Electro Robot and Sparko His Dog

Paranoia

Part 17 of 30

I’m letting Electro stand not just for Electro and his faithful dog but the whole computerized world, which as we know has taken over and has us marching in lockstep to do its terrible bidding. We have developed a horrible dependence on all this stuff, which is so bad that I’ve already given in to temptation three or four times in the last 10 minutes to check my Facebook. Someone may have “liked” my latest post about upgrading to a better Electro; Model 3.2 is out in case you hadn’t heard!

There would be a definite improvement in my life -- as I perceive it -- to tell my dog her services are no longer necessary and replace her with Sparko. I could argue that Electro has a hole in his heart when Sparko’s not around. And with an actual dog, nature has given them a wacky software, meaning they need to poop and pee more often than my own software wants to handle. In that way Sparko would be an real improvement. But just to keep myself in the good graces of pet fans -- if there are any -- I'm not taking immediate action, as I continue (reluctantly) to take my old-school dog out, so far still under 50 times a day. I even bag most of my own groceries just so I'll have enough poop bags and so far the store hasn't imposed a limit on the bags I can use.

But Sparko and Electro so far are just a dream not come true for me. Plus, I’m actually reluctant because, Do I really need something else to consume my time? And none of my neighbors have one either, so there’s no pressure to keep up with them. Really, the world has settled down quite a bit from the excitement of getting computers, hard drives, etc. I was looking at some of my blogging from the mid-to-late ‘90s, and my graphics were about the size of a stamp. They had to be small enough to fit on a floppy disk. We're never quite there... So it probably pays to wait.

Now all my floppy disks are gone, I don’t know what happened to them. Must’ve been when they quit putting the drives on computers we just thought, “What’s the use? Just move on.” The key thing to note here is that whatever you have now, it’s crap compared to what is to come. The old Electros will be sitting in the dump, configuring themselves with satellites above to wreak vengeance on us, and we’ll deserve it.

This is where the sad side of Sparko enters the picture. Small enough and well-programmed enough to do Electro’s bidding, he’s also on important missions for outer space masters to destroy our infrastructure. One mechanical dog against the world! But they’re faithful, if not objectively good, so what Electro wants, Electro gets.

If this doesn’t make your head swell with paranoia, I guess that’s OK. Once they take you out, as in terminating you as their so-called master, that'll be that much more space for me to stretch my legs and relax, to the extent relaxation’s even possible these days.

Sloshing Tankards of Grog, Phones Ruint

1814

At the Boar's Head Public House, Andermatt, Switzerland, peasants from the countryside and the people of the village are joyously sloshing tankards of grog in great celebration. The grog makers are bringing it in as fast as they can put it out. The tankards are being filled and downed, filled and sloshed boisterously.

Certainly everybody there is merrily sloshed, whether out of their own drinking or their being sloshed by a neighbor. What a happy time, "Here's mud in your eyes!"

The keeper of the Boar's Head -- old Jeremias Boarshead -- later cleaning up the dam place, thinks back on the festivities. He pauses with his brooms and mops and recalls even his own brother in the mix there, sloshing with the worst of them, calling out in celebration, "You dirty bastard!" to the merriment of all.

There were no enemies, only the best of friends in those days -- a neutral place -- when the grog was flowing. Even if sober and dry they would've been enemies. But a tankard of grog in your mouth or coming through the air is the great leveler of a people.

2014

The same damned place is going strong, with some updates, some improvements, maybe. The sink's got a new layer of porcelain. The big difference is the drinkers, coming in as they so often do with phones, computers, and all these dam devices. It's technology on them, the delicate, dainty widdle technology, that nobody can get grog in or its delicate mechanism is spoilt, ruint.

So when the spirit gets lively, from whence it comes, and the grog is flowing, and the shouts of "bastard" are at their most fevered pitch, you hear the saddest words known to man, "Oh, dam, you bastard, you only now just ruint my phone!" The man runs quickly to the back room to grab paper towels, getting it out of the plastic case as hurried as possible and getting it dried off. It spritzes and flashes before blinking off black. "Out the door with me!" he declares, going out the back door.

But the spirit's still lively, though, in the main hall. I'm right under the massive head of some massive animal attached to the wall. A boar, its head. There's drippings from its hair, trickling down its forehead, on to the glass eyes and running much quicker, skipping the nose and making it straight to the lips and chin, and running quickly and dripping endlessly, depending on how much grog there was we got flying.

Bastard me! I turn to check my messages just as a tankard crisscrossed the room, unbeknownst to me. Thankfully, mercy heavens, I heard the whiz and was able to get my phone under my pocket liner just in time to celebrate the tankard's explosive arrival at the big boar's head. More spray going everywhere! I give a hardy and hale shout, "Yea!" Doubling down, I crash a tankard into another bastard's tankard and it sloshes us good. A little gal with a tray's down below, beaming up at us. Cute little thing.

But nothing would be the same, would it, for a studious fellow opening his iPad in this frenzy, only to have it doused with the sloshing by six good mates crashing tankards all at once, going in toward one the others in a conjunction that could easily only possibly end in one big mess. He looks down at his iPad on the spritz, splashed now beyond recognition as a working and vital device. The bastard's gone, it's dead, ruint...

High Tor, the cash register guy, moves through the crowd with his raincoat. We all have to laugh, as we look over and see such a massed assembly of raincoats, plastic wraps, umbrellas, and various diversionary heavy tarps looming over the delicate integrated mechanisms of the register. The son of a bitch was made to communicate with the outside world, it was. Foolishly! They could've done better with a wooden drawer. This thing beams its workings to the office, where the accountant, Old Max, dwells, and from there it's a pushed button's job to relay the accounted sum to the local banking establishment. And in a crowd like this, O!, it was so constantly busy!

Yeah, well ... I poke this one crazy bastard in the ribs, who looks at me with stupid happiness all over his face till he sees my grand plan at once. We will soak the cash register with grog, and let it spritz its way across the floor, if its source of energy will allow it! And so we do. And so it's ruint! The old boy knows the other guys more than me, and we assembled all ourselves around the thing -- we're truly too wasted to be held culpable for our actions -- and it was round robin, one by one, dousing it in grog. A roar of celebration went up as it fell to the floor and spritzed and jumped like it was limping for dear life, any possible shelter, the shadow of a table. There it died and a host of connections were utterly lost forever.

No sir, 'twouldn't've been this way back in 1814, the longtime bartender of the Boar's Head, laments. Back then they could've made the cash drawer swim to the ceiling and we'd still have been able to pull out the pieces of silver and make it a decent payday. Now we just have to hope the soaking of the wet hasn't extended as far as the bank. And that all our dealings hitherto have beamed their way all the way there. Do you think that they did? I'm putting you all on the honor system. The place now is closing, check back tomorrow. We'll settle all debts.

Ruint phones, computers, pads. Tomorrow. Time is no healer.

Teleporter Spam

I wrote a piece today on "The Miracle of Email," which as we know quickly became clogged up with spam, and in large part the miracle became a nuisance. Now they've pretty well got the spam held at bay -- at least I don't see much of it anymore. But it illustrates perfectly the double-edged sword to technology, that anything that brings a blessing also brings a curse.

One of our favorite futuristic inventions is the teleporter from Star Trek, as the crew of the Enterprise, whenever the thing worked, were able to beam themselves to and from a planet. But don't get us started on the thing not working, which, however, wasn't usually the fault of the teleporter, but more the advanced blocking abilities of the others the crew met up with.

But actually having a teleporter, it's not hard to imagine how fast it'd be abused. Terrorists beaming themselves in and out of the country, into buildings, nuclear power plants, etc., is one of the worst things I can think of. Then it's not too hard to think of other terrible things, right down to the nuisance it'd cause for all of us, like burglars appearing and disappearing from our house. We'd need anti-beaming hardware on all our houses and have to hope the crooks wouldn't be able to beam it away, then come in.

They wouldn't even need to appear and disappear, now that I think of it. They could just beam out a houseful of possessions and pick through it at their leisure back at the hideout. It'd be terrible. Then crooks would be walking around the mall, beaming your wallet out of your pants. You'd need some kind of lead-lined pants, or an alarm hooked to your belt that detected beaming signals. Can you imagine? We'd have a whole new level of paranoia, thanks to this blessing. Some blessing!

And how about this? What if you had blackmailers, prostitutes, pimps, beggars, and long lost relatives beaming themselves in and out of your place? Can you imagine being a Congressman. You're at a fancy hotel and a prostitute beams herself into your room (probably scaring the one that's already there) and there's a right wing blogger with a camera beaming himself in at the same time? And speaking of right wing bloggers. They could just beam a miniature camera into your pants, take a picture of your privates, beam it out, and there'd be another scandal.

No matter what technology we come up with, there's always someone there to ruin it.

The Miracle Of Email

I'm getting ready to check my "email," another way to say I'm going to click a virtual button and let my computer find out if anyone has written to me. Just let me pause here a few seconds, and go down here -- it's always on -- and, push, there it is going out wherever it goes; it's compiling a list and readying everything so that I the reader can see what I've got. Which this time turned out to be nothing.

I'm glad it's nothing. That means there's nothing I need to worry about, nothing to open and respond to, no tasks that need to be done like scanning something for someone or going to look up an answer to some relative's question. But it easily could have been something, and if it was that would have been OK too. An advertisement from Amazon.com about an album that came out today. They're very faithful about writing to me with such news.

I'm still happy for the miracle of email, getting to jot a note to someone and send it to them without having to buy a stamp. You might think there's the disadvantage that a lot of people don't check their email very often -- which is true -- so whatever I write might languish in their in-box forever. That's true, I've had that happen, in which cases it's better to use the miracle of the phone. We're past the days of dial-up when the miracle of the phone was thwarted by people online all the time and having busy signals. Someone I'm thinking of was online all the time and let their email languish, so that was the worst of both worlds.

And speaking of having to buy stamps, I've got a letter I need to mail right now and I'm fresh out of stamps. Meaning I need to go buy some stamps before I can get it done. Although you can do that online too, but I still haven't done it. When I need stamps I always need them right now, not tomorrow... Still, relatively speaking, we use a lot less stamps today than we did years ago. And it's not entirely because of the miracle of email -- emailing is good but it's not fail-safe, but mostly because of the miracle of the phone.

The phone is one of our older miracles that's still good. We've had it ever since Alexander Graham Bell first built one. A big old box phone that he hooked on the wall, with a mouthpiece as big around as a pie pan. In later years they miniaturized it, but still you had to have it hardwired in your house. I can well remember having to rent a phone from the phone company. That's just the way it was and the way I figured it'd always be. They were very finicky about getting them back, too. I remember, though, one time, somehow we still had the old phone from the phone company, after a move. I worried about that for a long time.

But back to email. I remember my first email account, and what I was thinking at the time, "What hath God wrought?" Then email quickly went to the dogs, with spam accounts. I don't get much of that anymore. They've devised filters for it, so I'm not sure who's still getting the thousands of messages we used to get. One time I compiled a large graphic of penis-enlargement spams, just the headers, and it was very amusing, but somewhere along the way it got lost.

Anyway, time's up. I have to press on with my day, and wonder, what emails will I get before the day is over? Not very many, I hope.

UPDATE: I was thinking of how fast email became old hat. That's a weird thing, how fast things become passe. If they would've told us 40 years ago that we could mail people from our desk and get a reply in a couple minutes, we would've said, "Wow!!!!!!!!!" But after about the first week of email, it was ho-hum.

The Robotic Voice Of Life

I'm always getting the robotic voice of life, like everyone else, what you get when you dial phone numbers. "Our menu has changed, please listen closely to the options. If you know your party's extension, you may dial it at any time. Please press 1 if you'd rather not listen to me." If only they said that!

The fact that everyone's menu has changed, maybe that's not a fact. I've heard it so often that I'm starting to think it's just a psychological ruse to get you to listen to all the options very carefully. Personally, I'm so pessimistic that they're going to have an option that matches up with my needs that I'm likely to just start pressing random zeros and nines, anything to bypass the crap. I did that today with a zero and it just started over at the top.

It's amazing that it can be (or sound like) an actual human voice, but you're not fooled for a second. Because of the unresponsiveness, for one. But then there's the one that's reciting back numbers you've entered, etc., which is so obviously robotic that there's no question.

Whether all of this is a good idea to those who shove it on us, it's not a good idea from my point of view. I'm sure I'm not alone in hating it. Because there's certain places, I don't know if you can ever get someone on the line. I had a phone company once, I'm sure there's no one who actually works there. It's just computers and robots everywhere and no people, except the guy who turns it on.

They try to make it sound normally human. I'd rather they just made it sound more robotic, like the voices on TV and in movies, where there's more insistence, "Your phone will self destruct in five seconds if you don't make a choice." And he really means it! They could get the voice so malevolent sounding that it'd get your blood flowing. You break out in a sweat because he's already up to "9" and you haven't heard your choice yet.

I've also got the robotic voice in my head. Not on a daily basis, but still... I was driving by a church one day and heard this beeping alarm, an insistent "Uhhht, uhhht, uhht..." like that. The robotic voice I heard was "Baptismal overflowing in Quadrant 4." Of course ministers would be rushing from their prayer closets with buckets. Or at the library, "Intruder entering Door 8." Librarians are dropping their books and running.

Here's a bad robotic voice, the self checkout station at the grocery store, "Please place your item in the bag." Then if you don't, it gets upset, because under the bag is a scale that lets the machine know that you've been non-compliant. I've seen some real screw-ups with these machines, enough that I don't go to them anymore than I have to.

I'll leave you with this happy robotic voice, "Your call is important to us. Estimated wait time is 27 minutes."

A Waste Of Time And Space

My blog avatar, Cutie Pie, is in a bad place. His self-esteem is at an all time low. He's off in the corner with the dust bunnies and dirt specks, refusing to be consoled. He's sad that the traffic at our blog has bottomed out -- I include him in the ownership of it since that usually makes him happy, even though I'm the only one who knows my letters. I'm a little bit sad about the collapse in visitors, but Cutie Pie's a whole lot sad.

What exactly is the problem, that's something of a mystery to both of us. I haven't even hinted to him that maybe my writing sucks. He's my biggest fan, and I'm my second biggest. All this time, I thought I was some kind of humor genius, that I had a lot of big laughs to share with the folks. That's the way it was way back in high school. When I was a kid. I could write stuff so funny they had to bring in oxygen tanks just to stabilize people so they could get them on a full ventilator. But times have changed, humor's moved on, and I guess I failed to keep up.

That's the most plausible explanation I can think of. That and the bad economy. People aren't even smiling, let alone laughing. They haven't got time for an old has-been like me, who, yes, had a good run way back when, but with the economy and the changing dynamics of humor, I've been left behind, left to shrivel and die, unwanted, without a friend in the world, a pathetic sight.

But I try to buck up his spirits. "April's not usually a good month for the blog, everyone's out for the first barbecue, students are in class, and in spring, that's when everyone's involved in pre-planning their funeral," I tell him. But soon it'll be May, then what?

I can see what's going on, everyone's literally moved on. You might not believe this, but when I had 150 friends on Twitter, I got three times the traffic. Now I have 3,000, and it's dropped that much. Why did I befriend so many marketing robots who don't actually read my tweets? Maybe more importantly, Where did the 150 I used to have go? Come back, ya schmucks! I'm dying here! My avatar's dying!

I honestly didn't see it coming. I figured we'd go from one victory to another, always getting bigger and better, until eventually I'd take over the world, then they'd be making collectible plates with Cutie Pie's picture right in the middle. T-shirts, souvenirs, coffee cups, etc., with his picture on them, and me getting the royalties. Instead, we're sitting in dusty corners, up against the wall, wondering what happened...

If I could regain your trust and patronage somehow, I swear I'd really buckle down and write better, write funnier stuff. A few fart jokes, maybe that'll bring the folks back. More pictures of funny cleavage, like fat men shaking their man boobs. There's a lot of people for that kind of low humor. But, alas, not that many for my high-brow, pun-laced, intellectual humor. To me, it's funny. But I'm educated, I'm not a dullard, I know what funny is. I wasn't raised by wolves or apes. I was raised by people who knew the value of a good laugh. They didn't scratch themselves during every meal and mate in public. They were discreet. You couldn't even hear them through the wall in their bedroom, that's how discreet they were. If I'd have been listening a little closer, and had made it known, I would've been an only child.

I confess, this isn't a new problem for the blog. The traffic's been down since the first of the year. But I've been doing the best with what I have, although you might say I've been winging it. Throwing out anything I think might stick. And, like Cutie Pie, I too have a sensitive spirit. So it's been very disheartening to see the whole thing go belly up. I've started thinking, maybe this is just a waste of time, maybe I personally am a waste of space. If I dropped off the face of the earth, no one would notice. That's literally true. Already, I walk through town, like downtown, and no one recognizes me, no one gives me high fives for my blog.

I've heard from folks, don't get me wrong, but it's mostly harsh criticism. A couple brazen critics took me to the woodshed for "wasting bandwidth." I frankly don't even know what that means. But if it means what I think it means, it seems irrelevant in this age when we've typically got at least 10 meg/second downloads and uploads. What's each blog post, like 1 meg total? How's that wasting bandwidth?

Well, apparently I've got it wrong, because when I've responded, they've told me the true situation, that there are bandwidth miners in the depths of the earth, and it's getting harder everyday for them to find new bandwidth. The world's running out. So if I waste even 1 meg, miners are down there dying for my sins at an astonishing rate. Like maybe three miners for every two posts, I don't know the rate. But they're leaving entire families behind, children who have nothing to eat, just because I'm vain enough to put my idiotic posts on the internet.

And you want to know something, I think I was happier without it. I was writing humor on bathroom walls, no one was dying, unless it was the guy who had to constantly scrub it off. And people would actually leave comments, unlike on the blog. I always got more comments and follow-ups doing graffiti than this, which is an odd fact. Still to this day, I miss that whole scene. For a while -- seriously -- I was going in with one of those portable scanners and preserving it all, because the cleaning guy would take away historic stuff. Now I write historic stuff, and it's lost on Google, it's lost in plain sight!

Anyway, that's my lament, that's Cutie Pie's lament. I'm sitting here typing my lament, while Cutie Pie's off in his corner, and it looks like a dust bunny has mounted him and is pumping away. Sex has changed since my parents' day: People, avatars, and dust bunnies don't care where they do it. It's a terrible sight, but what else has he got at this point?

Someone Broke And Drained My iPad

Someone hacked into my house, probably the famous hacker "Anonymous," took my iPad from my computer shelf, broke its glass, and drained out most of the water. So there it is in its present sad state, one corner like a desert, dried right down to the back, the rest of it helplessly sloshing around every time I pick it up. Of course it's worthless now, another $400 to $600, depending on what they cost, down the drain.

I've Joined The Great Authors At The Library

Can it really be that I have brought culture to the library?

The library is where you expect to find the great authors. That's where I see them. I went there and checked the shelves, and all I saw were great ones. So ... that's something!

Then I went to check out the public access computer. This is a lot harder than looking at the books. They really guard that thing. A kid a few years ago reportedly saw a picture of a breast on it and that's all she wrote.

It's harder to get to because, first, there's other people waiting for it. Then, because you have to have a picture ID, your library card, a recent utility bill, and your birth certificate. They run all this stuff through the Department of Homeland Security, and you're sitting there sweating it.

The computer itself looks like any other computer, but you have to wait for your secret code, then scan your library card, then another password. But before that there's the agreement you need to sign, that you understand you're in a public place, and that this child all those years ago is still sitting at home, refusing to eat his spinach because of what he saw.

Finally, if everyone has been cleared away out of the line (and they give you a strict 20 minutes on the computer), an electric fence descends from the ceiling and is there while the final librarian checks your paperwork one more time -- and gets the call from the federal government about your fitness to use it. If everything's good, she puts on a thick glove and disengages the fence.

OK, friends, I think we've made it. At long last, it's my turn. I'm up to the computer. I need to work quickly. I type in all my access codes and, after a quick five minutes, the browser window opens. Then, so as not to waste any more time, I slowly and carefully type in the URL to my blog. And guess what! My writings at long last are on display at the library! I saw my post on "The End of the Residential Industrial Movement." That's really all I wanted to see, but since I notice there's another guy in line, waiting for the machine, I stayed for the full 20 minutes, reading some of my other industrial posts.

But isn't that awesome to realize? That I'm in the library with all the other great authors! No one can deny it! I'm right there, with Shakespeare, Joyce, Prokofiev, R.L. Stine, and the encyclopedia! People need to be very quiet when they're around me now because I might be writing something especially great.

Now, if I could only have an actual book in the library written by me. That'd be great. Because then I'd get a cut every time someone had to pay a fine on it. Think of what I could make if, say, I had 10 books published, and each one was in a thousand libraries, and at any given moment five of them were overdue. If the library split it with me 50-50, both of us would do very well.

One last request: If you happen to be reading me in a library somewhere, first, congratulations on having reached the machine. You likely would've been a survivor in World War II in one of those scenarios involving cutting through wire and running across No Man's Land. But let's say you made it, and you're reading me on the computer, remember, It's a library! It's supposed to be very quiet. So, please, no cheering or shouting "He's the Man!"

Super Brain Scans Our Industrial Future

Thanks to my post on how I rival even super computers, now they're calling me Super Brain! (For completists, I also mentioned the subject here.)

Super Brain? That's quite a title! I tried to shrug it off and say no, but the acclaim has been too great, from comments here at the blog, emails, and, of course, neighbors. I'm taking the title, somewhat reluctantly, but I'll try to live up to it as best as I can.

The acclaim started rolling in about 10:15 a.m. yesterday. Most of the factories take a break about then, giving everyone a quick chance to look at the latest scoop on my blog. The emails and comments started coming immediately. The calls and actual visits built then throughout the day, with a few of them actually using the term "Super Brain." Also, the florist was here with a few deliveries. Most of the flowers I'm giving to nursing homes. The big spray spelling out "Super Brain," I'm keeping.

So, reluctantly, I guess you can call me Super Brain. Hope it fits. For one, I do rival super computers, and apparently now even other human brains. But really, I didn't ask to be this smart. It just happened. I watch Jeopardy, have filled in a few Sudoku puzzles, graduated from school, and I've read a few books. The rest is just native intelligence, the ability to spell my name, balance a checkbook, and do three step projects without reviewing the instructions.

One thing I'm already doing is a lot more thinking. But the first official act I'm going to do as Super Brain -- and I'm getting ready to do it right now -- is to scan the future as it relates to the Residential Industrial Movement (RIM), our industrial future. I know you can't see what I'm doing, but I'm alternately pausing and gazing at the wall and typing. What am I thinking? I'm not seeing anything very distinctly ... I'm focusing in ... shutting my eyes ... hoping I don't drift off, since I'm up very early.

When I do this, shutting my eyes, I'm still looking, but I'm looking up, like I'm seeking something from beyond. A message, an image. I tend to trust the intuitive stuff of life, the flashes of insight I get, which can be quite literally a flash. It happens, maybe just a thought -- POP -- but it's something that is usually true. So ... I'm looking ... looking ... looking .... and ---- Wow!

Guess what? I don't know how to say this, but I think I really saw something! I have the sudden conviction that this thing is about to come to a head! That's what I saw, the indicators pointing to the very welcome good news that this thing is about to be resolved, and I'm so very, very happy.

Friends, as Super Brain I feel I can now deliver good news to you. The indicators are pointing to this one thing, and I will proclaim it. The data has been processed and the conclusions are in: I can now predict the defeat and demise of the Major Industrial Powers (MIP) within our lifetimes! That's a fact. Along with that, quite naturally, I see the security of the RIM established forever!

There's a lot of sunshine, Super Brain sees that. But, wait, what is this? I'm scanning the inside of my forehead, looking for flashes of insight, and a cloud has passed through. Meaning ... yes! ... the security of the RIM and the demise of the MIP will not come without additional challenge. I know, no one wanted to hear that, but you don't really have to be Super Brain to anticipate how that would be the case. We've been through so much already, and the MIP is not obviously staggered or fatally wounded yet, so of course there will be tough days ahead. But keep the ultimate prize in mind, which we have already glimpsed: Victory is ours!

Just for fun, I wonder how fast a super computer could've come up with this. Probably not all that fast, because it'd take a programmer longer to type in the questions and variables than it took me just to look at the wall. So, once again, I've left the super computers in the dust. Super Brain gets his work done and is taking the dog out to pee before the super computer manages to get warmed up! But I don't feel like taunting this morning ... because ...

It's a day of gladness for the RIM! We shall prevail!

Now, I know everyone will be looking for additional details, but, please, just put it out of your minds and get back to work. We shall prevail according to what our strength is, and our strength comes in our work ethic, our ability to produce quality goods in mass quantities, and in our dirt cheap prices. Fill your warehouses to capacity! Keep supply high and let demand catch up. We can't lose!

On a personal note, thank you, everyone, for the title of Super Brain. I shall wear it with honor. Super Brain has spoken!

Industrialist's Brain Rivals Super Computers

I hate always being the guy who has to toot his own horn, but think of all the money I'm saving.

In sports, you have a teammate who steps up and says, "Joe's too modest to say it himself, but I'm not -- he just played the best game of his life." Then Joe pays him off in the dressing room and everyone's happy. With the Residential Industrial Movement (RIM), there's plenty of guys who'd be willing to say it for me, but I'll spare them; they're busy, plus it's just an unnecessary expense.

So I'll just say it myself. And, really, it's not like I'm claiming for myself anything all that great. I'm just saying my brain rivals that of super computers.

After all, I think I know what super computers know, but I'm pretty sure there's not a super computer that knows what I know. Because I haven't been examined by one, it hasn't had a chance to get my mental coordinates into its system. And in certain respects, even if it did, it'd probably short out and never be the same. It'd be twitching and babbling, spitting out incoherent or obscure phrases like, "Cheese hits my tongue with a furry feel." Let's say a super computer were to say that. Guess what, I said it first, yesterday at lunch. So there's proof that my brain rivals that of super computers!

But how this came up had nothing to do with that. It came up yesterday in my post on praising the Major Industrial Powers (MIP), when I was trying to work out some of the mysteries of karma, or, as I call it, the psychic price. I've been thinking deeply about these issues, trying to unravel things that are very nebulous. You may have followed the arc of my thinking, which happened at about 400 mph, faster, they say, than a super computer. I decided against praising them, and I believe I decided right.

As I explained, tearing them down might help pay some of their psychic price, or atone for some of their karma, with their suffering. But praising them might help puff them up, making them susceptible to greater karma on down the road. But I came to the conclusion that with the MIP's vastness as an organization, the discernible difference in the psychic price owed was likely to be negligible. And, in fact, it might serve to increase our psychic price, because it'd all be a lie.

These are huge issues. It's hard to quantify karma; you have to admit that. And things that are hard to quantify would be tough for a super computer to handle. I can imagine a super computer going, "Hey, I'm only a super computer! Not that guy at the blog!" To which I would reply, "You got that right, Mxyzptlk 5000!" I'm just going to say it; I don't care at this point: I think I am smarter than a super computer. At least I haven't seen a super computer yet that can keep up. Look out, I might just make my own super computer. Then maybe we'd have one that knew its way around the block...

I actually have it in my genes to do so, too. I've never mentioned this on the blog, but it's an absolutely true fact: My dad, the swami, built one of the world's first personal computers. Whether you'd call it super or not, that I can't say. We kids thought it was pretty super. It had blinking lights. It was a device he called "Mr. Know-It-All," and we fed it punch cards. A question was printed on the card, and somehow "Mr. Know-It-All was able to blink the answer (A, B, C, or D) through reading the punch card.

But I believe they've come a long way since my dad's great little device. Now we can Google our answers, no longer needing cards. And a super computer is even better, because it quickly scans through every variable and possible answer, at long last settling on the correct answer after something like .000009 seconds. Very slow, because I can usually give you the answer in a snap.

But I'm not putting down super computers. They're fast because they're built for speed. And this is something interesting: A super computer only knows two things, 0 and 1. Apparently the less you know, the smarter you are! So it's cycling through those two numbers at super speed, shuffling off a few 0s, then throwing in a few 1s to make it look good. The answer comes spitting out, and if you have more 0s than 1s, that's still good. In the super computer world, a lot of 0s still adds up to something!

Whether kids are smarter than a super computer, I don't know. Kids are smarter than a lot of adults on the computer. We've all heard that. I know my teachers didn't know a thing about computers, word processing, Google, or anything. Total ignoramuses. Of course that was before any of this existed, which is something of a good excuse for them, looking back on it.

We in the Residential Industrial Movement (RIM) think highly of ourselves and our skills. This comes from the confidence we get in doing it ourselves, digging in and building factories, plants, and entire industrial complexes of our own. We've gone from regular yards to these great facilities in a matter of months. So you can see, whatever it is, if we set our minds to it, we can get it done!

Super computers can do a lot. But they haven't built one yet that can rival us ... or me.

I'll Be In A Hobo Jungle With My Hard Drives

I'm lugging so much computer stuff around now, it's funny. I need a tutorial just to figure out what all the cords I have go to. Then there's all the power strips, with such a confused tangle even the electric company doesn't know what's going on.

This keyboard is behind this computer, and one of these mice goes to it. I just came home with another power strip and a 4 port USB hub. The hard drives have to go somewhere, along with the wireless mouse, which actually does have a wire, sticking on its little transmitter.

As for my hard drives, I baby them, and protect them, from all physical harm and from thieves. It's my daily paranoid obsession that someone is going to steal them. If they went, the dollar value would be negligible, of course, but it's the information and the hundreds of thousands of files on them that would be tough to lose.

I have email files from the '90s on there, and practically everything I've ever done since early 1996. And some of it there are several copies of, because at one time keeping files safe was a lot harder than now. With floppy discs, that never were perfected as far as I can tell. They failed so often, they're still failing in a parallel universe.

People see me walking along. There's the guy with that box of hard drives. Wonder what he has on them that he's so protective of. I'll never tell. They go where I go. And if they don't go where I go, which they usually do, they're so well hidden they'd have to X-ray the house just to get a clue. But spare yourself the trouble, because they go where I go. Not to the health club or the grocery store, of course.

I can picture myself being homeless or being an outcast, out on my own, living by my wits. I'll be walking along the railroad track, looking for a place to stay under a trestle. And there I'll be, warming up a can of mulligan stew in a hobo jungle, me and my box of hard drives.

No Solitude In My Own Cellar

Yesterday was an anxious day. I was in the cellar and found the grange file in the box. So far, so good.

But I clung it to my chest, knowing there wasn't a backup copy. I hate the idea of not having a backup copy. Blame it on computers. It's so easy to lose things.

I know we used to go see the country music show at the park when I was a kid, and we'd all be lined up to get autographs. It seemed normal then but if I was a kid now I'd ask for two, just in case I lost the first one. And, come to think of it, I don't have any of them anymore. So I should've learned my lesson early on.

But there was no time to take the file somewhere and get it copied. Anyway, I might be waylaid on the way and then my enemies would have the file. Do they know I have the file? Maybe it was hooked to a wire and set off an alarm back in the grange barn when I moved it, meaning a vast force of hooded assassins and their horses will be coming for it. These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your mind.

Holding it to my chest, I felt my heart racing. That's real. That used to happen to me when a teacher was about to call on me, or worse, at the end of a really contested eBay auction. I had an auction sniping program that literally made your final bid with the shot of a Thirty-Ought-Six. I used to win an auction and open the windows to let the smoke clear. It gives you a heart attack. I envy guys with a pacemaker, because that's a good backup.

As soon as I had the file, I realized there was no solitude in my own cellar. Other people had been there -- the original house builders as well as family members in the years since. And anyone could suddenly appear. So I got up and with haste went upstairs. Grandma was turning. Must not let her see me coming from the cellar or see the file. The living room has had people through it. It's our main room.

Outside! Eventually my path around the half acre was like the kids in the Family Circus comics. Over by the well, by the pussy willow trees, by the shed, in the garage, by the tiny grove, at the south corner, next to the well, on the roof, where the old trellis used to be, in the blackberry patch...

All along the way I felt the mounting breeze, starting off slow and easy but building ever more steadily till it was a pleasant light breeze. The pages could've gone falling to the ground and been blown randomly toward the north. Or they could've spontaneously combusted in the light of the sun -- they'd been mostly in darkness for decades.

I thought I might sit on them, but any kind of dew on the ground would smear them. A couple of the summer's last moths flapped an irregular course near me. Moths! Moths eat paper, right? You need a cigar in your suit pockets to keep them away. And I wasn't wearing a suit.

I stopped in my tracks. Gotta get a grip. I've already had a million chances to lose the file. Need to consider the odds. I should've stayed in the cellar. I returned to the cellar, haunted by the ghosts of all those who'd been there before. It was oppressive, as I can plainly attest, but it was a more controlled environment.

So there I was. At the end of a mad trek around the property. Back in the cellar. Finally settled, I looked down at the only copy of the file I had ... and with the greatest care and trepidation, opened it.

Hiatus Backup

I'm a big believer in backing up, having a backup. A backup plan, a backup of files, having my back up when I'm mad, everything. And backups of backups, to tell you the truth. Because you can never be too careful.

I think I got some of this urge to backup everything when I was in school. It was a very sour feeling to give the teacher the only copy of your homework, only to have her tell me two weeks later that she didn't get it. That's when a backup would've come in handy, and I should've had one, since all my teachers were complete incompetents.

Anyway, whatever it is these days, if it's possible and feasible to have a backup, I will have one, two, three, or more. If they put me in charge of the Library of Congress it'd have to be three times as big as it is, just to store all the extra copies.

I remember as a teenager being deathly afraid that my favorite artists' songs could be lost to civilization if they didn't have them on albums as well as singles. The thing was that singles were in the store for less than a month but an album could be there forever. My own little collection, as far as I knew, would exist as the last backup if they found that certain songs had vanished.

With computer files, how often, especially when we had just floppy disks, have I duplicated files. And you needed to with floppy disks, since about 90% of the time they were defective. Hard drives these days are a lot more reliable -- but even then I know that eventually they're going to fail. It's good to have everything on at least two hard drives, then also at least one copy on a CD or DVD. Then if one hard drive goes bad, as it eventually will, there's a chance the other will work good enough to copy everything over to a new hard drive. And if both fail, at least you have the DVD. If everything fails, then you'll know you should've had other backups.

When I took this hiatus, I didn't know how long it was going to be. But I might have foreseen it, that if I wanted a really good break, it'd be better to triple the days that were likely. Then if I wasn't rested up sufficiently, say, from three weeks off, I'd have another six weeks on top of that to make sure the job was done.

Certain things it's not feasible to back up. Like I don't have a couple extra cars in case the one goes bad, although I'd like to. And if we're having hamburgers I don't make extras in case the first ones fall into the charcoal. I can't live my life like that ... entirely.

Mode-A-Day Mowed Away

They tore down the shopping center. It's a lamentable thing to drive by the place that was the center of so much of our activities as a family.

But the days of shopping centers and malls, it appears, are over. Now everything's online -- no more bricks and mortar -- they're tearing it all down. Maybe the bad economy has something to do with it too. Construction has come to a halt. 1) Because there's nothing to build; 2) Even if they wanted to there's no money; 3) Customers are busy shopping online.

That's not the way it was 50 years ago, which is about the time, I think, when they built the shopping center. Back then we didn't buy everything online. A good brick and mortar store was what we preferred. People who worked there greeted us. We walked in, looked over their wares, maybe ate a pickle if it was a place that sold them, and bought what we wanted.

The shopping center was like a godsend. Finally we could go to one place and stay inside. No more traipsing around downtown into a warm store, then out into the cold weather. It was about 10 years later the stores started closing downtown. But we had the shopping center. Then they got rid of the parking meters downtown and we were torn about where to shop. But since the stores were closed anyway there wasn't any point to the free parking.

I personally preferred the shopping center. Grandma liked it. It sounds weird to say it these days -- when bricks and mortar stores have entirely gone out of favor, and online shopping is all the rage -- but we were even proud of the shopping center. I was. We had cousins come to town from Denver and we took them there and hung out. It was a cool place. A bowling alley that smelled like stale beer. A nice dime store. A restaurant that had you actually phone your order back to the kitchen. And the Mode-A-Day store, a place for women that Grandma got some nice dresses at. She never liked sack dresses, I might add.

I don't know precisely what happened to devastate the shopping center. Of course, I suppose online shopping had something to do with it. Plus the fact that bricks and mortar stores are generally out of favor. I'm thinking it just got old. We weren't overly proud of it, say, after 40 years had passed. By then we took it for granted, thinking it was just always going to be there.

Then, slowly but surely, shops started closing. Pretty soon the customers were home with their computers. Fewer crowds meant more stores closing. That meant less revenues and more dilapidation. A local gang painted some graffiti on the wall. And that did it. The place closed up. The bulldozers came in.