[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s 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!
We’ll start with an easy one. Here’s Rand Paul before the DeepDream treatment..
Here’s Rand Paul after DeepDream analyzed his image and interpreted it using artificial intelligence. Note the skunk-like face emerging from the American flag in the background. I like to think that’s indicative of his spirit animal.
Bernie Sanders before DeepDream.
Feel the Bern! Notice how it looks like he’s wearing a little shower cap with an antenna, all the better for emitting radio waves of socialism.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
This is another one of those spirit-animal conjurings via DeepDream: the three-eyed wolf emerging from the flag resembles Christie’s hunger for power.
Carly Fiorina.
Yet again, DeepDream interprets a spirit animal for this candidate, replacing one of the buttons on her jacket with a spider. Weaving a tangled web, perhaps?
Vermin Supreme.
Spirit animal: Activate! Notice how only his face becomes interpreted by Google’s AI. Everything else is just too specifically Vermin.
Joe Exotic, presiding over his kingdom in Wynnewood.
Joe Exotic presiding over Google’s DeepDream. While the man himself remains just too real to change much in the AI, his menagerie undergoes serious transformation.
We’ve decided to up the ante here: This is an image of Ben Carson after receiving the kawaii treatment on a BuzzFeed post recasting candidates as “Kawaii Kweens.”
After emerging from the DeepDream, a gorilla’s face appears in the top of the wig, perhaps reflecting the candidate’s fierce temper of late.
Jeb Bush, as he appeared on a BuzzFeed post recasting candidates as “Kawaii Kweens.”
O HAI!
Last but not least, how could we leave out America’s favorite princess, seen here as a kawaii kween?
Just in time for Thanksgiving, a turkey’s head and neck appears on Donald Trump’s good side.
BONUS: Here’s a gratuitous deep dream of WWE’s The Undertake. Surely it’s about time for an active pro-wrestler to throw his or her hat into the 2016 Election ring?
Josh McBee served as NonDoc's managing editor from September 2015 through January 2019. He earned a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. He has reported and edited for newspapers and other media in Oklahoma, Colorado and California.
