The Difference Between Coke and Pepsi Explained at Last

I never for the life of me could tell the difference between a Coke and a Pepsi — unless one tried mixing that Pepsi with rum, and, holy chemical spill, Batman! What is this foul poison (and will it work on broadleaf weeds)? 

Pepsi is the Great Deceiver. The godly mojo of the rum forces it to reveal its true evil nature.

From the Wholesome Memes of Traditional Morality Facebook page.

Kafka Would Know Better Than To Get Into That Thing

More fun with flying cars. It’s an obvious tale, I know, but some people may need reminding of how these things can go.

Promotional art from Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc.and Copyright © to them as well. Call it Fair Use or cross-promotion, it’s all good. Forget that long-dead neurotic Czech, you know you want to ride.

In the news recently was one of those pieces you wonder isn’t a straight-up press release. It’s the same feeling I got reading information technology trade magazines in 2009, when they were crowing about SAAS (software as a subscription service) and everything being done from “the cloud” (someone else’s server). To the detriment of consumers used to paying one fat fee up front for software they can still use when the Internet goes down, some of this actually came to pass.

Ten years later I’m reading aviation trade magazines and there’s quite a bit of buzz for eVTOLs, short for “electronic vertical take-off and landing.” In plain, non-jargony English, electric helicopters. These aren’t your standard single big rotor on top with a smaller stabilizer rotor at the rear, though. In place of the rotors are six ducted fans that tilt like a Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey for flight. 

As high-end CEOs and the like have had rooftop helicopter service taking them to the airport for some time now, I’m guessing this is about bringing this service to The People™, or at least the middle managers. It’s notable that the transport-for-hire company Uber is putting a lot of money into eVTOLs. I can see this becoming the new limousine service in which people of lower income ranges can splurge to show off for special occasions, prom season, etc. Here we are on the rooftop of the Foo-Foo Arms getting ready to board our ride to the airport for our honeymoon. #HighStylin #HatersGonHate #YouWishYouWasUs 

View from the rear seats of the cabin of the Bell Nexus. These lovelies will seat four plus a pilot.

Now imagine a warm spring evening. You call for an Uber. You arrive at the rooftop pad in time for the flying taxi to alight. The turbo fans hum softly on standby as you approach the hatch and flash your credit card, a special screen on your smartphone, or whatever is required to identify yourself. The hatch pops open and slides back. You duck inside.

Strapping in, you hear the faintest whine rising inside the cabin as the fans spin up and the craft lifts gracefully from the top of the skyscraper to the sky. (The noise reduction factor is a major selling point for eVTOLs.) There is no pilot, but those are just for the reassurance of tourists and the prom kids, anyway. For the sake of avoiding collisions with the many such craft in use about the metro area, air traffic control is regulated by sophisticated, self-teaching, super-adaptable software. The voice command “airport” is all you need to get going. I imagine one saying it directly into an app on one’s phone, all the better to facilitate accounting of who’s riding and how the ride is paid for, whether on the company dime or monthly billing. Voice recognition software would provide another level of security. 

Full-tilt boogie. No deafening whup-whup-whup, either. Just hummin’ along.

The sun winks behind the horizon. Yellow tatters of clouds fade to orange across the deepening blue. You look down at the angry red taillights of the traffic glowing like so many demonic eyes from the abyss of the concrete canyons below. Heh. Better to look towards the sunset those poor drones are missing, despite moving only inches per minute.

You chuckle to yourself. “Drones.” That’s what some people still call these remote-control taxis. Irony or coincidence? Coincidence, of course, because it’s clearly a case of one word meaning several different things...it’s then that you realize something’s wrong.

If you lived here...it’d be awful nice.

You’re moving at a wrong angle to the sunset. This isn’t the way to the airport. You pull out your phone. No signal. Which makes no sense, because you have to use your phone to communicate with the taxi.

“Please remain seated with your seat belt fastened,” says the pleasant female voice from the surround-sound speakers. “Emergency landing protocol in progress.”

You fight back panic, and listen for what could possibly be wrong. All six of the ducted fans are working fine. You don’t smell anything burning. You look towards the setting sun, now well off to your right. 

In the long minute you’ve been off-course you note you’ve passed several rooftop landing pads on this side of the city. “Why can’t we land there?” you wonder. The voice recording repeats, and you realize you’ve been squirming against your belt and shoulder harness.

At last you begin to slow. There’s that sound as the ducted fan housings swivel upwards to face the sky, the fans themselves reversing for landing protocol. They sound like they’re working fine. So long as you’re over a pad, all’s well that ends well. You look through the window and down.

A crescent shape blacker than the encroaching night stands about the pad. You recognize the strange bristles as your eyes focus in the dark. They’re none other than the downward-pointed rifle barrels held by law enforcement officers in full tactical gear.

“Please remain seated with your seat belt fastened,” the pleasant female voice repeats from the surround-sound speakers. “Emergency landing protocol in progress.”

Your seat belt and shoulder strap are locked. 

Your phone still reads no signal.

You’re descending to the pad.

Your eyes become level with the darker-than-darkness of their body armor. You can’t see them, but you know those rifle barrels are up and pointed straight at you.

What can this possibly be about? Why did they jam your phone? Who could they have possibly mistaken you for?

Your hands are already on your head as the hatch doors on either side pop open and slide back, and the first officers approach. You can only hope they don’t beat you too badly before you have a chance to clear this up.

Please remain seated with your seat belt fastened....

Terms of Ensmearment

All insults are better in French, the language with the built-in lisp!

This must have been the seventh or eighth time I’ve had to look up soi-disant while reading on the Internet. No wonder I keep forgetting to use it like a proper midwit who knows his popular French phrases. It means “self-styled, so-called,” and of all the phrases in which a writer should use (so sayeth I, the Great Infallible God of All Writers, but you know what I mean) the plain English meaning instead, this is one. You’re trying to bust on someone for being fake while looking like you’re trying hard to fake looking intellectual. A soi-disant intellectual. 

Come to think of it, all intellectuals are self-styled and so-called. 

We’ll stop here.

Gotta love the example they used. “Hey, I resemble that remark!”

Spring Fever, 2019 Edition

“And just like that, winter was over.”

February was a day short of done and we didn’t need to run the wood pellet stove that night. For a psychotic moment I felt a little sad that Winter 2018-19 was drawing to a close—it had been a very good Christmas and a not entirely unproductive New Year—but I’m happy not to have to run the kerosene heater in my office in the morning.

The three days in a row of 50°+ F (10° C) have gone a long way towards melting off the snow that’s lingered since the storm we got on New Year’s Eve. We’ll have a low temperature of several degrees above freezing Thursday morning, a number we’re lucky to get for the high temperature in either February or January. 

So, I’m calling it. Winter 2018-19 is finished. Sure, maybe one more single-digit degree cold snap awaits, and I certainly hope we get more snow. But the week-long death-freezes which would make the furnace run nearly non-stop if it weren’t for the wood pellet stove are behind us. We’re good until November.

♫”There’s a feeling I get/When I look to the West/And my spirit is crying for....♫ dinner.”
My traveling for the sake of traveling days are long done, thank God. 

Vintage Complaints: “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”

It’s not the best of times. It’s not the worst of times, either, thank God.

Imagine growing up during the 1960s and you’re watching a TV show set in the 1980s with a giant, freaky nuclear submarine (loved those forward bow fins and searchlight-turned-laser cannon) carrying a fully submersible jet aircraft, and another show in which an entire family got lost in space trying to colonize Alpha Centauri in 1997. Even in Star Trek’s 23rd century (original flavor, accept no substitutes), we had World War III out of the way in the 1990s, and would be due for our first warp space flight a few decades from now in the 21st century. 

What gets me is these Irwin Allen shows would easily go on for three years or more despite their jaw-droppingly awful writing (all those wonderful concepts and props wasted!) while the original Star Trek struggled to stay on every year it aired. Even the famously excruciating Lost in Space would have gotten a fourth season had Allen not inadvertently insulted a west coast network honcho.

According to science fiction in print and media clear into the 1970s, the 1990s were going to be huge. Instead of Khan Noonien Singh, blaster pistols, and the start of the Martian Chronicles, we got grunge, Bill Clinton, Windows 95/98, and online shopping. I’m over it, myself—the ability to shop and pay bills online was was a major change for good—but you can see how some people might be feeling a little put-out.

So what do we have to look forward to? Duct-fan propelled air taxis that can lift vertically like a helicopter and zip across town like a jet? A reality TV show featuring Mars’ first human colonists?

That’s about the best I can think of. I’d like to think of better.

I remember laughing aloud at the title of this song as it seemed so appropriate in the dark years immediately after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. “People Used to Dream About the Future.” Now even our dreams are remakes or “re-imaginings.”

It’s got to turn around sometime. I just hope I live so long.

Burps in the Road

Inspirational, super-motivational burps! #7 will make you sweat pure vinegar! 

You wouldn’t know it to follow this blog, but I’m actually still quite invested in my Christmas/New Year’s resolutions, with only a week to go in February. 

With everything else in my life going on, e.g., dead furnaces in subzero January cold, pipes frozen the entire length of the house, busted Jeep idler pulleys with mystery drive belt size (what was supposed to fit, didn’t), cracked windshields, et al., I got hung up on telling the tale of how I fell off the wagon in terms of maintaining a daily posting schedule (this wasn’t a resolution, but that I managed 18 days straight of quality posts was quite the Christmas miracle) as well as beer ragers that same night. It was a funny story, but requiring too much exposition to translate said humor to an audience. 

The funniest thing I can relate is learning that I use social media to lurk more than interact. I made the mistake of “waving back” at someone who waved at me on Facebook, and found myself in mortal terror of interacting with someone while half-drunk. I am hardly sociable under optimal conditions. The very idea of interacting while impaired with anyone outside my extremely tight orbit of family and friends absolutely mortifies me.

Of all the things in my life that requires squaring away—and some degree of turning around—that would be the one. I’ve got to develop a working policy towards dealing with people. I was always a somewhat odd, socially autistic duck to start, but all this time alone is really making me dysfunctional.

Whatever issues I have, I’ve always prided myself on being functional.

The bearings within went bad, then exploded out the hard rubber seal. The pulley seized, and the serpentine belt unscrewed the pulley. For all the pieces of metal and rubber flying around under the hood the damage could have been much, much worse.

Things are going well on the creative front, but they need to go faster. The furnace is working. My Jeep is operational. We’re almost done with February. I need this book out by summer.

It’s just a matter of re-establishing control, which can be done with one simple trick (people hate me with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns for this!):

Don’t give up. 

Green grass and warm, sunny skies will return. Better have something to show for it when they do.

The Never-Ending Twilight of the Living Dead Simpsons

The many men, so beautiful! 
And they all dead did lie: 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on; and so did I.

—S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV, Stanza 3

I knew I’d written about this ambulatory rotting corpse of a show sometime ago, so I looked it up and discovered I’d made a post in October 2013. Here we are again, already another half-decade later, with an meme more apt than ever:

Homer’s expression is so apropos. From the Unprofessional Madman Facebook page.

Thirty-one, 32 seasons. Thirty-one, 32 years. Three decades and change. 

Five U.S. presidential administrations, starting early in the term of recently deceased George H.W. Bush.

Baby Maggie would be in her early 30s now. Bart and Lisa would be securely middle-aged. Homer would be dead, either of occupational cancer or obesity-driven heart failure.

Why, oh why? How can this possibly go on? Like NBC’s The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, it’s as if someone forgot to pull the plug on these vegetables long after the EEG flatlined into brain death.

It gets worse. Consider that one generation ago (generations generally measured in 30 year increments), this show began as an act of brazen defiance and mockery of the phony Cosby Show pieties of the 1980s. One generation later, the character who ran the Quik-E Mart is being phased out in craven deference to the even phonier pieties of the current age — despite the fact that the character, funny accent aside, has always been a man of laudable integrity. With their knees bent and heads bowed to the screeching purple-haired Creeps of the New Church, soul and spine were exhausted from this show decades ago already. 

The irony is just a little too ironic here. 

Still The Simpsons persists, a shambling, living-dead parody of the living satiric glory it once was. In the end, all anyone will remember this once ground-breaking show for is as that sometimes-funny cartoon that went on forever and ever and no one knows why.