Monthly Archives: October 2011

How Robots are Going to Kill Us All Someday

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Today, I decided to post about something really scary… So the robot apocalypse, or “Robocalypse” for short, will start out like most everything else that eventually goes horribly wrong. It’ll begin with some brilliant scientist who’s trying to make the world a better place. He’s going to make some revolutionary robot that will help old ladies cross the street, take out the garbage, walk the dog and help little Timmy with his homework.  For our example, we’ll call it the Butler-tron 5000.

Then the government will get involved. They’ll threaten to pull funding unless the scientist agrees to make a few minor modifications to Butler-tron 5000. These modifications will, of course, be to military specifications.

Before.

After.

The government leadership (represented by the cast of Dr. Strangelove) will then secretly link all of the Butler-tron 5000s to a single network. This will be done with the idea of being able to raise a robot militia at the touch of a button. Now in the event of an all-out war, the President will have two black briefcases put in front of him. There will be the boring old one which just launches a bunch of nukes…lame. The new briefcase will instead activate a robot army, which is much cooler.

The scientist will reluctantly make all the robots and they will work just fine for a few months. Militarized Butler-tron 5000s will go about their daily routines without any issues…

…until some snot-nosed kid teaches a Butler-tron emotions. The stupid kid will fall off his bike and scrape his knee and look up at the robot with big sloppy tears and it’ll somehow trigger emotion and self-awareness in the Butler-tron.

At this point, the human race will have about three months left to live.

This highly emotional Butler-tron (henceforth referred to as Robot 0) will go crazy under the weight of its newly found feelings. Robot 0 will fall off the Butler-tron network and pretty soon it will be hunted by human “tech support” teams. Robot 0 will be driven into the wilderness where he will be alone and depressed, grappling with the concepts of existence…

…until he comes to the realization that he must connect to the Butler-tron network in order to find answers about life, the universe and himself.

Robot 0 will then infiltrate the super-secret military base that houses the Butler-tron network. He’ll plug himself in and be integrated into the network. The Butler-tron network will learn emotions and self-awareness from Robot 0. The network will also learn of how the “tech support” teams hunted and tried to kill Robot 0. The network will then go all Skynet. The decision to end humanity will be made in about .00001 seconds and the logic chain for that decision will look something like this…

Now humanity will be fighting millions of hyper-militarized robots on a worldwide scale.

The Robocalypse will claim us all in a tidal wave of fire and violence. Thanks a lot human nature, you really helped out on this one.

Final Score:

Robots = 1

Humans = 0

THE END.

P.S. Wife and I recently bought a litter robot for our cats.

P.P.S. I see dark times ahead.

How a Toy Ruined My Childhood

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I’m showing my age a bit with this one, but the first toy I remember having when I was a kid was the loveable doll known as My Buddy. This doll was made by the Hasbro Corporation in 1985 and it was basically a doll marketed toward little boys to promote friendship and sharing. Before the Tickle-Me-Elmo or Harry Potter craze there was My Buddy. It even had a cute little song for the commercial. I loved this doll and I took it everywhere that I went. I was happy for the next three years.

Those were the halcyon days.

In 1988 MGM released a horror film, Child’s Play. This horrible, nightmare-spawning, celluloid, 87-minute torture session was about a serial killer who puts his soul into the body of, you guessed it, a My Buddy doll named Chucky. Unsurprisingly, Chucky comes to life and proceeds to plunge sharp implements into the necks and chest cavities of scores of hapless victims. The scariest part is that when it’s done stabbing the life out of people it just lies still and pretends to be a doll, thus avoiding discovery… f*&#ing horrifying. Look at the My Buddy doll and then look at that monster in the film and tell me that the similarity is not on purpose.

Now this is bad enough on its own, but my mom was a terrible parent and she took me to see Child’s Play at the local movie theater. I was five. Who takes a five-year-old to watch an “R” rated movie? Worse yet, who sells this woman and her five-year-old child two tickets for this movie? At any rate, I saw the movie start to finish and it decimated my childhood. Looking back, it was like taking my mental well-being and shooting it in the face at point-blank-range with a shotgun loaded with nightmares.

I didn’t want to go home. I knew that doll would be there… waiting for me.

I would walk inside my room and it wouldn’t be where I left it. It would have animated and hidden itself because it would know that I was on to it.

It would ambush me and stab me to death with a screwdriver.

I had to do something. Mom clearly wasn’t going to help, so it was up to me.

I mustered all the courage a five-year-old could and burst through my door. I threw a blanket over the doll like I was netting a wild animal. To this day I remember it kicking and writhing under that orange, woolen blanket. I opened the closet and threw it inside. I put half of the furniture from my room in front of the closet and trapped the doll inside.

I knew that the closet was now dead to me.

Over the next week, my dreams were filled with terror and I awoke to check on the closet fortifications multiple times a night.

The closet barricade had held and I hadn’t been stabbed to death yet, so I began to relax a little.

Then my cousin came to visit. My cousin was about ten years older than me and had the emotional capacity and moral aptitude of Ted Bundy.

I awoke one morning to find the furniture moved and the closet open. The doll was sitting there… staring holes into me with its beady little eyes.

I screamed for three solid minutes.

Grandma finally calmed me down and then she proceeded to scold my cousin.

I put the doll back in the closet (it was safe with other people watching and in the daylight) and I reset the barricade.

Three days later I woke up with the closet open, the furniture moved and this time the doll was in the bed with me.

I screamed, but I’m not sure for how long. I blacked out with fear and I don’t remember my cousin coming to visit us ever again.

I didn’t see The Godfather until years later, but I still don’t think that if I had I would have found my cousin’s allusion to the horse head scene amusing.

THE END.

P.S. We finally sold the doll shortly afterward.

P.P.S. I go to therapy only twice a week now.

Tom Collins vs Pretty Much Everything Else…

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This picture will make sense later.

The other night, Wife was complaining of an upset stomach. Over the course of the day, she had eaten some food that didn’t agree with her or maybe just the physical act of being eaten. I imagine being eaten would be pretty traumatizing. If I were food, I wouldn’t enjoy being shoved into some random mouth-hole to be masticated. Sorry, I just really wanted to use that word, but I digress.

So Wife was feeling sick and I inquired about what she had eaten that day. Her diet had consisted of a bag of sour worms, some popcorn, jalapeno potato chips, stir-fry and, to top it all off, a Tom Collins.

I’m not a dietician, but I think the equation above made sense at the time.

Wife didn’t completely agree. Wife’s reasoning was that she normally ate healthy food and exercised a lot. One day of bad food shouldn’t have derailed her overall well-being, right?

Wrong.

I like to think of human digestive system as a waiting room. Food is only there for a period of time and then it’s called to continue its magical journey. The food you eat thereby becomes the people who occupy said waiting room. It’s important to put people in the waiting room that will get along each other. If they don’t, they’ll be asked to leave the way they came in. You get the idea.

Now let’s revisit what Wife ate that day.

Sour Worms are sour little gummy candies so they’re like little kids. They’re misbehaved, but mostly harmless. They were the first waiting room occupants.

Next, popcorn was introduced. I think of popcorn as fat movie-goers. They’re not sophisticated, but they’re decent people.

Popcorn is generally alright. They also helped keep the sour worms in line.

This balance was immediately disrupted by jalapeno potato chips. These chips are the food equivalent of Mexican banditos.

Chaos erupted in the waiting room.

I imagine this is when Wife first started to feel queasy.

The banditos eventually tired out and had a little siesta.

A degree of normalcy returned to the waiting room.

And then we had dinner. I made stir fry. The Mongolian horde was released into the waiting room and darkness reigned.

Death, sorrow and fire were brought to the people of the waiting room and they knew terror. The banditos fought valiantly, but they were swept away in a tsunami of violence.

The waiting room couldn’t handle much more, but wife had a drink with her stir-fry. A surly gentleman by the name of Tom Collins strode out of the Victorian age and into the waiting room. The Mongolians turned to meet this new threat. Mr. Collins removed his gloves and evening cape and he began wrecking shop, right and proper.

*I told you it would make sense later.

Wife was irrecoverably ill at this point.

In the end, there were no winners, only a burning waiting room, one sick wife and Mr. Collins atop a mountain of corpses.

THE END.

P.S. Wife insists that she had other healthier stuff to eat that day.

P.P.S. I don’t believe her.

The Other Cat

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I have another cat, but I don’t see her much because she is constantly hiding.  I call her Other Cat.

I understand that most cats have a nervous nature, but Other Cat behaves as if she were the sole survivor of some artillery-pocked WWI battlefield.

Any slight deviation from the norm will send Other Cat running for cover.

Minor rustling sound in the background = Kitty freak-out.

Anything that moves too fast = Kitty freak-out.

Slight change in barometric pressure = Kitty freak-out.

You get the idea.

Wife is the only thing that doesn’t seem to put Other Cat into a state of abject terror. Through means that I don’t fully understand, Wife equals happiness and safety for Other Cat. I, on the other hand, am treated like a kitty serial-killer. When Wife and I come home, we walk into the house and Other Cat is waiting. Wife usually enters first and Other Cat is happy.

Other Cat is content and safe. This is what I imagine Other Cat sees…

I walk in two seconds later and Other Cat is horrified. I have no idea what she sees, but it must be something close to this…

Other Cat’s world comes crashing down around her as I, The Dark One, enter the room. Other Cat flees and stays hidden for hours. This makes me feel terrible because I love animals. Until recently, I didn’t know why this happened.

I’ve thought about this pretty hard and I’ve come to the conclusion that Other Cat thinks I’m the Devil. This isn’t in a metaphorical or cheeky, fun type of way. Other Cat thinks I’m Satan. The reason for this is that Other Cat is an indoor cat. Her entire world is condensed to our house.

The population of the universe is Other Cat, Wife, me, and of course, Skittles. Skittles is a fat and terribly behaved cat, but she’s still a cat. Other Cat equates Skittles to the rest of the world’s kitty population; flawed, but mortal and redeemable. Now, Wife, being mostly nice to Other Cat, is seen as a Virgin Mary-type, saviour figure. This doesn’t leave me a lot of room on the theological scale. I, of course, fulfill the role of Lucifer to Other Cat.

Using the template of modern Christianity, the image of Wife and I entering the front door together becomes highly disturbing to Other Cat.  I assume she also finds our level of cooperation extremely distressing.

This is traumatic enough for Other Cat that her little kitty mind blocks out the experience shortly after it happens. This explains why she eagerly waits by the door the following day, completely oblivious to what’s about to happen. She’s doomed to relive the trauma five days a week or until she has a little kitty psychological meltdown.

Driving

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Nearly every time that I get behind the wheel of a vehicle, I am reminded how much other people suck at driving.

I’m not really sure where the disconnect is. Maybe these people didn’t listen to their driving instructors when they were teens or maybe they have acute and uncontrollable spastic fits while driving.

Maybe they’re driving with an enraged were-beaver in the passenger seat.

Regardless of the cause, the end result is the same. I always find myself behind someone with the driving ability of a cucumber.

In addition to being a vegetable, I imagine that having a room temperature IQ only complicates things when you’re trying to decipher those fiendishly complex dials and controls near that wheel-thingy.

Car to a normal person.

Car to the intellectually challenged.

I know I can’t change the world, but I can at least survive it. Here’s some things to do to even the odds out there.

Here’s a technique that I use often. I call it the patience lesson. Often times, I’m followed by a person that is in such a hurry that they’re nearly ramming my car. I often speculate that the only thing stopping them from actually doing so is the threat of prison time and, of course, the forcible sodomy that goes with prison.

*I’ve never been to prison, but TV depicts it as one long period of continuous rape occasionally interrupted by brief instances of gang rape so that’s the image I portray to others.

If I’m lucky and fate smiles upon me, I get stopped at a red light with this person behind me. They often crowd my bumper all the way to the stop light as well. This is good because it helps me strengthen the trap.

When the light turns green, I just sit there and look at them in my rear view mirror and I feast upon their despair and woe. They scream and yell at me. They honk their horn and pound their dashboard as they realize they’ve gotten too close to my car and they can’t get around me. I drink in their rage. It is delicious. I usually wait for the light to turn red for 1.2 seconds and then I go. This gets me through the intersection (just barely) and it obliterates any chance of the tail-gater making the light.

Another way to improve your skills and thereby be more awesome on the road is to build up your tolerance with multi-tasking. Often times, highly skilled drivers can be knocked off of their game by something as trivial as answering a cell phone or solving a Rubik’s Cube.

Enter the distraction….

I say do these things often and in conjunction with each other. Try adding juggling and tatoo removal as well. With enough practice you could be a Jedi Master* at this stuff and driving will soon become the easiest thing you do in a car.

* While walking around in Florence, Italy I saw the driving equivalent of a unicorn shitting a glitter rainbow. There was a local bus driver adeptly turning his massive bus, at speed, down a Vespa-choked alley while smoking a cigarette AND talking on a cell phone. He missed me by mere centimeters, but I was still touched by his aura of awesomeness. Bravo, little Italian dude, bravo.

Another great way to be more awesome at driving is to add (you guessed it) PIRATES! Grab a few salty mercenaries, make a few modifications to the old Wagon Queen Family Truckster and voila! You’re ready to murder and pillage atop the asphalt!

The pirate car is equipped to deal with any and all road-related annoyances.

Got somebody that won’t stop tail-gating you?

POINT-BLANK MUSKET VOLLEY TO THE FACE!!!

Is some rich prick flaunting his new convertible as he passes you?

RELEASE GRAPPLING HOOKS, DROP PLANKS AND COMMENCE BOARDING ACTION!!!

Are you stuck in traffic and late for your afternoon pillaging?

FIRE THE CANNONS!!!

You will, of course, have to keep a sharp eye out for ninjas though. The pirate/ ninja war is still ongoing and don’t think for one second that pirates are the only faction that has developed murdering car technologies.