My Husband's "Art Project"

My husband has had a vegetable garden for years. It keeps getting bigger, and thus producing more of everything. Tomatoes, carrots, green beans, beets, green peas, onions, broccoli, eggplant, cucumbers, radishes, yellow squash, zucchini, peppers of many varieties, potatoes, lettuce, kale, spinach, basil, dill and cilantro. Sound good?

Here's the problem: There are just the two of us living here at the moment. We have only one dinner at night, and some nights we eat out. Therefore, we have too much stuff. We give some of it away, but here in Maine everyone with a piece of land has their own garden.

I ask Mitch every year to plant less, but he claims it's his "art project" and that he grows it for how it looks, and that I don't have to eat it. But every time I see the guy he's offering me a carrot or a radish or a tomato or something, whether it's mealtime or not. I remind him it's an art project and that I don't force him to eat my paintings. He shrugs.

Still, those veggies keep coming. 

Film Review: WILD INSIDE

Even the worst documentaries are at least educational, which is more than you can say about most bad Hollywood movies. But the best of the genre opens your eyes to worlds you never knew existed. Wild Inside is one of those. Just released, it tells the magical true story of Falco, a male Eurasian Eagle-Owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February of 2023 and spent a year of delicious freedom -- the first in his life -- sightseeing in New York City.

From the moment a passer-by spots him on a city street, just sitting on the pavement looking wide-eyed and completely lost, we are in love with Falco. Soon enough the entire city was too. He was on the TV news, in magazines and newspapers, and all over the internet. A huge following of bird nerds soon sprung up and spent their nights tracking him, filming him, photographing him and thrilling over his every move.

Flaco himself is a beautiful and wondrous creature. Seeing him learn to fly and fend for himself, after 13 years of captivity in his tiny zoo enclosure, is enthralling. Afraid he will starve without his curated meals from the zookeeper, we celebrate his first kill -- a rat -- and revel in his survival skills. Go Flaco! 

Equally compelling are his human followers, a group of sensitive souls (with some heavy-duty camera equipment) who we meet through interviews, each of them showing their growing love for the giant bird. Spoiler alert: It's a sad but happy ending, definitely worth your time.

Shame On A.I.

Last night I attended a performance at a local theater. When I got home I studied the program, reading with interest the bios of the cast members, which often include a personal note at the end of their acting credits. What jumped out at me was a line that had been blacked out with a marker. Still, holding it up to the light I could make out the words, "An avid sex fan and sexaholic." Really? Either the man had chosen to include that in his resume or someone on the staff was up to no good.

Interested to find out more, I emailed the theater and learned that it should have said the actor was "an avid Sox fan and Soxaholic," but their electronic proofing system had missed it. So 17,000 copies (!) had to be redacted by humans at the box office. And still, it was legible to anyone with an eagle eye, like me. 

As a former editor and proofreader with years of experience, I would have caught the error for sure. Just another example of how people are better than machines.

The Lesbian Said About It, The Better

Not long ago I wrote a post describing my recent car accident wherein I crashed into a mailbox after momentarily blacking out at the wheel of my car. It was a bad experience, to say the least. In the post I mentioned that the owners of the mailbox are two women who live as a committed couple. The official term for them is lesbians, a word I used once in the post.

Since then this blog has received "hate mail" from an anonymous lesbian over the fact that I used the word, I assume; I can't imagine why else. She said some awful things which were not only mean-spirited but incorrect, rife with erroneous assumptions about what had and had not actually happened.

Since then, the readership numbers of that particular post have skyrocketed to heights never seen by me before. (She said she hoped my "bigoted blog post" would be read by a lot of people.) Conclusion: Lesbians are very touchy. 

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Okay, so I wrote a rather depressing post earlier today about missing beloved dead people. I got over that when my son called and I realized that he is my favorite person and he is alive and talking to him always cheers me up. So much so that I often listen to our past phone conversations on his podcast called "Zack's Mom". (Find it on Spotify.)  

Moods come and go, often for no reason we can identify. Hormones? Bad dreams? Lack of sleep? Or that old devil, dehydration? Who knows? Certainly not that shrink you tell your troubles to, usually at a very high price. The fact is, some days are better than others. Our job is to get through the bad ones somehow. If you're having one of those today, remind yourself:

1. You woke up this morning.

2. You are not in the hospital recovering from surgery. (Skip this one if you are.)

3. You do not have an upcoming surgery scheduled. (Skip this one if you do.)

4. You are not homeless, have food in the fridge and indoor plumbing.

Then go take a hot shower and clean something: Your garage, the refrigerator, a closet, whatever. It's very therapeutic. Soon enough it will be tomorrow, which for all you know will be one of the good ones!

Calling All Dead People

By the time you reach my age, you like more dead people than living people. These days, when I'm down in the dumps and need someone to talk to, the people who could cheer me up the most are not available -- at least not without a Ouija board. This sucks and is one of the worst parts of life.

Let's Get Real About AI

Business bigwigs and government leaders talk up "AI" like it's a fabulous invention that will revolutionize mankind and improve life for everyone. But what if, instead of saying the initials, people said what they actually stand for? Just how great is artificial intelligence? Let's see. 

Synonyms for artificial: unreal, contrived, hokey, stilted 

Similar to artificial: affected, arranged, dummy, ersatz, factitious, fake, false, faux, imitation, simulated, staged, substitute, synthetic, unnatural 

Related to artificial: unreal, counterfeit, imitative

Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer reality. While it's currently all the rage, in the long run, "AI" might not benefit society even a little.

Puzzle-Mania

Today's puzzle, in case you need help.....

Just in case you don't believe that people are getting dumber, grok this: Every week on page three of the Sunday New York Times, there is a column called "Wordplay: Tips for Today's Crossword." The explanation for this is that, "A Times Games columnist helps readers solve the day's crossword."

I started doing the Sunday crossword in the Times magazine section when I was about 12 or 13, with my mother. I never stopped, and today I do it with my husband as we have for our entire marriage, going on 40 years. Not once have we needed help to complete it. But never mind getting help --  the column I mentioned gives the answers, right there in print! Not all of them, but many. 

Now you tell me what that says about the level of intelligence of the typical New York Times reader, not to mention their editors.

When Your Neighbors Are Democrats

I live on a beautiful street in a small town 20 miles from Portland, Maine. Except for one other family besides ours, it's populated by Democrats. It's a dead-end street, so if you enter by mistake you will have to turn around when you understand that fact. Although the house at the end of the street has a long driveway where you could do such a thing, the meanies who live there have posted a sign that says "No Turn-Arounds."

Mrs. Meanie walks her dog, off leash, every day past our house. Often, her giant out-of-control Yellow Labrador tramples through my gardens and pees somewhere on our front lawn. I say nothing, because dogs will be dogs. Besides, neighbors are people we must live with, peacefully one hopes. Yet Mrs. Meanie doesn't share that feeling. 

The other day she started SCREAMING at Mitch for supposedly driving too fast, even though he wasn't. Waving her arms wildly, she shouted, "Slow down!!!!!" with obvious hostility. (Meanwhile her dog was peeing on another manicured lawn.)

Our next door neighbors haven't spoken to us in the 14 years they have lived here. Several others who we were once close with shut us out a few years ago when we put a Susan Collins sign on our lawn, realizing possibly for the first time that we vote Republican. One particularly virulent Democrat whose vast gardens I watered daily for two weeks when she vacationed one hot summer, actually marched over to my house to say, "I don't like the way you think."

Here's the funny part: At the entrance to our street there are two lawns signs. One says, "Love Is All Around," and directly across the street from that, the other says, "Be Nice."

Welcome to Strawberry Fields

Back in the days when I wrote features for the Washington Post, my editor was a relentless task-master.  The opening paragraph had to identify the old standbys: who, what, where, when and why. The byline consisted of one name only: mine. And I had to identify everyone I quoted by name and connection to the story.

But that was then, before the dummies took over. In today's Wall Street Journal, the bylines of four of the five front page stories carry either three or four names. WTF? What the heck are they all doing -- looking up words in a thesaurus? And many of the quotes are attributed to "people with knowledge of the situation" and "someone in the room at the time."

John Lennon foresaw this murky future years ago in his song, "Strawberry Fields Forever": 

"Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out

Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about."

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