MR WRONG: Man against machine
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 76
COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: Who Feels the Pain When the Robots Fight?
YESTERDAY’S MR WRONG column, look, I don’t know about you, but it gave me a headache, because it was all about asking for money, argh!
JOE MACLEOD
At a certain point while I was typing I thought “Well, I’ll just write another column tomorrow to make up for it,” har! Seriously, I am not complaining about this on account of I am a Professional columnist, you can look it up, I am Pro, I Gets Paid to do this shit, so I have no complaints! However of course, I’m just saying, do you know how fucking hard it is to think and type at the same time?
Meanwhile, I gotta look at the keyboard to type! I do not have “touch typist” skills! I use three fingers and a thumb and I don’t know my “home keys!” Also, my keyboard is at the point where the letters are worn off. I bought a Keychon-brand keyboard because I wanted a clackity-clack typing experience, see, the Apple keyboard I got with my computer is really flat, and there’s no special feeling when you press down on the keys, so my typing is even worse, my fingers slide all over and hit too many letters. I dropped like, I dunno, $75, a hundred bucks maybe, on this Keychron, and you can see the picture I took of where the letters E and then A and S and D, and down at the bottom, C, they are gone. It’s like, are those the most popular letters, or is there something in my technique where I am more scrape-y on those letter-buttons, but whatever, I should be able to see all the goddamn letters!
In the interest of full disclosure and transparency, I gotta say I took a picture of my Keychron keyboard that I am mad at and then I looked at the picture, and there was all this schmutz and little hairs and dust and stuff, and I felt embarrassed to show you my dirty keyboard, so I got a paintbrush and totally took a few minutes to brush out all up in between the keys, so I dunno how Journalistic the photo is, because technically I styled it like one of those phoney-baloney cooking things where everything looks perfect, or in this case where everything doesn’t look like I haz cat.
So yeah, here we are at today’s Mr. Wrong column! If this was an old-timey printed-on-newsprint newspaper, it could be what they used to call an extra edition, which is where you get that hacky Hollywood-movie thing with a news-kid yelling “EXTRA” because something happened to advance the plot.
Oof! When I was looking for a Tube of some movie newspaper peddlers, I was reminded that there was a movie musical about this called Newsies, wow, urgh, har!
The Internet provides! Sheesh! I also saw today on Bluesky—but it was really a TikTok—a human being fighting a robot in a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)-type of cage, a “cage match,” if you will, in the common parlance, as it were. I looked at this video on my Bluesky, and it said this was an “influencer,” a person who gets Internet-famous in order to get free stuff and money, who is the human being fighting the robot, and you can make your own joke about how many human beings were in the fight because Influencers are bad, and this particular Influencer got their ass kicked by this robot, and now the California athletic commission wants to make sure people stop fighting robots for money or whatever. Look, I only want to see robots fighting robots, I don’t want human beings getting their bell rung, I think it does something negative to my immortal soul, you know?
Two robots, though? I am buying tickets for that shit, like the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots? Hells yeah, let’s go! Nobody will get brain damage in this contest, at least not from getting kicked in the fucking dome by a brutal remorseless robot! We can argue about if I am gonna get brain damage from choosing this as entertainment, that’s fair. Anyway, if you wanna see it, I don’t have a TikTok so I don’t know how to look at these properly, since I am on my computer typing on my crappy Keychron keyboard and not looking at this shit on my phone like you’re supposed to, this is the Tik and the Tok of a dipshit Influencer getting kicked by a robot:
@nbcnews California's athletic commission sent a cease-and-desist to a fight promotion for staging an "unsanctioned" human vs. humanoid robot cage match.
♬ original sound - nbcnews - nbcnews
Anyway, brain damage is bad, and boxing and NFL football and regular football and MMA, and a buncha other sports are bad, because the athletes get brain damage! Their noggins get shook and rattled and concussed, because a brain is just sitting around inside your skull minding its own business, doing brain stuff, and then you get tackled by a 300-lb. NFL football player, and even if you are not playing football, your brain gets sloshed around inside your cranium and you get brain damage, which I think is my topic today, on this very extra column of the Mr. Wrong column, it’s Brain Damage, or maybe it’s being an Influencer, which, if I was one, I woulda figured out how to get a free keyboard by now, instead of continuing to blabber about how the letters wore off my keyboard and I am not good at typing, but also, this keyboard is junk. Thank you.
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly. No refunds. Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 29, 2026
★★ The clouds were down to some purple shreds low in the western sky and flakes of white gold in the east. Then real sun was shining, casting real shadows, though the air and everything around remained sodden; the morning looked as if it should have been crisp, but it couldn't be. Slowly the open parts of the sky shrank down to narrow gaps of blue or a fleeting wash of sun. One tree at the upper end of the Pool had gone half gold, to cast a patch of color on the mirror of the water. Small dark mosquitoes made their moves quietly but without subtlety.
New York City, September 30, 2026
★★★★ A short line segment of cloud sailed broadside across the blue, crumbling away as it went, while higher cloud-wisps stayed where they were. In the bustle of breakfast, with hot tea, the apartment had been a little sweltering. Outside, though, all the disparate discomforts—the chill, the damp, the direct sun—had softened into harmony and ease. Someone in a sleeveless shirt sat curled up on the sill of an open third-floor window, shaking cigarette ash out onto the fire escape. On through the warm hours, it was a day that might have drifted in from some other place or different turn of the year, till that floating sense of dislocation and possibility came plopping back into fixed and unappealable position in time and space, one where the darkness of night settled in by quarter past seven.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of sandwiches selected from Good Things To Eat: As Suggested by Rufus, by Rufus Estes, Formerly of the Pullman Company Private Car Service, and Present Chef of the Subsidiary Companies of the United States Steel Corporations in Chicago, published by the author in 1911 and now available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CHICKEN AND PIMENTO SANDWICHES— Add to finely minced chicken, roasted or boiled, an equal amount of pimentos. Moisten with mayonnaise and spread between wafer thin slices of white or brown bread. A leaf of lettuce may also be added.
CRESS SANDWICHES— Take thin slices of rare roast beef and cut into small pieces. Add an equal quantity of minced watercress dressed with a teaspoonful of grated horseradish, a little salt and paprika to season, and enough softened butter or thick cream to moisten. Blend the ingredients well, and spread between thin slices of buttered graham or whole wheat bread. Cut in neat triangles, but do not reject the crust.
BANANA SANDWICHES— Remove the skin and fibers from four bananas, cut them in quarters and force through a ricer. Mix with the pulp the juice of half a lemon, a dash of salt and nutmeg and set it away to become very cold while you prepare the bread. This should be cut in very thin slices, freed from crusts and trimmed into any preferred shape. Slightly sweeten some thick cream and add a speck of salt. Spread the bread with a thin layer of the cream, then with the banana pulp put together and wrap each in waxed paper, twist the ends, and keep very cold until serving time.
GERMAN RYE BREAD SANDWICHES— Put between buttered slices of rye bread chopped beef, cheese or chicken, and cover with finely chopped pickle, dill or the plain sour pickle. Another variation of the German sandwich is a layer of bologna sausage, then a thin layer of pumpernickle covered with another thin slice of rye bread. Cut into strips half an inch wide and the length of the slice.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by our continued offerings, be sure to send along a description of your experience and maybe a few photos to us here: indignity@indignity.net.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
S_BST_CK IS DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD DEP'T.
