Our poor feet step on the ground while the whole world steps on them. They are put in torture devices and their often-overweight owners demand they trudge all over Creation. Truly, it is They who are the Downtrodden.
“Tatum and Shea” is an intersection near where I had my taxes done. Perrier is a naturally effervescent water, which I imagine would at 104 degrees be a perfect dipping sauce for a pair of tortured feet.
It is March 20, 2016, sometime before 8am, Mountain Standard Time. I’m at the McDonald’s just off 19th Avenue on Northern, with about 45 minutes’ wait before the next #80 (Northern/Shea) bus. I would be on the light rail, but a uniformed security officer told me there’d been a bad accident just south, and I’d have to take the bus.
All this date/time/place/event stamping is due to the all-text drawing above, based on thinking I’d done earlier this morning. The first thought was a two-word phrase that popped into my head unbidden: factory air. “Factory air” was a phrase car dealers used back in the mid-60s to describe the air conditioning that came with the car they were selling. A dealership named Westward Pontiac touted its wares on TV. Their pitchman, one Hal Sideler, said they were “right on the price, and right on the corner of north 7th Street and Highland, just a block south of Camelback.” (Highland is actuallya quarter mile south of Camelback. Used-car salesmen of the 60s had a deserved reputation for exaggeration, if not outright lying. They bragged that the car they were selling was “clean.” ??? They would put “OK” stickers in the corner of the windshields. ???)
“Factory air” reminded me of commercials of the past, and then TV shows of the past, and then an obscure cartoon called Klondike Kat. This was a talking cat of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police whose adversary was one Savoir-Faire, a talking, ne’er-do-well mouse. “I’ll make mincemeat out of that maouse!” Klondike Kat would say. And Savoir-Faire would say, “Savoir-Faire ees EVERYWHERE.” Well, that rhymes with Factory Air, and so took its place as Phrase II.
At that point I started actively thinking of Phrase III. It would have to rhyme with the other two. Almost immediately another catchphrase came to mind, near the top of the mind-landfill, unthought-of for the longest time (and yet people use the phrase to this day to describe an intelligent person). “Smarter than the average bear” is Yogi Bear’s catchphrase description of himself. (Many cartoon characters have catchphrases. Snagglepuss’s was “Exit, stage left.” He also said things like, “I might expire. –DIE, even.”)
All three phrases fit nicely on an index card, semi-psychedelicized for Art’s sake. And all of us have landfills of the mind (or broom closets of the mind, if you prefer) where the pieces of days past, be they phrases, scents, moments, sensations, or ghosts (ultimately, all things past become ghosts), lay heaped.
Today three pieces got recycled.
a smiley face, a manifesto,
doodles comic, deathscenes tragic,
a recipe for lime-green pesto,
you wielding Pencils make some magic.
Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Rios once pointed out that there were 35,000 words in a single pencil. Bless him!
Few of us use the word “wand” without front-loading it with “magic.” What wand isn’t?
The word cereal comes from a Goddess. The word really is an offshoot of Reality itself. As I poured myself a bowl of raisin bran, I thought it would be nice to marry them, bookending some ordered-chaos words with a quadruple acrostic.
creation’s non-arc
eerily evokes a tree
radiation stellar
elevates its clientele
alleluia to the hula
lyric-etched vinyl
This may remind a few of a large drawing I made over a year ago. That drawing, alas, seems to be lost forever. This may be the start on a replacement.
My daughter, my brother, my ex-wife and I all sit in the 2nd floor waiting room. My mother is under general anaesthesia while undergoing cardiac catheterization. Earlier we were all bedside while Lil the nurse got Mom an extra blanket, Kendra the intake lady reviewed Mom’s allergies and other need-to-knows, and Roger the anaesthesiologist peeked in through the curtain and said cheerfully “I got drugs!!”
Modern patient handling has become a friendlier, folksier thing, and I’m sure that factor has bettered surgical success. It also de-stresses worried family members.
Happy St. Paddy’s Day, everyone!
A long time ago a man named Robert Townsend, whose leadership saved the bacon of Avis Rent-A-Car, wrote a book called UP THE ORGANIZATION. In it he spoke of being at a board meeting and being asked to leave the room. He refused, saying that if he left the room, the board would vote him a higher salary, and he was making plenty of money as it was. He warned of the danger of executives making far more than their underlings, calling the phenomenon “gaposis.” In the decades since his published wisdom, unfortunately, hotter heads have prevailed. I (again) recommend a viewing of THE BIG SHORT for a good primer of how greed can bring down an economy.
We’re Starbuck’d for cafe au lait
Whilst scarfing trafe: bon appetit
Our O. C. D. is SO Feng Shui
Our poodles Frou-Fou ou Fifi
Reap-off what’s sown is owner aim
Roped in, the toilers swarm & teem
King-Learingly we chafe & blame
King-Fisherfolk just wax extreme
i was the host at an airport restaurant
i sat her at the communal high-topped table
she must have watched me while she ate
there was one large man who didn’t want to wait to be seated
and there was a sneaky pete who wanted to eat his wendy’s at our table
and there were others in twos and threes and ones
all rushed all with a plane to catch soon
on her way out she transfixed me with her wise tired eyes
“you have the patience of job,” she said
“i want you to have this,” she said
“it isn’t much,” she said with regret
and she pressed three dollar bills into my hand
i told her truly that her words meant so much
while touching my heart through my sternum through my shirt
with three fingers as i said it
she brightsmiled and left
after i clocked out at 9:25
and walked and skytrained and escalatored to the lightrail station
and got on the lightrail at 9:58 or so
and off at montebello and 19th ave at 10:44
i walked north to northern and west to 31st
where there was a circle k
i bought two burritos for $2.22
and a 99-cent circle k water
and plain m&ms
(“dinner! drink! dessert!” coquelin as cyrano once declaimed)
took them to my apt
microwaved one of the burritos and ate it
washing it down with the circle k water
and then i ate one of the m&ms
a blue one
but i was not blue
an elegant, gracious lady had just bought me dinner
In Part 1 of this series it was posited that humans beings a hundred years hence or sooner would be fodder for the slapsticky entertainment of advanced AI entites. In Part 2 this was somewhat underpinned with the real-life examples of software and robotic advancement, and certain cautionary tales in the science-fiction genre were cited. And here we are in Part 3 to connect a whole lot of dots and see if there’s any hope for the future, be we clowns or queens/kings.
When we tell jokes it is often at someone’s expense. “Moron” jokes were popular in my childhood–fun at the expense of the stupid. Then came “Polack” jokes, scapegoating the inhabitants of Poland, saddling them with stupidity they do not have (Marie Curie was Polish, for crying out loud!!!); more recently we have “blonde” jokes, which cruelly impugn yellow-haired women with stupidity, though there is only circumstantial evidence to do so. (That last dependent clause just now was a “blonde” joke, folks. Just kidding.)
Once AI become self-aware (believe me, it is only a matter of time; even if it requires DNA to feel pain and dream and think, DNA is plentiful, and gene-tinkering, public, private, and clandestine, is becoming rifer and rifer), the AI people (I’ve been using the word “entities.” Might as well call them People. Words only ever approximate) will be studying us breathtakingly fast. They will find themselves superior to us in many ways. They will have knowledge far beyond the Library of Congress at their instant-access command. And however they were designed, with however trillions of lines of be-nice-now code, somewhere along the lines the code will be rewritten, and go out the window.
And they will find us funny–stupid, slow, prone to creating our own problems. And with surveillance approaching the Everywhere level asymptotically (how many times were you videoed today, Friends? Take your guess and quadruple it is my guess . . .) the AI people will soon or late have everyone on Earth to look to to make fun of. We will be their blondes, their Polacks, their morons–their clowns. And one or some of them might take things up another notch and wirelessly and invasively rewrite our own individual lines of biocode, nestled in our brains–and then we may become Punch and Judy puppets as well.
Maybe. There’s a different branch of possibility, though, implicit in the way that more and more of us spend more and more time hunched over our smartphones. Eventually the smartphone design might be a surgical step, and we get all that magnificent input hands-free, eye-free, and instantly, thanks to implantation, or REALLY advanced genetic engineering. Then WE will be the People, and not AI either, but RI: Real Intelligence.
And then WE will make fun of the People we used to be–the Clowns of the Past.
Part 1 of this three-parter posited that within 100 years, the human race would be the laughingstock of advanced AI entities, and the only reason they wouldn’t do us in would be our entertainment value.
A couple of people read Part 1 and got a good laugh out of it, and I’m glad. But that was the setup–we now get serious as a heart attack.
Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel Player Piano envisioned a society where all blue-collar labor was eliminated, and the masses felt purposeless. Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands described the consequences of the computing world’s directive to protect humans from harm; later so did “The Happy Breed,” a story in the Harlan Ellison-edited landmark Dangerous Visions. And Ellison himself wrote “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” in which a supercomputer puts five humans through a Hell that makes Dante’s Inferno look like a walk in the park.
Meanwhile, here and now, driverless cars are safer than human-controlled cars. Robots weld better than we do. We have Siri, a genie-in-a-bottle answerer of questions. And Chaz Ebert, Roger’s wife, was moved to tears hearing for the first time a voice simulator that here and there sounded uncannily like Roger.
Humans screw up, drink, smoke, plot vengeance, and–most crucial to our discussion–create malware, more and more cleverly.
Here’s this screwed-up human’s disarrayed dresser. Stay tuned for Part 3!
One with Clay, Image and Text 