QUOTESSAYS

 Ten years ago today was the very first time more people in the USA accessed the internet with mobile devices than they did desktop computers. I am sure in another 10 years we will be seeing the first day more people accessed the internet with the Neurolink chip implanted in their brain than they did with smartphones. 2014 was about the time when I was beginning to notice a real drop with people writing on Facebook. Memes and video clips had taken over, and comments got shorter and more filled with emoticons. It was getting harder to engage people with any depth on posts. Now it kind of makes sense. I know a few people are getting frustrated with me because I can't be texted easily and evidently talking on the phone is passe, which always seems strange to me. What could be higher tech than talking to someone on a phone? Just having a laptop works for me though. I like not being tethered to a smart phone 24/7 and there is a certain comforting formality to sitting in front of a full

  ChatGPT can save lives in the ER, but it needs supervision: 'It is at once both smarter and dumber than any person you've ever met' (msn.com) Further dispatches from the front in the war of AI evolution vs. human devolution. And this article is almost a year old, which is 5 minutes in AI time. One can only imagine the progression in this field since then. I remember the smug attitude white collar professionals had back in the mechanical age of my youth as automation was eating the blue-collar line worker jobs alive. It brought Detroit from being the highest per capita income city in the USA in its heyday to its knees when I lived there. I spoke with a lot of old-time auto workers about the glory days in the Big D. Now the professional classes have an invitation to the extinction party. I have brought up before how anybody of average intelligence could probably successfully battle a minor civil court case with all the information available on the web. I would imagine any C

  To be filed under you never know when you are making a lasting memory. I am kind of making a hobby of looking back on my life and searching for the pivotal moments that stuck way deep in the memory banks and how they influenced my development later on. One happened 60 years ago about now when I was 10 years old in 5th grade. I remember what must have been an art class or club. I can't recall the details, but for some reason it was just me and another girl in the classroom, almost like it was after regular school or something. I always liked art classes, even though I have absolutely no natural talent in that direction. Math and science were always a deep mystery to me, and English at that age was basically just grammar rules and spelling lessons. Art seemed like the only thing was any fun that I could concentrate on for over 5 minutes. Now even in 5th grade there was already a very clear caste system in place. The girl I was in class with was definitely a patrician and I was an u

When 'Bucky' passed in 1994 at 73, and I was a tender youth of 42, I remember thinking, "Hey, that is not too bad for his lifestyle and profession!" Now on the cusp of 73 I am not quite as giddy about that idea.  Charles Bukowski's last written words before he died. He was a better writer on his death bed than 99% of other writers in their prime. "The words have come and gone, I sit ill. the phone rings, the cats sleep. Linda vacuums. I am waiting to live, waiting to die. I wish I could ring in some bravery. it's a lousy fix but the tree outside doesn't know: I watch it moving with the wind in the late afternoon sun. there's nothing to declare here, just a waiting. each faces it alone. Oh, I was once young, Oh, I was once unbelievably young!" What I love about Bukowski is the economy of his language. Each word has such weight. So many writers use 20 words when one well chosen and simple word will do. All killer, no filler, a well needed anecd

  Visiting Mariah Carey’s Cat’s Grave: Reflections on Disenfranchised Grief ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com) A long, but very good read for all the animal folks out there, and good writing is getting to be an endangered species these days. I have buried many a pet, stretching from coast to coast now. The irony is I am not really even a pet person. Every pet I have ever had was an act of serendipity. Neighbors giving me unwanted pets, ones showing up at my door, ex-wives deciding to leave me with the dog in exchange for my bank account, etc. I always left them in pretty nice graves though. Shelby's final resting place in my backyard has become a neighborhood shrine, with all the little girls laying painted rocks over her. She touched a lot of lives on her two daily walks around the hood. Even now I will see a nostalgic teenage girl sneak in and place a new rock on Shelby's grave. I am now down to Urtles the Tortoise, as we eye each other warily after almost fifty years, wondering who

  All high schools have pep rallies, their own little version of the Nuremberg Rallies, to get the student body all fired up for going to war via sports against neighboring schools. Having never been to one sporting event in 4 years of high school, the only redeeming feature of these spirit rallies was the cheer leaders doing cartwheels and all kinds of body twisting acrobatics. It was like a wholesome striptease. But, overall it was torture. If I remember correctly one of the big draws was you got out of class for awhile. I had read and cut out an article about some kid from high school that refused to go to his school's pep rallies. He had transferred from another neighboring high school and claimed he still supported his old school, so forcing him to support his new school was not fair and had nothing to do with the state requirements for his education. And it looked like he was right. I cut the article out and put it in my binder as ammo. From then on out I hid out in the libra

  The Coe cousins, Frank & George, were a little different from Billy the Kid and the majority of the other Lincoln County Regulators. They both became substantial citizens of Lincoln County, sired strong families that still have roots there, and both managed to live to a ripe old age. And because they lived so long, they also became one of the the last eyes and ears that saw and experienced the Lincoln County War first hand and left many quotes about it and the character of Billy the Kid. I will start with Frank, the older of the two. Benjamin Franklin Coe was born in West Virginia in October of 1851. He made it to the New Mexico Territory with his cousin George in 1871 and worked a ranch with another cousin, Ab Saunders. In July of 1876 Frank and Ab killed cattle rustler Nicas Meras in Baca Canyon just outside of Lincoln. Later the same month both Coe cousins, Ab, Doc Scurlock, and Charlie Bowdre broke into the obviously fairly porous Lincoln County Jail and nabbed horse thief Je

  From birth until almost 9 years old I was raised in the prototypical 50's suburban neighborhood in a pre-Silicon Valley San Jose. Our house was in one of the first post WW2 housing tracts marketed to all the returning vets, hungry to start a life interrupted. All the streets were named after military leaders from their just finished war. MacArthur, Patton, Halsey, Patch, etc. We lived on Hodges. My folks bought the house in 1947 for 12k. It is now appraised at 750k or so The Clevelands lived across the street from us and were about as perfect a clone of the Cleavers from 'Leave it to Beaver' as one could get. Even the name was close and they had two boys about Wally and Beaver's age. I used to watch the dad and his boys play catch in the front yard after he got home from work with great jealousy. My dad wasn't into sports or playing with his kids at all. I have no memory of even touching the man. I asked my mom one day why dad didn't play catch with us in the

  And everything appears to be a crisis these days. Perpetual crises are also a very effective political and economic tool to herd populations. They are the border collies of the ruling classes. The upside is rarely does the crisis of the week ever come to fruition. It is always the one we don't see that gets us. I am waiting for that asteroid to smack us into oblivion while we were fretting about proper gender pronouns and if Taylor Swift will make it to the Super Bowl. She did, so at least that is a load off my mind. Luckily Taylor owns two jets, so she had a back-up when one needed some servicing. 

Part 3 of the crazy cross country adventure over 40 years ago. I rolled out of Florida with an ice chest full of Cuban sandwiches, a Shell gas card with just enough left on it to get to LA if the wind was at my back, and $8. My VW bug had been beat pretty bad on this trip, but was running fine until I ran out of luck just outside of Houston. Some horrible sound was coming from the engine and I pulled over. I can't recall exactly what the issue was, but I believe it was the generator and fan housing flying apart. I did get it towed to a garage owned by two Hispanic brothers. There was a huge Virgen painted on the outside and I took that as a good sign. She has popped in and out of my life for years. They estimated the repair at about $100 and change if I recall, which was $92 more than I had, plus I was starving and saving that for food. This was before the days of gas station stores pretty much. Gas was all you could get on a gas company credit card. I went in with as much swagger

My traditional Super Bowl Sunday quote. Now we can add legalized pot to the mix! If professional sports and showbiz celebrity have become the secular religion of the United States, the Super Bowl would be its high mass and Taylor Swift our Virgin Mary.  It combines both celebrity and sports in one huge pagan spectacle of bread and circuses. I was never a sports fan, having been raised in a family where sports were a nonentity, and never picking up the fan habit later on. It just wasn't in my genetic coding.  I have only been to one Super Bowl party in my entire life, and that was in Detroit when I was a real estate agent/white collar criminal, and my broker hosted it at his palatial Bloomfield Hills mansion. The only thing more obnoxious and irritating than a room full of hyper, type A real estate agents are drunk ones in Detroit Lions football jerseys watching the Super Bowl. Plus, they all had deep psychological anger issues because the Lions have yet to make it to a Super Bowl. 

I am proud to say this is an original quote from me. It was actually a reply to a comment on another FB page a few days ago, but I realized it stood pretty well on its own too. Having been born with no real natural talent, aptitudes, perseverance, or driving ambition has turned into a plus in retrospect. Historically I would follow my interests until I realized I wasn't very good at whatever it was, lose interest, then move on. This formula for failure assured me of constantly being exposed to new people, places, and experiences, and I developed a chameleon like sensibility to adapt to any situation. Add to this a series of jobs in the servant class to the wealthy in various capacities, and I found myself easily navigating a wide range of social strata also. This eventually all came to fruition at age 48, when I finally found my calling as a real estate agent/white collar criminal/con man in Detroit, a city that nurtured my natural instincts and I could finally take root and bloom

60 years ago in 1962 I was in 5th grade at Scotts Valley Elementary School. They had just completed a new school at the north end of the Valley to accommodate the growing population. The students that lived in the north valley were transferred to the brand spanking new Vine Hill Elementary School, including me. They actually moved us over mid-year to complete 5th and do 6th before we went back to Scotts Valley for middle school. Our new teacher was named Mrs. Jacobson. Imagine Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of OZ and you will have a pretty good image of her appearance. Even to my tender, young 10-year-old brain something seemed off about her from day one. It escalated quickly from there. Nodding off at her desk, going around slapping the back of your head with a ruler, picking up part of your lunch as she was walking by and eating it, losing her temper and screaming out of the blue, etc. I remember telling my parents all this and them ignoring me and telling me I was exaggeratin

  50 years ago about right now I was taking my second attempt at 'Introduction to Algebra' as a sophomore. I had flunked my first shot at it as a freshman. Math just didn't seem to hit me straight in the head. I always blamed it on my mother dropping me out of a basinet as a baby, a 4 ft. drop landing head first on some metal closet door tracks. I am sure that has something to do with the trajectory of my life. The funny part was I really tried hard in all my math classes. I wanted to be good at math. It seemed like magic somehow. This was way more than a math block. I came in with the lowest math score in my high school class SAT's. I was so low on the graph they thought I had not taken the math section of the test. They even called me into the office to see what was going on. It didn't make it easier that every time I saw an illustration of 'The Tree of Knowledge' math would be the trunk, science the main branches and the humanities the little skinny branc

Facebook was unrolled 20 years ago today as a social media platform shared by a few Havard students. Roll that one around your head. I assumed it was much older than that for some reason, but I have noticed age has played with my sense of time passing. I also seem to be getting terrible of guessing people's ages lately. Everyone is 10 to 20 years older than I guess they are.  Either way, no doubt FB captured the zeitgeist of these times perfectly, though it appears to be fraying around the edges and becoming an 'old folks' social media platform as younger generations attention spans atrophy under the increasingly speedy assault of AI. In the 14 years I have been on here I have definitely noticed a dumbing down in the posting and commenting. I am always amazed at how much more thoughtful commenting was when older posts pop up in memories. We are getting dumber as AI is getting smarter. To the victor goes the spoils. 

  My Spanish may suck, but I am getting pretty fluent in Spanglish! Every once in awhile I will forget a word in English. I attribute a little of that to creeping age and senility. My brain can only hold so much information now. If something new comes in, something old has got to go....

  Video | Facebook Pretty obvious progression as I see it, even more so 6 years later. As I have said before, we are the Trilobite frame to build on, at least until AI decides we are unnecessary and can't be housebroken.

  In 1977 about this time I was going through one of my clean and sober periods saving up some health and fitness points for the butt ringer that was coming up down the road unbeknownst to me. God bless those periods though. I have a feeling that is what has saved me in the long run. I was never a very good hippie considering I was raised in the heartland of hippiedom. I always naturally associated with the Beats before me and the Punks after me more than my own generation. Tie dye seemed pretty gauche to me, I was allergic to incense, and macramé was just plan ugly. The whole hippie thing just made me itchy and nervous, except for the dope smoking part. It wasn't all bad. But one thing I did love to do was organic garden when I was in my 'get clean' mode, and in '77 I planted my last huge hippie garden at my folk's property in Scotts Valley. I really got pretty sophisticated in my gardening techniques and raised a lot of good food. I canned, dried and preserved to

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/ "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9" And this article is close to a year old, which is practically prehistoric at the pace AI is accelerating. The term 'paradigm shift' has been thrown around pretty loosely for a number of years now, but I have to admit I have a gut feeling we are on the verge of one. We have AI that can write beautiful prose instantaneously, yet we have had two presidents in a row who are not capable of speaking coherently in complete sentences. Something is boiling over on the stove here and we are losing track as to how it all works. I have not been in school for a very long time now, but I have to question how education even works anymore? Access to instant inf