The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Your Master’s voice may be the next voice you hear. Google just announced it has developed a robot that can mimic to perfection the quirks, halts, slang and cadence of us humans. To prove it they had their automaton call up a restaurant to make a reservation. The machine responded to the restaurant’s questions, asked a few of its own and if you didn’t know who was on the line, you’d never guess the caller wasn’t part of our species. Another machine called for a hair appointment, same drill, different gender for the voice, same result. You just listened to the future.

Siri, Alexi, roll over, let Beethoven give you the news. Now when you get a phone call, that pleasant voice without the Pakistani drawl will sound as familiar as your Uncle John’s. I know, this is comforting news. No more garbled conversations with outsourced help lines in India, just clear enunciated solicitations, surveys, scams and advertisements from companies utilizing robotic ventriloquy. Google thought enough of the technology to parade it out for the listening public even in the midst of an outcry concerning fake news, Russian bots, Artificial Intelligence warnings and robotic outsourcing of human jobs. Wring your hands if you want, the overlords of android production could care less.

This week another corporation, Boston Dynamics, trotted out a video showing their robot running and jumping through what looks like Terminator or a Star Wars storm trooper traversing a field next to a suburb, nothing to get alarmed by if you were picking up the Sunday paper on your front porch and this mechanoid was jogging by. Just a cute robot sprinting across your lawn. Wait a few weeks and it will holler out a greeting with a southern accent, how y’all this mawning?

Once future shock has abated enough for you to accustom yourself to sharing the planet with artificial inhabitants, maybe then I’ll let you in on who is really writing these blogs. Have a nice day, y’all.

Kilauea, the volcano menacing Hawaii, has been a welcome diversion from the daily mass murders, Trump tirades and political polemics we’ve all been getting accustomed to as part of our consciousness in the Land of the Free. It takes a huge natural disaster to push those out of the headlines, I guess, but thank you, Pele. Nice to have a breather.

Apparently, not so much on the Big Island where now the danger is from toxic gases belched up by the angry god. The locals have been leaving booze along the highway toward the volcano, mostly gin which is reputed to be a preference, with or without tonic or vermouth, but this did little to abate the magma flow and now the scientists are talking about explosive eruptions and poison gases. Maybe a better quality gin, guys….

Many years ago I had one of those early coil top refrigerators and miracle of miracles, it still worked but I made the mistake of moving it out to my shop back in the woods and managed to inadvertently puncture one of the copper coils. The thing began hissing as coolant escaped and I began to panic as I considered something fast that would seal it back up. Immediately, however, I noticed the leaves downwind curling and dying in what apparently was a toxic drifting cloud of death and then my nose began to smart and I was forced to retreat to a safe distance upwind from the scene.

Turns out the coolant was sulfur dioxide or something similar, which, when combined with H20 becomes sulfuric acid. The plants provided all the water necessary, a vegetable suicide. Me, I stayed away until the hissing stopped the next day. For a hundred feet or so all the plants in the dead zone were curled up and killed. It looked like Syria after the mustard gas. And, of course, I was the perpetrator.

Lately the media has been playing up the Ring of Fire, all our volcanoes that will be next, take cover, take precautions, take out insurance, stock up on gin. Course, chances are good it won’t be in the next century or two, but hey, beats thinking about the Mueller investigation, don’tcha think? Meanwhile, we’re all getting a cheap chemistry lesson.

Gun Gospel

It’s been a few weeks since the Parkland killings down in Florida and Big Walter seems to think he’s Designated Spokesman for the NRA, judging by his non-stop harangues from the Diner to the Pilot Lounge. Last time I was fortunate enough for a reprise, he was on a soapbox in the big box grocery’s cafeteria off island presumably to spread his gun gospel to the gunless and misinformed citizens of Stanwood and Gomorrah.

“They could ban assault rifles all day long and not one life would be saved!” he fumed with a styrofoam cup of coffee waved to make a point. “Same with background checks. Any nutcase can buy a gun if he wants one. A psychiatric test, ha! He’ll just go buy one illegally on the street. Not gonna stop him! The only thing that’ll stop him is more guns … in the hands of the good guys!” Walter slammed his cup on the formica table and splattered coffee on the newspaper his victims had set down to listen all the better. Big mistake, but then, Walt was new to them.

Out here in the hinterlands the NRA P.R. machine is running full tilt. I guess if banning AR-15’s won’t prevent some other massacre, well, why bother at all? If some guy flunks the psycho test and buys a gun from a buddy, then what’s the use trying to stop him? The NRA sure doesn’t see the point when the correct answer is to arm everyone from daycare teachers to Walmart greeters. Next would-be massacre might look like the O.K. Corral, collateral damage sure, but the next psycho-killer would think twice, wouldn’t he? And if everyone’s blasting away, the cops are going to have a hard time sorting out the good guys from the bad guys, but that’s the price you pay for the god given right to bear arms, Walter would argue.

Meanwhile he’s explaining how he himself is ‘packing’ now. The lady at the table next door who’s evidently been listening suddenly picks up her tray of half eaten food and moves to the far end of the cafeteria, maybe figuring stray bullets would be considerably less likely. Me, I headed for the exit. Before I wanted to get a conceal carry myself. For Walter.

The Fender Bender Repair Shop hides down past Tyee Store’s huge footprint, mostly just a pole building with four stalls, one with a hydraulic lift over a three foot pit. Ben Paulsen started it then years ago as an auto repair business to replace the income he lost when the tool and die shop he’d worked at twenty years closed down during the Great Recession. Ben used his 401-K savings to buy the dilapidated metal shed and lost a fortune on the penalties for cashing in early.

“How’s Biz?” I asked when I drove up with my truck that needed a new clutch. Ben groaned and said sadly, “You’re it, that’s how business is lately.” Most days Ben and a few layabout cronies can be found in an upstairs office with large windows overlooking the empty bays, television on with Fox News yammering in the background and a refrigerator full of barely cold beer the boys haul in but never take out. If Benny’s making money, it pretty much goes into the fridge and cable. Us locals know to make our appointments in the morning before the noon Happy Hour if we want quality repairs. Late afternoon, we might as well do them ourselves, just as bad but far cheaper.

“Whatcha got for me, Skeeter?” Ben finally asked. I told him my clutch was starting to slip. “All right, lemme order a new one, get it tomorrow. That okay?” I said it was and asked if I needed an appointment. Ben cast an arm out over the barren bays. “I think you’ll be first in line.” He dug his grease fissured hands into his ancient overalls. “Trump don’t bring those jobs back soon, this place is toast,” he lamented forlornly. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him.

“I’ll see you morning after next,” I said and got back in my old pickup, started it and backed up. Ben stood watching, then turned and headed back up the stairs. Fox News was flickering through the big windows. The Fender Bender Repair sign, bordered by small theater lights, flickered too. In Ben’s mind, the whole damn country was doing the same.

You maybe remember Oliver North, the poster boy for the Iran/Contra affair, that black spot on American History where Reagan and his team played a little fast and loose with the law to secretly fund a war in Nicaragua with money from Iranian arms sales. Some might say this should have gotten Ronnie impeached, but in the malaise of Nixon’s exit, another presidential ousting was more than Congress could stomach. Ollie, some say, took the fall instead. Me, I think the belligerent little soldier of fortune deserved all the jail time we could give him.

So it was little surprise Fox News gave our traitor a hero’s welcome. They’d give Benedict Arnold an anchor spot if they saw George Washington as the status quo. And now the National Rifle Association just announced Ollie will be their new President, replacing, well … nobody we’d remember since Charleston Heston memorably played the role. Hard to beat Moses. But Oliver North isn’t a bad choice. You know, if you want a hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners, cold hearted sonofabitch for your spokesman. And apparently the NRA does.

I mean, you got these snot nosed high school kids tugging at your bump stocks, smarmy smart asses who wouldn’t know an AR-15 from an AK-47, who think a Glock is a pharmaceutical stock their parents have in their portfolio … punk kids who want to embarrass their legislators for taking money from the NRA, protectors of the second amendment, and whose aim is to ban all shooting irons in the Yew Ess of Aye. You need a killer for president. You need a paid assassin. You need, yep, you need Ollie. Apparently Stephen Seagal and Dick Cheney are busy. Personally, Dick would have been the better choice. He was willing to shoot his own duck hunting partner. You have to RESPECT a man who blasts his friends, a man would willingly lay waste to those high school kids, no twinge of conscience for him. Have gun, will travel.

The NRA apparently feels under siege. Thousands of high school girls and boys, placards held defiantly high, picketing and getting out the future vote. That’s more firepower than La Pierre and his paranoid thugs were prepared to confront. They needed a stronger offense, if you can imagine that. They needed an Oliver North. Probably to sell arms to the Iranian mullahs for cash to power up a P.R. blitz. All I can add is that Fox News’ loss is probably nobody’s gain. Go get em, Ollie!

Rudy Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor and mayor of New Yawk on 9-11, is currently (as of the last few hours) Donald Trump’s newest attorney. The man has a mouth like Montezuma’s Revenge and if he had any clue how to use it, he might be dangerous. The President may have found the perfect counselor, a mouthpiece to match his own, full of sound and fury, signifying … well, who knows. He’s been walking back his first statements, then his second and now his last and in the end, it’s exactly like his boss, bad craziness, lies and bombast, ignorance and narcissism full throated. Try, if you can, to avert your eyes, much less your ears.

Trump just hired the guy who was Clinton’s attorney when he was impeached. Tell you something? I can’t remember his name right off, but then, why bother keeping track, they come and go faster than Trump’s girlfriends. Rudy was brought in to clean up the whole witch hunt bizness and so far has pretty much hung a tire around Donald’s neck, mentioning how he knew Cohen was paying off Stormy, how he met with Cohen to make payments when Cohen complained he was getting stiffed, how the payments were necessary given the election was a week away. If Trump was worried Cohen would sing like a canary, he doesn’t have to wonder about his boy Rudy, the man is a bad opera.

Giuliani’s newest fallback is that he doesn’t have the facts yet. Just blabbing off the top of his head, I guess. Like I said, a perfect match for his master. Attorneys usually are conservative fellows, reluctant to say more than what is necessary, usually nothing much at all unless they’re under oath themselves. Whatever lawyer/client privileges might have been invoked down the road, Rudy has pretty much burned that argument by spilling his guts day in and day out.

If I wanted to drain the swamp there in D.C., I might start with a lot less lawyers and lobbyists. Trump, not so much. This guy can take credit, almost single-handedly, for bringing the unemployment numbers down, creating jobs at an incredible pace and hiring folks most people would consider unemployable. Give him credit where credit is due. I just wish I’d gotten a law degree.

These are hard times for the 1% … even though they have control of most of the state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court and the office of the President. Oh sure, they pass tax reform bills that mostly go to themselves, but, and here’s the Rub, some of it went to the undeserving poor and middle class. They classified corporations as people so all that money that used to be given to the lobbying efforts can now go to elections. With a little luck and a lot of loot, they should soon be able to save billions on lobbyists that are no longer needed. You might think these are the Golden Years for the rich.

But you’d be wrong. The rich are never really happy apparently. Like John Paul Getty once answered when asked how much money he could possibly need: More. Succinct and honest. He wants more. He and many of the richest folks in America want it all. How much is enough? More. And trust me, that includes yours.

So when Father Patrick Conroy, the congressional chaplain, inserted a line in his prayer for the legislators to consider the poor in their deliberations, to be fair and inclusive, well … he definitely crossed a Line. Imagine the nerve of this guy!! Speaker Paul Ryan said, just before firing his chaplain, he had brought politics into his prayers. Sorta like that guy Jesus who told folks to sell their riches and give it to the needy. Politics! I guess if you think you ought to have the whole enchilada, giving crumbs to the poor is extremely political.

The thing is, though, they can take umbrage over someone like Padre Conroy inserting charity and hope into his mini-sermon, but they shouldn’t show it publicly. Looks bad. Greed and insensitivity, even in this Trumpian Era, don’t actually play well. They need to feign concern for the poor and downtrodden while they’re picking their pockets. Otherwise they look like, well, avaricious legal thieves. They should offer them a paltry cut in their taxes that they can always recoup with user fees, gas taxes, etc. while taking the lion’s share and claiming they cut taxes for everyone. Let the preacher have his sappy exhortation for charity. They’ll be slicing Medicaid back a few notches and cutting back on welfare programs before he can say Amen.

Sure, they walked it back on the chaplain’s dismissal. But not before they’d drawn back the curtain on their smoke-filled room where the Wizard was discovered to be all those back-slapping, cigar smoking, brandy sniffing yahoos and their lobbyist cronies. Just like you always suspected….

Say a prayer for them. They need saving.

Since it’s a rainy day and I haven’t quite motivated from the morning’s lethargy, let’s rehash the day’s headlines, maybe find reasons to fire up while the coffee is percolating through my sluggish pathways. That arsonist kid blew himself up down in Austin. Good news there. Donald Trump brags he could beat old Joe Biden to a pulp in a fistfight. Nice to know our president has the Putin-esque mentality of a 10 year old punk. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he takes full responsibility for the Borg’s lack of data security. Course, he crossed his fingers. That fully automatic car that killed a woman on the side of the road had a human aboard who didn’t see her either. It happens. Jarod Kushner lied about rent controlled housing numbers to New York City in order to increase profits. No kidding? Putin won by a landslide in jolly olde Russia. Really?….

The Bomb Kid managed to blow up 5 bombs before the Authorities tracked him down. You might have been wondering, like me, how many people he would kill before the ATF, the FBI, the local police, the Texas Rangers and who knows how many other crimefighters pooled their vast resources to bring this nutcase to ground. And maybe, like me, you were stunned how quick they nailed him. Cameras at FedEx, cellphone pings, credit card information, security video at Home Depot, license plate on his vehicle … the boy didn’t get very far. We live in an extremely interconnected world of sticky digital webs. You want to go off the grid, good luck. Ted Kaczysnki slunk off to a cabin. The Barefoot Bandit never used a cellphone or a credit card. No cars. No vehicle licenses. No known addresses.

The rest of us, good luck if you want to be Anonymous. If you want to be Left Alone. If you want to be Individual. Mark Zuckerberg will tell you these are Thought Crimes. What have you got to hide??? Individualism is Anti-Social. The Collective is Happiness. ‘Friends’ are your Salvation. Your Cellphone is God. Information will set you Free!

I try to be optimistic in these strange times we live in, but hellfire, the news coming in at me feels more like shrapnel or those nails the Bomb Kid packed into his explosives. I don’t exactly feel like an innocent bystander, though, since I keep peeking at the headlines. Maybe the trick is to wean off, slowly at first, then, once the D.T. ‘s subside, turn off the computer. Just watch out for the self-driving car that could smack you by the mailbox!!!

Grab a broom, y’all. We’re going witch hunting. I know, doesn’t seem sporting, doesn’t seem fair, the prey are such easy targets. They’ve laid down a trail a blind turkey hunter could follow in the rain. Tax records, graft, payoffs, porn star affairs, lies and misdemeanors, felonies and blatant nepotism, election tampering, bullying, name-calling just follow the latest tweet, you pretty much got the witch treed. That howling you hear isn’t the coon hounds baying, it’s the witch his screaming self. ‘Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness.’

These are dark times in Trump Tower, its gold logo looking smoke damaged and tilted. The T is falling off, leaving rump Tower as ironic icon. The hunter has become the prey, his attorneys are lawyering up like madmen, and the greasy little Giuliani has finally weaseled himself into the inner sanctum where men are chewed up and spit out faster than an Oscar Mayer wiener. Even the True Sycophants become sausage in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. Loyalty is a bad joke, it’s All for One and One for One. The rest, they’ll have a snarky nickname shortly.

The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The evangelicals may like this guy just for the reason that he may be the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. There are plenty of folks who pray for Apocalypse, plenty who secretly want the pandemic or the Big One, lots of folks who see the End Times and rejoice. The Anti-Christ, they may be hoping in their dark hollow hearts, the One who brings Chaos to the world. Drain the Swamp! Pull down the Walls! A better day is Coming.

But there will be no Second Coming this go around. We will be having an exorcism, a witch trial, a great national cleansing, count on that. You want End Times, you’ll have to wait a little longer in your miserable sanctimony. This isn’t the One prophesied in Revelations, kids, this is the wicked witch of the west. The bucket of water is being readied, the monkey army of Republicans will cheer when it’s thrown and the witch is melted, we’ll all go back to the old partisan politics. History will sort this out later, plenty of new jobs there. But we will be rid of the Reign of Terror that will be Trump’s final legacy. Ding dong, the witch will be dead.

Yes, you heard right, folks are clamoring in the heartland for their hero to be nominated for the Peace Prize. The dotard who threatened to obliviate the Little Rocket Man’s country. The pacifist who stands up to Russian aggression in the Crimea and Ukraine, not. The bully who uses his office to berate those individuals he dislikes. The boy who wants to build a 2000 mile wall between us and Mexico. But let’s stop, you know who I mean.

The man is many things, but a promoter of world peace, let’s dial down the meds, okay? Next thing you know, we’ll be giving him the Literature Prize for his tweets. And the Physics Prize for that impossible comb-over. I know you like the guy, all that tough talk and swagger, but c’mon, let’s stay in earth orbit.

But, you say, he has brought North Korea to heel. They’ve got a rapprochement with the South, they’ve quit testing their nukes, they wilted in the face of the Man who embodies the art of the deal. So what if their testing facilities had collapsed completely? So what if the South brokered the deal? The man is taking full credit. Not really sure yet for what, other than a meeting to discuss some kind of deal, but why not give him that Nobel right now anyway?? We’re working on blind faith obviously. The coal jobs are coming back (Economics award!), the tax cuts are fueling the American Revival (can we give him two Economics Nobels???), his golf courses are doing bang-up biz (Sports Nobels, anyone? or at least some kind of Olympic medal), he’s drained the Swamp (Biology?) and he’s turned facts and science on their heads (Philosophy).

Obviously some folks must think this is the Messiah. I know, he doesn’t seem very religious, but … this must be a New Religion. Maybe, let’s fly with this, maybe we should anoint him Pope or …. Guru … or … World Archbishop or, well, honestly, who am I, a mere mortal, to imagine the exaltedness? I have no doubt he will let us know when the time is right. Probably soon. Expect New Commandments, tweets five times a day, prayer rugs to face Mir-a-Lago, a Pyramid on top of the Lincoln Memorial. Ramses will pale in comparison. Meet the new Caeser, Pharaoh of the Universe. Pay homage. Tremble in his shadow. He is the Mighty and Powerful Oz.