Bonapartes and a Twitty

Click this to skip to Kenny Beats in ATL for Boiler Room . Choose your adventure.

I generated a couple of images from WordPress’s own natural language AI image generator. Hit and miss. I just wanted an image of Napoleon eating a churro on a volcanic island. On Elba, before the storm.

Midjourney got freaky with warpaint. It put the churros on Napoleon. Crowned with frybread. I thought Midjourney might take advantage of Napoleon’s habit of posing for photos with a hand shoved in his waitcoat to portray calm and firmness. Right. Shot the nose off the Sphynx.

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On April 6, 1814, he failed to abdicate and subsequently turn the keys to the castle over to his son (no one liked that idea, and junior died anyways at 21 of TB). The squares thought Napoleon would just use his son as a tool and rule by proxy. Dead ass. So, they told him to pick a different successor, so he picked a cousin . The Alliance exiled him to Elba, a Mar-A-Lago of the European Continent. He ruled the small island, Emperor of a tiny island. It’s almost mean. He came back anyways, power vampire, but would eventually lose it all at Waterloo to the British.

Lil Drumf

I watch Trump begin to get the legal hiding he well-deserves, and I know that his MAGA cult army is just waiting for a chance to inflict self-inflicted wounds on the body politic, on our shared future under the stars and stripes, and I see a harbinger of doom. Don appeals to people who want to see other people publicly abused and destroyed. Don lives in exile in his mini-kingdom in south Florida. He doesn’t have to flip steaks anymore. His cult is generous. Ironically, America has a tradition of creating cottage industries that focus on the orchestrated discrediting of prevailing leadership, regardless of political affiliation. Drumf monetized it.

Back to Napoleon

Here’s the emperor with no clothes, figuratively. On his way back to Paris, Nappy flexed on an entire army. He took over an army sent by Louis XVIII, named Ney. Napoleon once boasted about defeating the Prussian army by just marching- never fired a shot. He met the entire army alone within range of gunshot, went up to them on on the field of battle and told them, “Here I am, kill your Emperor if you wish.” Someone could have shot him. Someone should have shot him.

The sun shining, the silence, the calm firmness on display. Calm firmness on display. Invincible. The army spontaneously swore allegiance to him. Glory was his. The coconuts on this guy. Nap and Ney, the insurrection. They marched to Paris, and Louis XVIII fled the country. Seriously, Europe was like this for centuries. Like Falcon Crest on absinthe and pseudoscience.

Speaking of coconuts, Napoleon’s physician François Carlo Antommarchi apparently cut off the exiled emperor’s penis during the autopsy. Where did it go? Details survive about Napoleon’s autopsy. His guts, in fact, went in a jar to be buried in a sarcophagus with him. His death mask, though, went as a gift to New Orleans when Antommarchi would move to Louisiana, check. It’s like paying a coyote a Rolex. Antonmmarchi eventually moved down to Cuba, taught, sculpted, got into coffee trade. What’d he do with that penis?

Well, dang, “state radio” NPR got the skinny on Napoleon Bonaparte’s severed penis. I am writing about Napoleon’s privates to gain a more Republican readership. We all need to dig deep. Considering their interest in controlling what people got goin’ on down there, and not climate change or dwindling fossil fuel supplies or global feudalism and whatnot, destructive inequality.

In homage to the ridiculous “I never met a hungry child” sociopathic criminals sent to subjugate the lower classes, I shall decline from reading the NPR article myself. “I don’t even know what happened to Napoleon’s severed penis, I never read the article”. EDIT: I read the article, curiosity got the best of me. The penis went on a world tour with a carnival of sorts. Christ almighty, a rich dude bought the traveling penis and “took it out of circulation”? He felt sorry for Napoleon’s severed penis. Seriously? So, skip to Kenny Beats in ATL at the Boiler Room.

Midjourney blend

In any case, here’s segue about Conway Twitty. I tried a Midjourney blend of two images. The combine image is less appealing than the originals. I just think his name is ridiculous. Not a fan.

Browsing for any new content blocks WordPress recently, I found their own “AI image(Experimental)”. The images which follow are using my text prompts that accompany the image. The web host doesn’t do contemporary celebrities and politicians, real vanilla, but Napoleon worked. Napoleon! The idea of Napoleon takes me back to the 1970s idea of insanity. When I was a kid, I was told people went crazy, sometimes they thought they were someone else, or a dog. It was usually Jesus or Napoleon, or a nice doggy. I had to take grown people’s word for it. I watched Saturday morning cartoons. I knew who he was. I watched Sandford and Son. For some reason, you got the neurosis like Woody Allen, and then you went full Jesus or Napoleon. Anyways, I wanted to see how the world sees Napoleon now. Portly, regal, demented.

WordPress “AI Image” generator

The first image is refined according to the format used in the tutorial for generating parameters to be diffused into the image. The second image is the initial attempt to create Conway Twitty from the WordPress AI Image Generator. Midjourney has trouble recalling stuff “prior to 2021”. Likewise, WordPress doesn’t know a Conway Twitty from a hole in the ground. I would have to physically insert the Conway Twitty image into the algorithm. You can see that formatting, like supervised machine learning, like ideasthesia, affect the visual expression it conjures. There are ghosts in the machine. Midjourney made Twitty look like a shovel-jawed Mario. It needed some help from a guiding hand to reproduce a Conway Twitty with the wolfman hairdo.

Both Napoleon and Conway were buried in pink boxes, in quartzite and granite, respectively. The former sarcophagus resists acidic etching, the latter sarcophagus resists stains and scratches.

The third image, after considering the output in the first image below, is a refinement of terms and grammar – there were a couple of instances of words without spacing between them. Strangely, the steampunk bananacore spaceship suddenly becomes free of the ground. It takes flight.

I love this one. Buckethead Bonaparte.

Kenny Beats ATL Places+Faces BR