Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Execution will not be Live-blogged

Timothy Leary's Experiential Typewriter was a kind of ontological stenotype. The idea was to allow touch-typing observers to report the experience of tripping, at "twenty to a hundred codes a second", no matter how extreme the time distortions or how far removed they found themselves from reality.


Perhaps the Oklahoma Department of Corrections were using something similar the other day, to allow an executee to transcribe the experience of lethal injection in the manner of M. Valdemar or Arthur Blair:
Either that, or it was simply AP journamalism. "We don't need no steenkin' proofreaders! We got spellcheck!"

Two days later, most of the newspapers which published the AP story have noticed the error and quietly changed the word to 'writhing'. Not so the Daily Fail, where correcting an error would set an dangerous precedent.

3 comments:

H. Rumbold, Master Barber said...

Somehow, I'm not in the mood for funny on this one.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

They could devise something like the Penfield Mood Organ, but dealing death rather than an emotional response.

Welcome to new advances in barbarism.

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

if killing people by injection is something the government needs to do -

postulating the necessity for the sake of discussion -


why couldn't they just give the condemned person a really big overdose of something that is readily available for legal purposes, like morphine -

why does it have to be any more complicated than that?