The Convenience Store Blues

 

Sitting at my keyboard, typing
Tired of hearing others griping
Wanting to knock them off a shelf
Deciding I'll just gripe myself:

The sign says "Exit," clear as day
"You Must Enter Other Way"
And yet, they enter like it's a race
Makes me want to smash their face

"Those sandwiches should be on sale.
You charged full price. I'm gonna wail!"
The sale's not for the ones you chose.
The sign says these, but you bought those.

"I didn't use this wash code, bold
In 30 days like I was told
Hyuck-hyuck; silly old me
Can I have one more for free?"

Do you have our rewards card?
"No way! I protect my privacy hard!
I don't want your bosses to sell me
But if there's a coupon, would you please tell me?"

"How are you doing?" they ask me all day
Not ever pausing to hear what I say
Not that I care if they care how I am
Let's just not play out this little scam

And phones! Good night! Put your phone down!
You're talking to everyone standing around
How will I know if you want a receipt
If you don't hear me ask and I have to repeat?

And then, there are those who just stand and stare
Forgetting that payment's expected and fair
Who flinch to awareness and  see where they are
Then say, "I have to go out to my car."

But still, I show up for each of my shifts
Through rain that pours and snow that drifts
Sun that blazes and clouds that billow
Then calmly go home and pummel my pillow.

All in All, Just Another Day Trying Not to Nap: The 375th Greatest Song of All Time

 

Word has it that Pink Floyd member, Roger Waters, didn't write "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" just as part of their concept album The Wall. It was meant as an actual critique of his elementary school teachers.

From Songfacts.com:

He hated his grammar school teachers and felt they were more interested in keeping the kids quiet than in teaching them. The wall refers to the emotional barrier Waters built around himself because he wasn't in touch with reality. The bricks in the wall are the events in his life that propelled him to build this proverbial wall around himself - his school teacher was just another brick in the wall.

What a different tale would have been told had it been written about my elementary education in a rural school, just wanting to get through the day . . .

We don't need no tours of bakeries

Time ill-spent away from home

No dark rooms to yawn through filmstrips

Teacher, throw them kids a bone

Hey, teacher, throw them kids a bone

All in all it's just like sitting out in the hall

Try to crawl to just another grade in the fall

When you're tall, you'll get to go and shop at the mall

You'd never know I had a crush on my 2nd-grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter.

Stuph That Has No Reason Being in My Head, Vol. IX

 

Clarence Odbody, the angel who saves George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, appears on screen for only 15 minutes.

It irritates me when people on medical shows say things like “You have to save my child! Please save my child!” As if the medical staff wasn’t going to do anything until the parent told them to.

The voice of Betty Rubble, Bea Benaderet, was also Kate Bradley, the owner of The Shady Rest, on Petticoat Junction.

Two spoons of Swiss Miss plus one spoon of Tang makes for a tasty, orangey mug of hot chocolate.

Ice is not slippery. The tiny bit of water (i.e., melted ice) between your boot and the ice is what's slippery.

The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling was only 5'4" tall...if tall is the right word to use in this instance.

I'd be terminal, too, if I had an arrow through my head.

The founder of Hormel Foods, maker of Spam® and other fine delicacies, was George A. Hormel, who pronounced his name HORmel, not HorMEL.

It's not the lavender flower that smells so good; it's the leaf.

Mary Tyler Moore was only 24 when she started playing Laura Petrie, wife of the 35‑year‑old Dick Van Dyke, on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

♫♪ Hey Pink Panther
We love Pink Panther Flakes
They’re pink and sweet and they’re new
We love your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different vitamins
Just as much as we love you
From Post!

So THIS Is What A.I. Thinks of Me

 

They say curiosity killed the cat, so I really should have known better than to conduct this little experiment, but hey...I have never been accused of being significantly wiser than a cat.

For no reason in particular, I got to wondering what the major artificial intelligence entities "knew" about me. So I got to asking them.

I started with the algorithm that seems to have started the whole A.I. trend, ChatGPT:

It seems I have chatted with ChatGPT almost exclusively about my other blog, Truth Is..., and my personal blog (where book reviews have happened), DewDrops. That's fair enough, and this is a kind enough overview of what happens in those spaces.

Then I turned to the A.I. engine I use the most, CoPilot:

Very straightforward and factual. Little to no editorializing or sucking up. Well-played, CoPilot.

Finally, I went to X's A.I. entity, Grok:

Grok certainly did more research to provide its answer, but what a self-serving twit. "Your primary online presence is on X," my foot! With over 14-hundred friends on Facebook and fewer than 200 followers on X?

This isn't so much facts about me that Grok is reporting. It's more about what Grok thinks of itself and wants me to believe. (Oops. Did I just get political?)

The Sound of My Expectations Lowering: The 376th Greatest Song of All Time

 

It's always interesting when one of Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" is something I've never heard of.

It either means the magazine doesn't know what the definition of the word great is, or I am hopelessly out of touch with any music produced after the 1980s.

I'll give you a few facts about Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees," then let you form your own conclusion.

• Released in March of 1995, the song spent four weeks on the charts, reaching only as high as Number 65.
• Thom Yorke said the song began as "A very nice melody which I had no idea what to do with; then you wake up and find your head singing some words to it."
• Thom Yorke apparently has no idea what constitutes "a very nice melody."
• An acoustic version was featured in the 1995 film Clueless: Cher (Alicia Silverstone) criticizes her stepbrother's taste in music when she overhears him listening to the tune, calling it "crybaby music."
• The video for the song is so boring that several members of the cast and crew went comatose during its filming.

My lack of enthusiasm for this song knows no limits.

People Was Peedpulled

 

According to Punny Pete, "The past tense of William Shakespeare is Wouldiwas Shookspeared."

Putting aside my strong opinion that the past tense of Will should be Did, not Would, this has set my mind to wandering...

...and wondering if you intelligent readers out there can understand who the following are passed tents renditions of...

1. Tom Hanked

2. Robbedin Didiwass

3. Wasy Granted

4. Did Rogered

5. Divorced-Keaten Olsen*

6. Didiwas Told

_______
* Yes, I kind of cheated on this one.

What Happens When AI Meets My Face? Buckle Up.

 

Experimentation with the image-generating properties of different artificial intelligence entities has been running rampant like an escaped velociraptor in a convenience store.

The most recent example is the flood of Facebook posts from people who asked ChatGPT to create a caricature of themselves.

And of course, I hopped on that bandwagon.

Let's begin with the results from AI-bots who dealt only with my verbal request for "a caricature of a bald man with a closely-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard wearing dark-rimmed glasses seated in front of a bookshelf typing a blog. Feature images of Jesus, grandkids, music of Rich Mullins, and Dr Pepper."

Canva certainly got the Dr Pepper and Jesus right, but that's not Rich Mullins and the whole thing looks too academic. Where's the fun aspect implied by asking for a caricature?

Freepik looks like they were peeking over Canva's shoulder but didn't want to bother with Dr Pepper, Rich Mullins, or grandkids. What a lazy pile of algorithms.

DeepAI really cranked up my age beyond what was necessary, if you ask me. And they seem to have done away with the English language.

I like what NoteGPT/NanoBanana did with my overall look and including the auxiliary images, but doesn't it look like I'm squatting over my chair instead of actually sitting in it? Also, it's a little creepy that the computer is talking along with me; not sure which of us is talking and which is echoing.

MOVING ON to the lucky entities which were given the following picture...

...and these instructions: Here's my portrait. Can you turn it into a caricature featuring some of my favorite things: lions, the music of Rich Mullins, Jesus, my grandkids, Dr. Pepper, blogging?

This mini-trend started with ChatGPT, and I must say I like the jolly feeling in the result, though it's obvious the AI-bot has no idea what Rich Mullins or my grandkids look like: comforting news in the case of my grandkids, but slightly disappointing when it comes to Rich Mullins. (Additional whine: That's a decent drawing of me, not a caricature.)

CoPilot is what I do most of my AI-ing with, and it certainly ticked the boxes here in a very literal fashion, except for turning the picture of Jesus over my left shoulder into a skull...eww.

I think Gemini takes first place. I even like that one of my grandkids now has the tail of a lion. Genetics be darned!