Blue Dot Special

Horatio writes: To thank to the discerning people at New York Magazine for Approving of us in their Matrix (bottom right corner, baby: brilliant, perhaps, but lowbrow, really?) we have a New York question. This was triggered by the astute Mark L. of Brooklyn (but born and bred, Upper East Side) who reminded us that when Time Warner took over the world of cable in the city, they tried and failed to shut down our heroine and role model Robin Byrd, the equivalent of forcing an entire generation of city boys to wear chastity belts. Their fall-back plan to stunt our adolescent development was ripped right from the Cinema Paradiso playbook. They went to the remarkable lengths of superimposing a blue dot on any sexual organ that lived or breathed on the show with the exception of breasts. If a penis or beaver showed its head, a blue dot would swoop down and smother it. Our question is... Just whose job was it to sit in an editing suite and insert the dot? Our imaginations say it was a beautiful, nubile woman in a bikini, but from what we know of the television industry it was more likely to have been a sixty-year-old pot-bellied chain-smoker with plumber's crack. We NEED TO KNOW! Both for the purposes of adding to the storehouse of knowledge and to try and understand why our careers advisor never mentioned this kind of occupation to us in high school. If anybody knows the answer, kindly be in touch.