Tuesday, January 14, 2014

What is a Hoffman Lens?



Last week we had some dead folks to honor, but now that duty’s done it’s time to introduce this blog more properly.

The Hoffman Lens was originally a column on the 8sails web site. The column was designed to skewer obnoxious trends in mass media and popular culture. And we’ll continue on in that tradition here. I opted to make the move to a Blogger blog because they’re easier to manage than separate web pages. I’d rather focus on being mean to celebrities and leave the HTML to folks who love it more than I do.

So what exactly is a “Hoffman Lens”?

In They Live, a movie by famed horror-meister John Carpenter, evil space aliens have taken over the planet and are systematically using the Earth as a giant third-world economy. Trouble is, nobody knows what’s going on. The dastardly villains have managed to disguise themselves, hide their presence and keep earthlings in line via an elaborate barrage of brain-numbing broadcasts and subliminal print messages. The only way to see the bad guys in their true, less-than-attractive shape is by wearing sunglasses that have been treated with some kind of special, hypno-filtering chemical. In one scene these glasses are identified as Hoffman lenses. Hence the name.

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