“I wonder if Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the producers of ABC’s ‘Dancing with the Stars’ will meet for coffee and a slice of cake before next week’s show,” Chris Matyszczyk writes for CNET.
“Earlier on Tuesday, Woz had declared that he was being set up by those cynical Hollywood producer types,” Matyszczyk reports. “He said that if he was in the bottom two, it would be “an outright lie.” And he was convinced that the fix was in for him and his partner, Karina Smirnoff, to be in the dance-off (and win it) in order to boost ratings.”
Matyszczyk reports, “Now here’s the truly weird thing. When you’ve set up a conspiracy theory that appears to come true, perhaps the last thing you might be expected to do is apologize to the alleged conspirators. Yet that is precisely what Woz did.”
Matyszczyk reports, “In his latest letter to his dancing Facebook diocese, he said,’Yesterday, I wrote my suspicions of the secret ‘Dancing With The Stars’ audience vote tabulations. I wrote that the producers were liars, simply because I truly believed in that possibility, not because I had a shred of evidence. I hurt a lot of honest people. The top people of this show, (the) ones responsible for counting audience votes and keeping them honest, told me all the specific details of where their numbers came from.'”
Matyszczyk writes, “Aha. Those wily coyotes of the production world appealed to his sense of numeracy. And then they knew the way to his heart. They showed him their machines.” Woz wrote, “‘I was offered an opportunity to see the equipment they use also. You can tell when things are extremely on the level. You can also see why the exact totals cannot be released. That would make it harder to detect fraud.'”
“Fraud? Did someone mention fraud? Oh, yes, Woz did,” Matyszczyk writes. “‘One main way that they detect fraud is, when the phone-in votes and text votes and Internet votes don’t follow each other, percentage-wise. There are other things they look for as well that IT experts would detect as signals of something wrong,’ [Woz] explained.”
Matyszczyk reports, “The appeal to his IT experts’ chops seems to have done the trick. ‘Conrad (Green) and the other producers are not liars,’ Woz said. ‘They are extremely honest people, in my mind…In this case, they are certainly more honorable and honest than myself.'”
There’s more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Woz is a filterless one-man publicity machine. Dancing machine, not so much. Regardless, for such a mindless escapist enterprise, any publicity is good publicity; ABC has got to be loving this roly-poly multi-billionaire.
MacDailyNews Note: One thing, as Matyszczyk mentions: the geek vote for Woz has obviously not materialized in significant numbers, so for those who wish to vote for Woz:
Steve Wozniak & Karina Smirnoff’s vote-in phone number is: 800-86834-10 (800-VOTE4-10) and their text-in code is: 3410. To vote online, visit the official site (voting page activated when the show goes live) here.
Phone lines, text votes (AT&T customers only, iPhone users rejoice!) and online polls will open at the top of each performance show. Phone and text lines stay open for 30 minutes after the end of the show. You can vote up to as many times as there are active contestants with your cell phone. Online voting will remain open until noon (Eastern) the next day.
Thanks for taking time for sharing this post, it was excellent and very informative. It’s my first time that I visit here. I found a lot of informative stuff in your page. Keep it up. Thank you.