I'm ready for my foil hat, Mr. DeMille

Can you feel it?  The Internet is stalking us.

This is nothing new, it's been stalking me for some time now.  Sidebar ads.  Recommendations when I search for something on the great and powerful Google.  Recipes for delicious Spam primavera when I go to my spam folder in email. 

The most recent disturbing message came when I Twittered about our office coffee and it's lack of quality.  Mere moments later, I got an email from WebMD asking me if I didn't think, perhaps, my caffeine intake was a tad high.

This is uncalled for.  If good things happened with this whole Internet spying thing, I wouldn't mind.  If, for example, it triggered shipments of free bacon to my home any time I mentioned #bacon on Twitter, or if someone mysteriously showed up at the office with a four-shot of espresso when I disparage office coffee, we'd be golden.

But really, Internet?  Questioning my caffeine intake?  Spam-kebabs?  Who are you to judge, oh great Judgie McJudgerson?  Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, that Zuckerberg kid from Facebook, whoever invented Google, and even Al Gore, I'm looking at you.  Stop stalking me, just let me live my life in peace.  Am I going insane, here?  Are we in danger of the Internet ruling our lives until we run, screaming, to a tiny shack in the middle of Montana to write our manifestoes on manual typewriters, far from the prying eye of the Worldwide Web?  I think so!

But then again, that could be the caffeine talking, I suppose.

Carry on.

Where is my flying car? I was promised flying cars!

I don't see any flying cars! 

I'm 40 years old today.  Age is just a number, nothing important as I've been an 'old man' much of my life.  But 40.  Forty.  Four-Zero.  That's 14610 days, if I include leap years (and I have, because that's how I roll.  Nerd to your mother.)  

One of my favorite websites, IMDB, lists over 4000 people born the same year as me, actors and best boys and key grips born 40 years ago.  Many famous, some that nobody's ever heard of.  And I share my birthday with the likes of Salvador Dali and Irving Berlin.  They're no slouches.  

1971 was a big year in the space race, astronauts and cosmonauts vying for supremacy of the heavens.  I wasn't yet born when Americans walked on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission.  I was alive and being adorable when we followed up with Apollo 15, but I don't really remember it.  I was alive when DB Cooper jumped from a Northwest Orient flight and into history.

We were doing that in 1971, and now?  Nothing.  Sure, there's a space station up there somewhere, waiting patiently to Skylab its way back to Earth, but are we really using it for anything?  Science is all up in our faces over alternative fuels and clean energy, but where's my robot maid, my dog-walking treadmill?  Do I need to download an iPhone app?  I don't even have an iPhone.    

As for my physical prowess, I'm not going to win a Superbowl or the Tour de France.  Can you imagine?  Especially those of you who've seen me throw a football or witnessed my first bike ride without training wheels.  Anyone who actually witnessed my face-first assault on the school track back in 8th grade isn't at all surprised that I've never become a superstar athlete. 

So, what have I been doing with myself?  I'm married to a beautiful woman who puts up with far too much of my nerdilated insanity.  Not that I'm asking her to stop.  I have two wonderful daughters and a lovely grandson.  I learned how to ride a motorcycle, and for anyone who was there for my early forays into the bicycle realm, that's probably pretty frightening.

In all, I've managed a pretty positive forty years by most standards.  And the future seems pretty bright.  If only I had a flying car where I could keep my shades.  Then again, I'm fairly old-school.  My razor only has two blades.  Most of my music is still on cassette, many of them taped off of the radio, and my first portable cassette recorder (like a Walkman without the name brand) required me to flip the tape over to the B-side manually.  I did walk home from school in the snow.  I've only owned a cell phone for a quarter of my life.

But being old school means I was taught that when you make a promise, you keep it.  And I was promised flying cars, so I want mine.     

God didn't buy me a satellite

Not that I expected Him to, nor did I ask.  Certainly, there are far larger things going on in the world than my having to listen to broadcast radio.

All the same, having spent the last three months nearly commercial-free, almost always finding music to suit my mood, whatever mood that may be, suddenly being faced with static, lost stations, non-stop ads, unwitty 'witty morning banter' and country music (actually, it's both kinds: country and western) is like torture.

(And not the good kind, with spankings...)

It was something, driving to lunch with typical early-80's new wave in the background, only to get back in the car after some great tacos to nothing.  Well, an XM advertisement looping non-stop, but not early-80's new wave, to be sure.

I can't say they didn't warn me.  I ignored the mail, the phone calls at inopportune times, even the emails.  Because part of me cringes at the idea of paying for radio.  However, that part is the one with no short-term memory, the holier-than-thou part of my brain that forgets we hate commercials, unwitty 'witty morning banter' and country music.  It's also the same part of my brain that hates buying bottled water or paying for cable, but those are completely different subjects.

I'm just going to have to break down and pay the XM piper, aren't I?

On an unrelated note, have you noticed the trusty sidebar here at CDS Enterprises?  There's a nifty little PayPal button over there, where you can achieve great esteem in the eyes of this site's author by donating to the XM cause.  


No?  Then at least click the email link and ask the nerdy fat guy an interesting question.  It's the least you could do.

Fun Fact Friday - Welcome to the Valley

A warning, before you go any further. There are things you can't un-see, and this may not be for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Okay, so I may be living under a rock, but it's cool here, and the ground is nice and moist. An occasional grub to munch upon. I understand that what I'm sharing here today is by no means new, and may have been part of pop culture for some time. I've understood 'The Uncanny Valley' in theory, I just never knew it had a name.
Dogimo brought up the concept of The Uncanny Valley the other day, in reaction to Bev's post regarding, in part, Courtney Love. I had to look it up, and it makes sense.Dr. Masahiro Mori originally coined the phrase in relation to his work in the field of robotics. It stipulates, basically, that our innate attraction to an object, living or inanimate, will increase gradually, but at a certain point in design, attraction rapidly turns to revulsion. Only when the object or being obtains a greater humanness does the curve again rise. To quote Dave Bryant's take on this phenomenon:
"This chasm—the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis—represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment—affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that."Dr. Mori brings this up in his effort to keep man from designing robots that too closely mimic human appearance and behavior, because a slight mistake (the 'Joan Rivers' model, for example) could cast the object into the valley.This valley is subjective, certainly. Things that bother Lori (Charles Schwab ads, folk art) are not the same pseudo-human things that wig me out (mannequins, Yul Brynner in 'West World', grotesque deformities).Strangely, I'm drawn to folk art, especially animated, talking folk art, and Lori can't turn away from every possible television show centered on deformities. Go figure.The valley's not all bad, mind you. Zombies live there. Awww, look at the cute little zombie!