With a prompt like “Enchanted,” the mind enters the Magical Realm of Once Upon a Time. Here’s a true story that seems magical to me. Once upon a time there was a man who lived with two women, and loved them both. But he found that there was truth in the Chinese symbol for “Trouble,” which draws a simplified picture of two women under one roof. He became agitated by some of this “trouble,” and it gave him an idea. Don’t people who lie have physical changes that a machine might be able to detect? And so the Lie Detector was invented. And later, the same man noticed, with the help of one of the women he loved, that comic books only had men as superheroes, so he told a comic-book-maker that they needed a woman hero. The comic-book-maker agreed, and asked for help, so this man created Wonder Woman with the help of an artist. And he created Wonder Woman with a Lie Detector of her own, a magic lasso which when encircling someone would make that someone tell the truth. And though there is no “happily ever after” to this story, the empowerment of women that can be directly traced to this man has made the world a better place. The end.

I have futurist David Rose to thank for this true story in the form I have written. It was part of his discussion of his book Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. He gave that discussion five years ago, and since then Siri and Alexa, two well-written forms of artificial intelligence, have managed to insinuate “themselves” into our lives, working their often creepy enchantment. (In his discussion Rose speaks of “The Uncanny Valley,” wherein things designed to be more humanlike do so just enough to give us the willies.) (And the Bad Punster strikes again: If they made social robots of Willie Mays and Willie Nelson, it would REALLY give us the Willies.) (Sorry not sorry.)

So my page this time has no acrostic poetry, though I became tempted, when listing various Enchanted things, to list them as Swords, Evenings, Castles, Rings, Encounters, and This Guy’s Brain–put them all together and they spell “Secret.”

I have provided the link to David Rose’s discussion to my Facebook readership, and the link is on my Magic Clipboard now, but I will cost you a few seconds and NOT paste it here, instead inviting you to work a little Enchantment of your own via Internet search, by way of demonstrating, as Arthur C. Clarke once observed, “Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Let’s end with a punchline. There are many people I know via social media that I have never met in person. YOU may well be one of them, and one of the reasons I want to spend my retirement on a World Tour of meeting lovely people that I have and have not met yet. From this day forward, at that magic moment when I am physically WITH someone (as I say, pehaps YOU) whom I previously have only known online, I intend to use that magic word that the French employ when they meet someone for the first time–“Enchanté.”