Guess which month consistently polls as America’s least favorite month.  According to Gallup, February has won the honor since 1965.  In the Midwest February is psychically painful.  It is cold, sunless and constantly mocks you should you attempt to be happy for more than two hours on any given day. 

February of 2022 began per usual.  The groundhog surfaced to cast his little rodent shadow and sentence us to six more weeks of purgatorial winter.  In the past there have been both kinder and more brutal Februarys.   But this February took a bothersome turn when Punxsutawney Phil somehow managed to summon return appearances of a few unsavory characters to cast bigger shadows than his own.

…to my already pandemic battered psyche.

It all started a week ago Sunday.  Garv and I decided to go for a drive just to get out of the house and have a change of scene.  About an hour into our drive I realized it wasn’t just a drive. We were on a “Sunday drive,” the kind old people take.   

My grandparents were big fans of Sunday drives.  My grandmother would wear her navy wool pill box hat complete with hat pin.  My grandfather usually wore his houndstooth suit jacket, felt fedora and a splash of Old Spice.  Off they would go in their Nash Rambler going nowhere in particular, looking stylish.  Proper.  Civilized. 

I glanced at Garv.  He was not wearing a fedora but his hair was having a party!  (Picture Doc from the movie Back to the Future…that kind of party.)  Equally pulled together, I was sporting slippers and no pants.  Well, I was kind of wearing pants, leggings actually.  But it’s no secret that leggings are just well marketed long underwear.  Obviously we lacked my grandparents’ sense of flair and refinement.   

We blew past a sign and I’m certain it read, “Oldageopolis City Limits.”  I said, “Garv, we are officially old.”  Ironically, he did not hear me. 

The first sentence in Google’s “Terms of Use” should warn the Google-er that typing a question into the little white box may very well render answers the User really does not want to know.   But Google assumes no responsibility or moral obligation to protect Users from themselves.  

I am fully aware that Google likely knows much about my personality, preferences and quirks.  I assume they have figured out that I am a spiritual sort, a moderate, a sensitive creature, and an animal lover.  So the other day when I typed in “do cows have besties” Google could have been gentler with their results.   They could have tried to save me from myself and tried to throw me off course by asking,

Did you mean “do cows have breasts?”

As I read the news the other day Gilda Radner (may she rest in peace) and Chevy Chase came to mind.  Were they still on Saturday Night Live I think Weekend Update would go a little something like this.

Chevy Chase:    Weekend Update recognizes its obligation to present opposing viewpoints. Here with an editorial reply is Miss Emily Litella.

Emily Litella:    What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about a picture of a black hoe?  Why…black hoes are everywhere.  Just go into any Lowes and you’ll see dozens of black hoes hanging on a wall.  Every good gardener has a black hoe in their garage.

       Chevy Chase:     Miss Litella, Miss Littella…

Emily Litella:    Why spend all this money setting up fancy telescopes and computers all over the world just to take a picture of a black hoe?

Chevy Chase:      Miss Litella…

Emily Litella:      What?

Chevy Chase:      The editorial was about black holes. In outer space.  Not black hoes.

Emily Litella:       Oh…that’s different! Never mind.

How do I associate black holes with Emily Litella?  When faced with potential threats my mind tends to use bizarre coping methods.  Black holes are kind of menacing so I guess my mind shifted to free association.

Anyway, should I consider adding black holes to my already extensive worry list, a list that ranges from serious to the ridiculous?

Continue reading “Black Hoes?”

10.  We shop for bathing suits. After seeing the horror in the dressing room mirror we’re thankful to have a couple more months to lose our winter weight gain.

 9.  On March 10^th we trick Mother Nature by advancing our clocks an hour. The pros and cons of this maneuver cause great debate among Midwesterners.

 8.  We attend clandestine parties to kick off the new season of Bravo’s RHONY.

 7.  We eat an embarrassing number of brown eggs. These are specialty free-range brown eggs with labels identifying their place of origin as Cadbury or Reese’s.

 6.  We buy vegetable and flower seeds. (Midwesterners are very optimistic folk. The sun will come out tomorrow kind of folk.)

Continue reading “Ten Ways Midwesterners Survive March”

It’s Oscar night! For Cinephiles like myself tonight is our Superbowl, World Series, our Grammy Awards night.

For me movies are nothing short of magic. When the theater doors close and the lights dim, the rest of the world and the 100 things that are on my mind disappear. It’s bliss, a mini vacation, a deserted island. I am at peace for the next two hours free from distractions, solving problems, or making To-Do lists. I am present and open and free to let the story on the silver screen unfold.

Every story ever told by any human consists of only five possible conflicts in the storyline. Five. That’s it! Man vs. Self, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Supernatural, Man vs. Man and/or Man vs. Society. That seems impossible to me to be true, but I have yet to see a movie where it didn’t apply.

We think humans are so complex, but the way we move and live in this world really does boil down to how you treat yourself, how you treat or respond to nature, how you interact with others, acceptable or unacceptable societal norms, and how you interact with the supernatural, which I assume includes tech and AI.

Movies have the ability to give us all a better understanding of different people and cultures. Movies can shift the way we see the world…as it was, is, or could be.

Continue reading “And the Oscar Goes To…”

Be it visual, theatrical, musical or written, I love the Arts. Creating or appreciating art is nothing short of a spiritual experience. I own some originals including my most prized masterpiece (shown above) titled “I’m Thankful for You”.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I suspect this was a collaborative piece. I doubt a chunky orange Crayola in the hands of a 3 ½ year old could have drawn the beak, wattle and legs on this turkey. I think a Master might have added finishing touches.)

All of this reminds me of a story I recently read in the New York Times.

There are these three twenty-something Frenchmen who own a company in France. They are a collective of artists and technology students who are programming computers to ‘learn’ art. In other words, they are working on the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

For their most recent project they scanned 15,000 images of portraits painted between the 14^th and 20^th centuries. They challenged their computer to “study” these artworks and produce an original. The computer “learned” about art history portraiture then (ta-dah) rendered its own original portrait on the computer screen.

“Ooh la la!” the Frenchmen exclaimed.

Continue reading “Art and the Turkey”