Anybody can talk like one — Do pirates ever vacuum their ships? I’m not talking about the pirates of yore, with their plumed hats and parrots. Everybody knows they didn’t vacuum their ships. Vacuum cleaners had not been invented yet. They had to clean the decks of their ships by scrubbing them with sand and a…

Turn the lights out for me — In this, my eighth decade, I think about death about as much as I thought about sex when I was in my twenties. Among the differences between sex and death is that with sex you feel like you need some personal experience if you are going to have anything cogent…

Even if it kills you — Get plenty of exercise. We olds hear it so much we want to run away screaming, “Shut up already! No? In that case, may I please die now?” Want to keep yourself out of that mobility scooter? Get plenty of exercise. Want to keep your brain sharp? Get plenty of…

Here’s proof — Previously, I wrote about how GPT-4 outstrips us when it comes to intelligence and awareness. That isn’t much of an accomplishment. I will now present three examples from modern daily human existence to support that assertion. YOU SAVED $7.48 Look at the picture above. I’m sorry, I didn’t save anything. I spent $30.50…

Adriann and the gift of death — You read this text from your ex-wife: Time To have hard conversation. Please call me today Your throat tenses. You will it to relax the way you did when you swallowed an overly large wad of chewed-up bagel. Relax, let it slide — Your head jerked upward that time. You…

Simplicity, complexity — who cares? — In the before times things were more complicated in some ways, but simpler in others. Women couldn’t sing through their breasts. Breast singing simplified some things, complicated others. Men were no longer any sort of match for women vocally. Women could sing three-part harmony single-handedly — one ordinary voice plus…

It is we who are stupid, insensible, and mere automata — What if GPT-4 is intelligent because we are really doing what GPT-4 does — picking the word or doing the thing most likely to come next as we tell ourselves the story of our lives — the most salient difference being that so far, GPT-4 can’t do anything because it…

Forty million years of primate evolution can’t be wrong — Evolution makes no mistakes, nor does it hallucinate. What did you think it was, ChatGPT? We moderns may warn our offspring of hairy palms, using it up, a lifetime limit on ejaculations, blindness, and other absurdities, but our ancestors had way more sense. According to science, primates have been masturbating…

Advice from a pro — Those plastic traffic calming devices need to vanish from the face of the earth. If you drivers would learn to drive they would not be needed. I would not have hit one slightly off perpendicular at the bottom of a hill in a parking lot — yes there are parking…