As the holiday season moves its slow thighs into our work weeks, we begin to enter the doldrums of seasonal productivity. Annual ad budgets are spent, big projects are wrapping up, workers are taking time off for vacations.
In the election cycle, however, a spike of recent activity indicates some candidates didn’t get the memo about the holiday lull. To wit: Two new presidential candidates have thrown their wacky hats into the ring.
The first, Vermin Supreme, is an all-time favorite of mine. Combining performance art with activism, the Massachusetts native is known for wearing a boot on his head while sporting a Merlin-like beard. In 2011, he glitterbombed a fellow candidate during a political forum in New Hampshire, prefacing his sparkling assault with the declaration: “Jesus told me to make Randall Terry gay.”
He has run as a candidate in every presidential election since 2004.
The second is actually a fellow Okie: Joe Exotic, The Tiger King. As the operator of the Garold Wayne Interactive Zoological Foundation in Wynnewood (formerly GW Exotic Animal Park), he may have more widespread appeal than Vermin Supreme. He recently told KFOR that he has “17 million viewers on YouTube and that more than 38,000 all over the world watched his show [Nov. 22] on JoeExotic.tv.”
That’s way more than the 14,000-plus that watched his 2014 music video, “Pretty Woman Lover,” on YouTube, which, if it wasn’t intended to be ironic, is made so by the fact that Joe Exotic married his husbands recently and changed his last name from Schreibvogel to Maldonado.
In keeping with the growing spirit of oddity that seems to be infiltrating Election 2016, NonDoc would like to present the following gallery of select presidential candidates as re-imagined by Google’s DeepDream artificial intelligence.
(If you’re unfamiliar with DeepDream, it’s basically “designed to detect faces and other patterns in images, with the aim of automatically classifying images,” according to Wikipedia. There’s a whole lot of technical information in that article, but all you need to know is it’s fun to use, easy to operate and delivers nightmare-worthy images at the click of a mouse.)
Enjoy!
