Artificial Unintelligence

If you ask me, I'm much smarter than AI. I'm also smarter than my phone and my computer and all those apps and Siri and Alexa and the whole lot of them. They think they know everything but they're wrong.

I'll give you an example. Not long ago, maybe an hour or so, I ordered a new pair of running shoes online. (Full disclosure -- I don't run anymore because I had a new hip installed nine years ago and my doc said that I could keep running if I wanted to but that I would "use up" my new hip and have to get it done again in like ten years, if I lived that long. So I walk in running shoes, okay?)

Anyway, I bought a pair and since then my computer and my phone have been flooded with ads for running shoes, including the brand I just bought. If AI is so smart, how come it can't grok that I don't need running shoes anymore since I just bought a new pair and maybe try to sell me some socks instead? Because it's dumb, that's why. It should be called AS for Artificial Stupidity.

Enough With the Talking Babies Already!

The whole thing of making videos featuring celebrities as babies was once a bright, new and original idea that was hysterical! The internet was instantly flooded with talking-baby versions of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the casts of The Sopranos and The Golden Girls and My Cousin Vinny and Seinfeld. It was definitely worth a few hardy guffaws -- at first. But then it was everywhere, with everyone who could figure out how to do it doing it. And now it's just been- there-done-that annoying.

Sadly, that's what happens in a society where only a special few people possess the wits and intelligence to create something brand new. Through overuse by people scrolling desperately for anything different, ultimately it ends up on the trash heap of annoying copycats.

I hope and pray that happens to AI, and soon.

Metamorphoses

Tom Cruise in "Risky Business", 1983.

1) Conceived in 2004 by a group of college students, Facebook originally served as a catalog of who was "hot" and who was not, a precursor to today's dating websites like Tinder that was limited to Harvard students. In just 19 years it has turned into a miserable depository of anything and everything. Just this morning a friend of mine posted a video of a starving Israeli hostage held by Hamas inside a dark tunnel, emaciated and digging his own grave. 

2) Happy couples who are madly in love get married and then years later the husband murders his wife, or vice versa.

3) Actor Tom Cruise was once beloved by all, and now he is considered to be a creep into plastic surgery and Scientology who lies about doing his own movie stunts.

4) This blog was started in 2007 to be funny, and today I'm writing this.

Death Keeps Happening

Actress Loni Anderson, ex-wife of actor Burt Reynolds and former blonde bombshell on TV's WKRP in Cincinnati that aired from 1978-1982, recently died, just days shy of her 80th birthday. According to reports she had  battled a "serious illness" for the last year. 

Sad news, yes, but surprising? No. Yet her friend and fellow sitcom actress Barbara Eden, star of I Dream of Jeannie back in the day, posted online that she was "stunned" by the news. (BTW, Barbara is now 93 so she better be prepared for something even more stunning.)

How could anyone be stunned about the death of someone who was 80 years old and had cancer? Or even who was just 80 years old without cancer? Or even young with cancer? Or without cancer and any age? In fact, anyone at all?

We all need to get with the program and accept the fact that everyone dies -- at any time, at any age, for a variety of reasons. You can be sad about the death of a friend or loved one -- or depressed, suicidal, grief-stricken and bereft -- but seriously, you cannot be stunned, which basically means amazed, shocked, astonished, surprised, horrified and dumbstruck. 

Until we all learn to view death as a natural end to life, we will never feel relaxed.

Good Dog! (Bad Human!)

Reading the paper this afternoon, I came across two stories on the same page. One was about a teenager whose foot was badly burned at Yellowstone National Park when he stepped through the crusty earth near a boiling hot geyser. Having been to Yellowstone many times, I know that there are many signs warning visitors to steer clear of the geysers, as they pose a serious danger. So the kid must have ignored those signs and been foolhardy and oh well, too bad for him. I cared not a whit.

The next story was about a dog rescued in Parkland, Florida during a Category 5 hurricane last year by a state trooper who received a radio call about an animal trapped in rising waters. It went into great detail about how the dog's collar had gotten caught on a fence after his owner, a 24-year-old brat, left him tethered by the side of the road because he didn't want to take him along as he raced to escape the hurricane. 

I cried reading the second article, imagining the terror the dog had felt until his rescue. I hated the dog's owner, a lowly human, and was elated to read he had been tracked down and punished, and that Florida passed a law making the abandonment of animals during a storm a felony.

There is no punchline. People are truly the worst, and believe me, it's upsetting that I am one. Dogs are so much nicer, kinder, sweeter, more loyal and loving, except for pit bulls, whose inborn nature has been destroyed by generations of human owners.

How I'm Different From Kamala Harris

I'm not a moron.

I speak in complete sentences.

I'm never offended when people pronounce my name incorrectly.

I do not cackle.

I'm actually Jewish and my child never once called me "momala."

I told everyone that Joe Biden was demented.

How I'm Like Kamala Harris

I love a good green salad!

I never realized before yesterday just how much Kamala Harris and I have in common. It's uncanny, really, when you stop and think about it. For example, her rambling answers to an interviewer's questions are called "word salads," and I love all kinds of salads -- in fact, I eat at least one every single day, often two. 

Another thing is that her husband is Jewish, and so is mine! And talk about coincidences -- she was born in Oakland, California but lived in the neighboring city of Berkeley, and when I worked at the Oakland Tribune, I too lived in Berkeley. Also, while she is "leaving the door open" for a presidential run in 2028, everyone knows she will never be the President, and that's certainly true for me as well.

But perhaps the biggest similarity between us was revealed yesterday with her announcement that she won't be running for Governor of California next year (me either), explaining, "For now, my leadership and public service will not be in elected office." That is so me! In fact, just like Kamala, nobody knows what my public service is, or just how I'm a leader or to whom.

It's crazy that I never noticed all this before. It's like we're twins.