O-Bits—Black Polka Edition

In tonight’s O-Bits: A computer learns to write horror stories, and our First Family shows humans they’re more horrible than any fiction. Plus, you could have been head-banging to the Polka Tulk Blues Band…

But first, since today is The Day of the Dead, why not discover the holiday’s pre-Christian roots.

The Guardian takes a look at how horror movies and Heavy Metal music have influenced each other. It goes back to Black Sabbath, who took its name from a 1963 Boris Karloff movie. Before that, the band was calling itself Polka Tulk Blues Band. Hard to imagine parents getting upset over that…

In Derbyshire England, one family’s Halloween decorations decorations were a bit too realistic for their neighbors. Among the usual ghosts, goblins, and Jack O’Lanterns was what looked to be a body bound and wrapped in trashcan liners and blood-soaked rags. The mother of three who put up the macabre hanging, was surprised by the response, telling the Sun that she got the idea after seeing a neighbor hang a similar decoration last year.

You know who probably had an even worse Halloween? Donald Trump, Jr. This year, he was a one-man Halloween wrecking crew. The night before the holiday, he tweeted a lame joke about Halloween being the favorite holiday of sexual predators and on Halloween itself, put up a photo of his daughter looking sad with a half-filled plastic bucket. “I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight,” he wrote,  “and give it to some kid who sat at home.” And what’s the lesson here?  “It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.” Twitter promptly explained to him that since she got the candy free from her neighbors, if she gave the half to a less-fortunate child, it’s called sharing.

Perhaps you just want to read a really great horror story. Or maybe write one? Some MIT engineers have beat you to it, and built an Artificial Intelligence program called Shelley (after “Frankenstein” author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). She starts a new story every hour, and invites followers to add a sentence and move the story forward. According to its creators, it learns from what gets the best response; their hope she will invent new horror genres. It will learn what scares us, the creators tell us.  We already know the scariest sentence Shelley could write: “The singularity has begun.”

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.