Pop Culture References
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has made multiple references to "Techno" Ted Stevens's "series of tubes" description; as a result, Stevens has become well known as the person who once headed the committee charged with regulating the Internet. "I have a letter from a big scientist who said I was absolutely right in using the word 'tubes'," Stevens said to reporters in response to The Daily Show's coverage. When asked if he'd think about going on the show to debate Jon Stewart, Stevens replied, "I'd consider it."
In the keynote speech at the 2007 Penny Arcade Expo, Wil Wheaton spoke about remembering when the Internet was more like a truck than a series of tubes.
Google has included references to this in two of its products. Gears' about box says "the gears that power the tubes" and Google Chrome had an about: easter egg at the address about:internets which displayed a screensaver of tubes (if Windows XP's sspipes.scr is installed) with the page title "Don't Clog the Tubes!" When "about:internets" was entered on a computer lacking that screensaver, the tab displayed a gray screen with the page title "The Tubes are Clogged!" This easter egg was removed as of the 2.0.159.1 release.
Read more about this topic: Series Of Tubes
Famous quotes containing the words pop culture, pop and/or culture:
“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”
—Charles Krauthammer (b. 1950)
“The children [on TV] are too well behaved and are reasonable beyond their years. All the children pop in with exceptional insights. On many of the shows the children’s insights are apt to be unexpectedly philosophical. The lesson seems to be, “Listen to little children carefully and you will learn great truths.””
—G. Weinberg. originally quoted in “What Is Television’s World of the Single Parent Doing to Your Family?” TV Guide (August 1970)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)