If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: Keith Newstead

Keith Newstead makes… things.

Things like that have a name, of course. They’re automata. It’s the basis for the word automaton. There’s a very long tradition of making things that do things without doing anything. They’re just meant to capture the imagination in an ingenious way. Mission accomplished.

Keith Newstead

The Greatest Thing In The History Of Ever

I must admit, I detest the entire format of almost everything that’s vaguely factual on television. Apparently it’s the same format everywhere on our orb. There’s all this filler and all these strange dullard people that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed interjecting themselves into the frame. The only time I see TV newscasts is in a two-minute blast on YouTube, and it looks so bizarre to my eye now that I feel like I’m a Martian.

Scene: Two hair farmers seated at an elaborate but shabby desk that looks like it’s designed to attract the attention of a four-year-old with a learning disability. The man with a shrine to Rock Hudson in his dressing room speaks to his partner across the desk in a Phil Hartman voice without the humor:

Well, Katie or Bev or Shanile or whatever your name is, in a minute we’re going to show you something interesting. It will be interesting to see the interesting thing that’s just behind our man on the scene, Biff or Tavon or Mikayla or whoever it is that’s really angling for our jobs so they can sit down and be vapid and make six figures instead of being sent out with only a microphone and a yellow slicker to ask a hurricane how it’s feeling.

Yes, Ted, or Bill, or Stone, or DeMario, or whatever the hell your name is, it sure will be interesting to wonder exactly what interesting thing is directly behind Biff or Jenna or whoever’s sleeping with the program director this week because his wife doesn’t understand him. And we’ll show you the interesting thing in an interesting way right after these interesting messages from our sponsor about fixing your leaky gutters or vaginal discharges or yellow toenails or whisky dick  or whatever.