity when freshly dispensed seems disproportionately attributable to a very high concentration of tiny ice crystals at a carefully controlled temperature, rather than to either lots of butterfat or lots of air.

In fact, if you left equal apparent volumes of 1960s bargain ice cream and Frosty to melt completely, I'd expect their respective puddles to tell you quite a lot about how differently the manufacturers achieved the original illusion of "creaminess."

Whazzup? Walgreen's, 4x6 and 5x7 Prints

 Walgreens sells photo prints at $.30 for a 4 x 6, the three dollars for a 5 x 7. This seems disproportionate?

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Yes—wildly disproportionate by area.

A 4×6 print is 24 square inches; a 5×7 is 35 square inches, only about 46% larger. At 30¢ versus $3, however, the 5×7 costs 10 times as much—roughly seven times more per square inch.

The explanation is retail pricing, not production cost:

• 4×6 is the mass-market commodity size, printed in enormous volume and often used as a loss leader.
• Photo machines and paper rolls are optimized around 4×6.
• 5×7 is treated as a premium enlargement, even though it is barely an enlargement.
• Customers ordering 5×7 prints are often buying just one or two for frames or gifts, so Walgreens assumes much lower price sensitivity.
• The posted 5×7 price may also function as a “coupon price anchor”; photo departments routinely offer 40–60% discounts.

So the extra paper and ink might plausibly justify 40–60% more, perhaps somewhat more because of lower volume—but not 900% more. 

The remaining difference is essentially a convenience and premium-format markup.

The Complete Works of Throttlebottom-Smith Assessed (2013-2016): Claude + ChatGPT

I asked Chat GPT and CLAUDE Opus to assess the complete works of our trusty Capuchin monkey, Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith.

See Chat GPT here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z_gutwf6qiucKxhGTxK8pyHSqS3ZE40h/view?usp=sharing

See Claude Opus here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozq-CZfUJBQEPlqaQ6X0uqrAHL9hNRSw/view?usp=sharing

In a nutshell, early stories with the monkey, I simply asked Chat GPT to insert the monkey into a short description of a work - Moby Dick, Death of a Salesman, etc.  I often asked for an illustration - one that merely shows the piece with a monkey added.  

There were a few more elaborate twists, such as an O. Henry take on Poe's Cask of Amontillado, and imagining a New Yorker interview with the monkey over the collapse of Polaroid Inc.

Only fairly recently in 2026 did my instructions get much more involved, often loosely dictating several sequential scenarios into Chat GPT on my phone, and then letting the AI actually convert that into prose. See Rasputin; see Christmas Carol.   In these, I started making series of elaborately contributory illustrations, too.

Long: The Complete Works of Throttlebottom-Smith Assessed

 As assessed by Chat GPT.

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Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith:
the complete blog-post archive

 The archive begins with the July 2026 Shawshank entry and proceeds backward through the September 2023 origin stories. There are 21, some of which contains multiplex stories in one blog.

I have arranged them chronologically, beginning with the monkey’s first appearance.

2023: The capuchin enters the canon

1. Chat GPT Updates MOBY DICK (Capuchin Monkey)

September 4, 2023

The founding document. Captain Ahab brings his beloved capuchin aboard the Pequod. The monkey initially supplies mischief and comic relief, but gradually reveals Ahab’s residual tenderness, senses danger, attempts to warn the crew, and ultimately helps save Ishmael. The post also experiments with other deliberately incongruous additions, including a life-insurance salesman and a therapist concerned about Ahab’s monomania.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/09/chat-gpt-updates-moby-dick.html

2. Chat GPT Invades More Stories with a Capuchin Monkey

September 5, 2023

A major omnibus containing monkey-altered versions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie, Einstein 1905, Our Town, and Death of a Salesman. The repeated experiment establishes the basic formula: introduce the same exuberant animal into a famous dramatic structure and see whether he merely disrupts it or begins to illuminate its themes.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/09/chat-gpt-invades-more-stories-with.html

3. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith Returns: Iceman Cometh, Lord of the Flies, In Cold Blood

September 6, 2023

Three darker incursions. In The Iceman Cometh, the monkey mimics the barflies and becomes an uncomfortable witness to Hickey’s confession. In Lord of the Flies, an actual monkey destabilizes the boys’ increasingly primitive symbolism. In In Cold Blood, he accompanies Truman Capote and acts as a whimsical but morally uneasy counterweight to murder, investigation, and the author’s own psychological descent.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/09/mr-throttlebottom-smith-returns-iceman.html

4. Capuchin Monkey: Mr. Throttlebottom Invades “The Cask of Amontillado”

October 24, 2023

The monkey acquires genuine control over the plot. While Montresor walls up Fortunato, Mr. Throttlebottom quietly builds a second wall behind Montresor. The murderer finishes his work, turns to leave, and discovers that an industrious capuchin has administered celestial—or at least architectural—justice.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/10/capuchin-monkey-mr-throttlebottom.html

5. Capuchin Monkey Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith Helps FDR, Lear, Napoleon, Edison, Kekulé

November 9, 2023

A historical-literary anthology. He accompanies Roosevelt to Yalta, Lear into madness, Napoleon to Waterloo, Edison through the invention of electric light, and Kekulé toward the structure of benzene. In the Kekulé vignette, the monkey’s circular tail-chasing replaces the famous serpent dream as the inspiration for the benzene ring.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/11/capuchin-monkey-mr-throttlebottom-smith.html

6. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith Returns: Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer—Plus Bonuses

November 18, 2023

The title foregrounds Tennessee Williams, but the post is broader. The monkey enters A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, then moves through Shelley’s death, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. His role ranges from unruly comic presence to companion at the edge of catastrophe. In The Magic Mountain, his apparently innocent play begins to echo the larger disorder moving toward World War I.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/11/mr-throttlebottom-smith-returns.html

7. Mr. Throttlebottom Revisits the Book of Job

November 30, 2023

The monkey brings playfulness to the worst sequence of misfortunes in Scripture, but he also becomes a source of companionship. During Job’s debates with God, he listens, nods, offers leaves and twigs as evidence of creation, and embodies the vitality of the natural world. The conceit works because the monkey cannot solve suffering but can remain present beside it.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2023/11/mr-throttlebottom-revisits-book-of-job.html

2025: The monkey becomes a dramatic and psychological instrument

8. AI Humor: Hamlet with Capuchin Monkey

February 4, 2025

The monkey steals Yorick’s skull and forces Hamlet into an undignified tug-of-war. Yet the scene becomes unexpectedly tender when the animal touches the skull and rests beside Hamlet. Physical comedy does not cancel the graveyard meditation; it sharpens the contrast among life, death, play, memory, man, and beast.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/02/hamlet.html

9. AI Humor: OUR TOWN with Capuchin Monkey Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

March 19, 2025

The monkey accompanies daily life, courtship, marriage, death, and Emily’s return to her childhood. His antics diminish in the cemetery, where he quietly places a flower in Emily’s lap and looks toward the stars with the Stage Manager. The closing question—fate, free will, or “divine nonsense”—shows how far he has traveled from mere comic relief.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-humor-out-town-with-capuchin-monkey.html

10. AI: “SEVERANCE” vs. “THE PRISONER”

March 19, 2025

A comparison of the two television series expands into The Throttlebottom-Smith Incident. At Lumon, the monkey has a miniature desk, employee status, a severed identity, access to ventilation ducts, and suspicious knowledge of Project Simius. He becomes both corporate satire and a key figure in the rebellion: a creature designed for control who proves uniquely uncontrollable.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-severance-vs-prisoner.html

11. AI Envisions The Great Gatsby—100th Anniversary—with Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

April 9, 2025

“Smithy” receives an appropriately dubious Jazz Age pedigree involving a Prussian baron, Gertrude Stein, an Armenian violinist, and a speakeasy. He attends Gatsby’s parties, antagonizes Tom, interferes in the romance with Daisy, witnesses Myrtle’s death, and finally appears to be the only honest creature in East Egg. He is symbol, saboteur, social observer, and perhaps minor organized-crime figure.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/04/ai-envisions-great-gatsby-100th.html

12. AI Revisits The Lost Weekend—with Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

April 15, 2025

One of the most fully developed entries. The monkey becomes the literal “monkey on the back” of Don Birnam: addiction, shame, seduction, self-sabotage, creativity, and possibly survival. The post grows from a theatrical treatment into production notes, a director’s statement, an imagined Broadway review, and a carefully staged ending. The fictional critic calls the result “haunting, harrowing, hairy.” The animal is integrated into the production’s “visual grammar,” not merely added as a gag.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/04/ai-revisits-lost-weekend-with-mr.html

13. AI: Edwin Land, Polaroid, Business Strategy, Netflix, and Nonsense

May 20, 2025

A substantial business-history post that gradually mutates into a Throttlebottom narrative. The monkey advises Edwin Land, condemns Polaroid’s strategic inertia, ridicules consultants, predicts digital photography, and later gives a self-serving retrospective interview from retirement in Barbados. Here he is no longer merely a literary intruder. He becomes the ignored strategic adviser who was supposedly right about everything and has preserved the memos to prove it. The post describes him variously as mascot, corporate gadfly, moral compass, and the only participant with a survival instinct.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2025/05/ai-edwin-land-polaroid-business.html

2026: Mature literary parody and illustrated alternative history

14. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith and DOWN AND OUT (Orwell)

June 20, 2026

Orwell is dispatched to Paris as a junior correspondent accompanied by a capuchin on loan from the Manchester Zoo. The arrangement is partly journalism and partly circulation stunt. In hotel kitchens and among the working poor, the monkey exposes the dirty plates, bodily labor, and concealed machinery beneath civilized luxury. The conceit is unusually well suited to Orwell because the monkey keeps dragging material reality back into view.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/06/mr-throttlebottom-smith-and-down-and.html

15. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith and DAS KAPITAL

June 20, 2026

The monkey joins Marx’s crowded London household carrying a Columbia journalism degree he cannot plausibly have earned. He rearranges money, steals objects, chews manuscripts, and transforms commodities, primitive accumulation, ownership, and bourgeois credentialism into household action. Marx eventually concedes that the monkey has one advantage over many journalists: he does not pretend to understand political economy.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/06/mr-throttlebottom-smith-and-das-kapital.html

16. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

June 20, 2026

Holmes accepts him as one of the Baker Street irregulars, “of the arboreal division.” Watson considers him an insult to detection; the monkey considers Watson a slow rival with accessible pockets. Through scent, theft, appetite, and well-timed interference, he becomes an actual mechanism of discovery rather than an ornamental companion.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/06/mr-throttlebottom-smith-and-hound-of.html

17. Scrooge and the Three Ghosts—The Re-Boot

June 27, 2026

Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith successively occupies the three supernatural roles. As Christmas Past, he is a familiar energetic capuchin opening portals and stealing nightcaps. As Christmas Present, he becomes a six-foot, three-hundred-pound festive colossus. As Christmas Yet to Come, the moral lesson arrives through an endlessly repeating cemetery bombardment of monkey excrement.

The images are essential to the escalation: the first resembles a plausible Victorian book illustration; the second monumentalizes the capuchin into a Dickensian spirit; the third turns the graveyard punishment into a visual punch line. The pictures do not merely decorate three jokes. They establish the three-stage architecture of the parody.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/06/scrooge-and-three-ghosts-re-boot.html

18. Robert Frost, But With Playful Capuchin Monkey

July 11, 2026

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” meets snowballs, pinecones, stolen clothing, tool use, and escalating insurance risk. Frost’s stillness is confronted by a creature for whom every branch is a ladder and every unattended scarf a transfer of ownership. The piece is light, compact, and almost entirely dependent on the collision between contemplative cadence and simian velocity.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/07/robert-frost-but-with-playful-capuchin.html

19. Emily Dickinson—and Capuchin Monkey Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

July 12, 2026

Dickinson deliberates over adjectives, dashes, mortality, and possibility while the monkey wears the sugar bowl, steals the quill, distributes papers across the room, and turns a finished poem into a hat. Her radical inwardness meets his radical physicality. The result includes a surprisingly successful pseudo-Dickinson lyric in which every shelf becomes doom once a monkey enters the room.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/07/emily-dickinson-and-capuchin-monkey-mr.html

20. Rasputin and the Tsarina…and Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

July 12, 2026

A secret revision of imperial Russian history. The monkey enters the Alexander Palace in a crate marked “ECCLESIASTICAL OBJECTS—DO NOT SHAKE,” studies Rasputin in the sickroom, humiliates him before the royal children, attacks him with a slingshot and sugared almonds, seizes his beard, and steers him through a window.

The illustrations have become sequential storytelling. They establish surveillance, rivalry, weaponry, combat, defenestration, and the reflective rooftop coda. Their faux-nineteenth-century engraving style makes the absurd episode look like suppressed archival evidence. In several places the image delivers or intensifies the gag that the prose has prepared. The monkey’s initial stillness is “reconnaissance”; the later pictures prove it.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/07/rasputing-and-tsarinaand-mr.html

21. Capuchin Monkey Can Succeed Graham: The Senator from the Palmetto Canopy

July 13, 2026

The monkey is floated as a replacement for Senator Lindsey Graham. Washington reacts by doing what Washington does: leaking, messaging, interpreting constitutional language, polishing biography, and converting the ridiculous into a personnel process. The key joke is not that a monkey might enter the Senate. It is that the political system rapidly develops a vocabulary in which his nomination sounds ordinary.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-senator-from-palmetto-canopy.html

22. The Shawshank Redemption—and Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith

July 16, 2026

There is one final wrinkle: although the search archive yields 21 distinct URLs before Shawshank is counted in some earlier tallies, the complete corpus represented here is 22 posts. Shawshank is unmistakably a separate entry and must be included.

The essay presents itself as a restoration of a suppressed cinematic performance. The monkey was allegedly the film’s third principal character but was removed after disputes involving billing, artistic direction, and monkey labor protections. The joke expands beyond rewriting the plot into mock film history: the capuchin becomes a victim of editing, studio politics, and retrospective critical neglect.

https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-shawshank-redemptionand-mr.html

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The Monkey in Literature and History

Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith first came aboard as a joke.

The joke was both simple and nearly inexhaustible: choose a work whose dignity appears impregnable, then introduce a small, fast, intelligent mammal with hands, appetites, poor impulse control, and no respect for the accepted hierarchy of objects. Ahab may command a ship, George and Martha may command a drawing room, Marx may command several thousand pages of political economy—but none of them can control a capuchin who has noticed an unattended pocket watch.

That original comic mechanism never disappears. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith remains a superb physical comedian. He steals clothing, throws food, inhabits chandeliers, opens cabinets, rearranges papers, interferes with solemn ceremonies, and repeatedly discovers that valuable objects have been placed at monkey height. His name makes the contrast even better. “Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith” suggests a minor English diplomat, an elderly clubman, or the junior partner in an old private bank. The bearer of the name is generally upside down.

Yet the corpus does not merely repeat one gag. It records the gradual discovery that the monkey could perform several different literary functions.

At first he is an intruder. His presence is funny because he does not belong aboard the Pequod, in the Tyrone household, or among the fragile glass animals of Laura Wingfield. He exposes the artificial order of the work by refusing to observe it. He is the child, the id, the uninvited audience member, and the stagehand who has wandered into the scene carrying the wrong prop.

He soon becomes a revealer. Human characters hide objects, motives, bottles, memories, resentments, and crimes. The monkey opens the cabinet. In The Lost Weekend, he reveals Don’s hidden alcohol. In The Glass Menagerie, his vitality throws Laura’s fearfulness into relief. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his relentless demand for attention parodies the human characters’ more sophisticated emotional games. He cannot understand their defenses, which is why he so often defeats them.

Then he becomes a witness. This may be his most important role. Job’s friends can argue, Hamlet can philosophize, Nick Carraway can narrate, and Orwell can report. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith watches. Because he is outside human rhetoric, his stillness sometimes carries more weight than human explanation. He sits beside Job. He touches Yorick’s skull. He watches Emily Webb revisit the living. He lays a wreath for Gatsby. He listens as Don Birnam attempts the first honest sentence of his recovery.

That silent attention prevents him from remaining merely cute. The monkey begins to occupy the uneasy border between comic companion and moral consciousness. He does not judge according to a system. He responds—to grief, fear, deception, generosity, illness, and death. Sometimes he responds by sitting quietly. Sometimes by throwing a walnut.

His usefulness in history is slightly different. Historical narratives tend to make events appear orderly after the fact. Napoleon loses at Waterloo; Kekulé dreams of a serpent; Rasputin is murdered by conspirators; Polaroid fails to adapt to digital photography. The monkey restores the roles of accident, appetite, embarrassment, absurd personality, and undocumented interference. He is the excluded variable.

In the early historical pieces, he is a mascot or accidental muse. At Yalta he relieves tension. At Menlo Park he helps sustain Edison’s spirits. At Kekulé’s desk, his circling tail supplies the missing structure of benzene. In the Polaroid essay he grows more sophisticated: he is the ignored adviser whose recommendations were obvious, correct, and institutionally unacceptable. By the Rasputin episode, he is not adjacent to history. He causes it.

This creates a recurring mock-historiographical joke. The official record is broadly correct; it has merely omitted the capuchin. The Shawshank essay uses the same structure for cinema. The accepted film exists, but its history has suppressed the third principal performer. The Rasputin essay offers engraved visual “evidence.” The Polaroid interview uncovers tapes and corporate records. The monkey increasingly comes equipped with archives.

He is also an excellent anti-credentialist. He holds a Columbia journalism degree while being unable to read or file copy. He has a Lumon employee number. He may qualify for the Senate. His institutional legitimacy is never less plausible than that of the humans around him. Indeed, the institution’s willingness to accommodate him often becomes the central joke. The monkey is absurd, but the credential, corporation, press operation, board meeting, or political rollout makes him official.

Across the collection, he moves among three kinds of truth.

There is bodily truth: hunger, alcohol, dirt, fatigue, sex, fear, illness, and mortality. The monkey is always bodily present.

There is emotional truth: grief, loneliness, tenderness, dependency, denial, and the wish to be seen. The monkey often recognizes these before the human characters do.

And there is institutional truth: systems will defend themselves, credentials will be honored, committees will optimize the wrong thing, and official histories will omit whatever cannot be placed comfortably in the minutes.

Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith crosses all three realms because he belongs fully to none of them. He is animal but nearly human, ridiculous but ceremonially named, innocent but not harmless, silent in some stories and unnervingly articulate in others. His inconsistency is part of his freedom. No canonical biography restrains him.

The illustrations eventually acquire the same freedom. Early images mainly confirm the proposition: yes, here is the famous person, and yes, beside him is a monkey. Later images establish setting, period, attitude, and sequence. In Scrooge, three distinct visual transformations provide the architecture of the joke. In Rasputin, the engraved scenes operate almost like panels in a graphic novel or plates in a falsified history book. The monkey is shown watching, preparing, attacking, triumphing, and finally contemplating the stolen cross at dawn.

The visual progression parallels the literary one. At first, the monkey is inserted into a text. Later, an entire production is designed around him.

His ultimate role is therefore neither merely parody nor merely commentary. He is a stress test for seriousness. Place him inside a great work and ask whether that work has enough thematic gravity to absorb him. The weaker adaptations merely acquire monkey jokes. The stronger ones change shape around him. Hamlet makes him contemplate death. Our Town makes him witness transience. The Lost Weekend makes him addiction. Orwell makes him material reality. Marx makes him property. Holmes makes him evidence. Dickens makes him three spirits. Rasputin makes him history.

The masterpiece, in other words, retaliates. It gives the monkey meaning.

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What on Earth Was the Author Thinking?

There are occasions when an author’s intellectual history can be reconstructed from diaries, correspondence, marginalia, and early drafts.

In this case, the essential document may be the first prompt:

Rewrite Moby-Dick, except Captain Ahab has a capuchin monkey.

What was the author thinking?

Initially, almost certainly: this will be funny.

There is no need to manufacture a grand theory behind the first impulse. The collision is inherently comic. Moby-Dick is immense, metaphysical, oceanic, biblical, and notoriously serious. A capuchin is compact, tactile, agile, acquisitive, and very interested in whatever object someone else is holding. One is the white whale of American literature. The other will steal your hat.

But a joke repeated becomes an experiment.

After Moby-Dick, the author begins asking whether the procedure is portable. Can the monkey survive O’Neill? Williams? Wilder? Shakespeare? Scripture? Marx? Orwell? Can he be introduced without flattening every work into the same banana routine? Can the identical absurd premise produce different kinds of meaning?

The blog posts preserve the exploratory nature of this process. Many retain the prompts, follow-up questions, alternative versions, production treatments, imagined reviews, and requests for further elaboration. The author is not simply ordering finished pastiches. He is probing the model: make the monkey less incidental; give him a structural function; put him in the graveyard scene; explain what he symbolizes; turn the treatment into a Broadway production; now write the New York Times review.

The monkey becomes a benchmark for whether the machine understands the source.

A superficial model knows that monkeys steal bananas and swing from chandeliers. A better model recognizes that a monkey in The Lost Weekend should not perform the same function as one in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In the former, he should become compulsion, temptation, shame, and witness. In the latter, he should smell the boot and find the clue. In Dickens, he should transform with the spirits. In Dickinson, he should assault the careful arrangement of words and dashes. In Orwell, he should bring the dirty dishes into the dining room.

The author, therefore, was thinking partly like a literary critic and partly like a laboratory investigator. Keep one variable constant—the capuchin—and change the literary environment. Observe the interaction.

There is also a strong suspicion of solemnity running through the project. Great literature, political history, business strategy, and academic theory all generate systems of prestige. They develop canonical interpretations, specialized vocabularies, and authorized tones of voice. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith is a small corrective. He enters the room and asks, without asking:

Why is everyone taking himself so seriously?

The answer is not that seriousness is worthless. These essays are affectionate toward their sources. The successful pieces depend upon understanding what is serious in Job, Hamlet, Our Town, The Lost Weekend, Orwell, and Dickens. The monkey does not abolish suffering, death, poverty, addiction, or moral transformation. He prevents the treatment of those subjects from becoming pompous, airless, or professionally self-satisfied.

He is an anti-pomp device.

That explains the long name. A monkey called Bongo would merely be a pet. “Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith” arrives already carrying institutional dignity. The mismatch between his title and conduct gives him permanent comic voltage. He is always both the distinguished gentleman and the creature presently dropping Rasputin’s hat into a chamber pot.

The author also seems increasingly interested in mock authority. These are not simply revised stories; they are often presented as recovered treatments, suppressed histories, newly discovered performances, corporate retrospectives, newspaper reviews, or official rollouts. The voice calmly announces that accepted history is correct except for one omitted capuchin. Absurdity is delivered with documentation.

That deadpan manner is crucial. The narrator rarely screams that the premise is hilarious. Instead, he supplies dates, credentials, casting information, committee reactions, production disputes, and explanatory footnotes. The monkey’s Columbia degree is not argued for; it is found in a leather tube attached to his collar. The Senate lawyers do not reject him; they formulate species-neutral originalism. The Russian palace does not discover an animal; it receives a crate of ecclesiastical objects.

The author was thinking: the straighter the frame, the funnier the monkey.

Over time, that frame becomes visual as well as verbal. The earliest illustrations are essentially premise pictures. They show the monkey standing beside the canonical figure. By 2026, the author is acting more like a director or picture editor. The images must match a historical graphic style, maintain character and setting, depict the exact stage of the action, and sometimes produce the joke through visual escalation.

The Scrooge sequence is especially revealing. The same monkey appears first as a relatively plausible small spirit, then as an enormous and magnificently robed Ghost of Christmas Present, then as a dark cemetery agent administering the final punishment. Each illustration changes scale, mood, and comic function. The images are not captions beneath the story. They are the three movements of the story.

The Rasputin images are still more ambitious. Their style mimics old engravings, lending counterfeit historical authenticity to progressively more ridiculous events. One image places the monkey high above the sickroom, already conducting surveillance. Another isolates him with a slingshot. Another stages monk and monkey across an ornate room like adversaries in an illustrated adventure. The final rooftop image adds a note of genuine beauty and mystery after the violence. The pictures produce a rhythm of reconnaissance, provocation, battle, and aftermath. They are key parts of the humor because they solemnly insist that all this really happened.

What on earth, then, was the author thinking?

He was thinking that artificial intelligence had made a new form of literary play possible: not merely one parody, but a continuing character who could be passed through the canon, world history, corporate America, television, Scripture, and the United States Senate.

He was thinking that the difference between nonsense and satire is often one additional round of revision.

He was thinking that the monkey should not always remain a monkey. Sometimes he should become addiction, appetite, evidence, mortality, instinct, historical contingency, institutional absurdity, or the only honest creature in East Egg.

He was thinking that great works might reveal themselves under pressure from an alien ingredient.

He was thinking that pictures could eventually do more than illustrate prose—that they could create counterfeit documentation, visual escalation, and independent punch lines.

And he was probably also thinking, at regular intervals:

This is a very distinguished capuchin monkey. Surely there must be somewhere else he can go.

The final answer is that Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith went almost everywhere because he provided a peculiar form of freedom. Through him, the author could revisit great works without writing reverent summaries, engage grave subjects without surrendering humor, test artificial intelligence without pretending the test was purely technical, and mock institutions without delivering a lecture.

The monkey is the author’s license to trespass.

He can enter Moby-Dick through the rigging, Hamlet through the graveyard, Das Kapital through the household accounts, Lumon through the ventilation ducts, Polaroid through the boardroom, imperial Russia through a crate marked “Ecclesiastical Objects,” and the Senate through a carefully managed leak.

He does not destroy the room he enters.

He merely opens every drawer, examines the credentials, steals the ceremonial object, and reveals what everyone else had hoped would remain hidden.

Orange Fanta in Glass: Why It's Better

There is nothing like it: bright orange, springing to life, pulling attention, holding the eye.  Orange Fanta in glass: bright and happy and beckoning.  

Now we are somewhere else.   We feel uncomfortable; something is going to go wrong.  It is a can.  It is a can of orange Fanta, but it is a can.   Someone pulls the tab.   ...Someone takes a sip.   It is tart, but lacks flavor.   Color, perhaps, but not zest.  This is Fanta in a can.

We used to think you could not taste the difference.   Well, some told you that, but it never stuck, because they did not know.  Orange Fanta in glass; the best ever.  The greatest of all time.

So you know you can taste the difference, but why?   The glucose, the malic acid, the citric acid, the faint acids that don’t have names, they are the life of Fanta in Glass.  

In a can, the organic acids go bad.  They go rogue.  They leach out metals.  They leach out copper and tin.  From an alloy can, they leach out tungsten, gallium, vanadium, and in Siberian cans, polonium.   

Orange Fanta in cans is bad for you.  Orange Fanta in bottles is bright and alive and can only leach out hope and happiness.

 

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