ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-27-18)
This is the kind of thing that runs through my mind on a daily basis, and FYI, I am not proud of it: I was thinking the other day that somewhere in a glass office in the Googleplex, there's a guy in the Self-Driving Car Division who heads a department that oversees the development of an algorithm that determines what the largest animal is that their car can decide to run over.
Before I even got around to that, I thought about how miserable it would be to work in a glass office. There is all kinds of research that proves that taking a nap increases productivity and creativity. The CDC says that not sleeping in 24 hours is like having a .10 blood-alcohol level. So if you're not getting any rest you're probably staggering around the workplace like a tourist at Mardi Gras, especially if you're a work-aholic. I'd like to de-stigmatize taking a nap at work, but do I really want to be in a glass office showing everybody how efficiently I'm increasing my productivity, snoring with my mouth open? Plus, the boss can peek in and see that I have NEVER cleaned my computer keyboard, which contains particles of dust from when the universe was first formed.
Anyway, my self-driving vehicle is going to have to learn to decide between swerving out of the way of a stray animal and possibly causing an accident with an oncoming self-driving vehicle which is also swerving to avoid the same animal, or sacrificing its poor little life. If you're a bug and you have some sort of urgent business on the opposite side of the street, you'd better ask yourself if it's worth your life, because nobody's going to miss you when fail to make your appointment. Sometimes I see a tiny mouse scoot across the road, and I don't even see its feet moving, so it looks like a toy mouse. I've never actually checked to see if it IS a toy mouse or not, so if anyone out there has lost a toy mouse that they just put new batteries in, I've seen it. My advice is to put new batteries in your toy cat and tell him to get right on it.
I was driving on the Taconic the other night, and at the last second I see that this frog is jumping really high leaps across the road like a cartoon frog, and it's too late to safely adjust my course, and I couldn't help thinking, wow- it's just like that video game "Frogger" from the '80s. It would have been worth sinking another two quarters in just to find out which one of us won.
Fifteen minutes later I ran over a skunk that somebody else ran over first. Stunk up the whole car, so I hit the "recirculate" button on my dashboard, thereby trapping all the skunk-related air in my car. Then I opened the window to let it out, and more skunk-stunk drifted in. There's an old wives tale that if you get sprayed by a skunk you can bathe in tomato juice to alleviate the smell. Who was the old wife experimenting with this idea, and was there vodka and a huge stalk of celery involved? You'd have to actually own stock in the Sacramento Company to come up with thirty gallons of tomato juice to fill up your tub. Just save some money and bathe the skunk in the tomato juice before hitting him with your car.
An opossum is an endearing creature that I would not like to run over, despite the fact that it looks a little like Georgie Jessel. If you're old enough to know who Georgie Jessel you should be taking vitamin supplements, and there's not a moment to lose. Georgie Jessel was a comedian back in the olden days, when humor was first invented. Actually, I remember the very first joke, which was a big riot in the Jurassic era, and it goes like this: Question: Why do iguanodons have small balls? Answer: Because so few of them know how to dance! The caveman who told that joke howled his head off, but nobody else got it until fifteen minutes later, then they hit him with a rock.
Some animals have their own crossing signs, with a picture of a moose or a duck and the word "XING" under it. Sometimes it's just a picture of a prancing deer, alerting you to the fact that deer are around, not necessarily XING, but just working on their prance routines. A deer once came out of nowhere (not to habitat-shame it or anything) and hit my car. I was rattled by the collision, but the deer seemed only mildly inconvenienced, and wandered off, leaving my fender to fend for itself.
If the shoe is on the other hoof, you could be driving around in a jeep in the Veldt, and a rhinoceros could run YOU over. So remember to treat every living creature with respect, and stock up on your karma. Don't kill any animals you don't absolutely have to, and try not to put yourself into a situation where you absolutely have to. And that means YOU, idiots who pose on Instagram with a simpering grin and a dead giraffe that they shot with a twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft gun for "sport." If the giraffe was just pretending to be dead, wakes up and eats you for "sport," it will probably serve you right. And if anyone out there works for Google, feel free to circulate this article, in case you're working on a self-driving rhinoceros.
This is the kind of thing that runs through my mind on a daily basis, and FYI, I am not proud of it: I was thinking the other day that somewhere in a glass office in the Googleplex, there's a guy in the Self-Driving Car Division who heads a department that oversees the development of an algorithm that determines what the largest animal is that their car can decide to run over.
Before I even got around to that, I thought about how miserable it would be to work in a glass office. There is all kinds of research that proves that taking a nap increases productivity and creativity. The CDC says that not sleeping in 24 hours is like having a .10 blood-alcohol level. So if you're not getting any rest you're probably staggering around the workplace like a tourist at Mardi Gras, especially if you're a work-aholic. I'd like to de-stigmatize taking a nap at work, but do I really want to be in a glass office showing everybody how efficiently I'm increasing my productivity, snoring with my mouth open? Plus, the boss can peek in and see that I have NEVER cleaned my computer keyboard, which contains particles of dust from when the universe was first formed.
Anyway, my self-driving vehicle is going to have to learn to decide between swerving out of the way of a stray animal and possibly causing an accident with an oncoming self-driving vehicle which is also swerving to avoid the same animal, or sacrificing its poor little life. If you're a bug and you have some sort of urgent business on the opposite side of the street, you'd better ask yourself if it's worth your life, because nobody's going to miss you when fail to make your appointment. Sometimes I see a tiny mouse scoot across the road, and I don't even see its feet moving, so it looks like a toy mouse. I've never actually checked to see if it IS a toy mouse or not, so if anyone out there has lost a toy mouse that they just put new batteries in, I've seen it. My advice is to put new batteries in your toy cat and tell him to get right on it.
I was driving on the Taconic the other night, and at the last second I see that this frog is jumping really high leaps across the road like a cartoon frog, and it's too late to safely adjust my course, and I couldn't help thinking, wow- it's just like that video game "Frogger" from the '80s. It would have been worth sinking another two quarters in just to find out which one of us won.
Fifteen minutes later I ran over a skunk that somebody else ran over first. Stunk up the whole car, so I hit the "recirculate" button on my dashboard, thereby trapping all the skunk-related air in my car. Then I opened the window to let it out, and more skunk-stunk drifted in. There's an old wives tale that if you get sprayed by a skunk you can bathe in tomato juice to alleviate the smell. Who was the old wife experimenting with this idea, and was there vodka and a huge stalk of celery involved? You'd have to actually own stock in the Sacramento Company to come up with thirty gallons of tomato juice to fill up your tub. Just save some money and bathe the skunk in the tomato juice before hitting him with your car.
An opossum is an endearing creature that I would not like to run over, despite the fact that it looks a little like Georgie Jessel. If you're old enough to know who Georgie Jessel you should be taking vitamin supplements, and there's not a moment to lose. Georgie Jessel was a comedian back in the olden days, when humor was first invented. Actually, I remember the very first joke, which was a big riot in the Jurassic era, and it goes like this: Question: Why do iguanodons have small balls? Answer: Because so few of them know how to dance! The caveman who told that joke howled his head off, but nobody else got it until fifteen minutes later, then they hit him with a rock.
Some animals have their own crossing signs, with a picture of a moose or a duck and the word "XING" under it. Sometimes it's just a picture of a prancing deer, alerting you to the fact that deer are around, not necessarily XING, but just working on their prance routines. A deer once came out of nowhere (not to habitat-shame it or anything) and hit my car. I was rattled by the collision, but the deer seemed only mildly inconvenienced, and wandered off, leaving my fender to fend for itself.
If the shoe is on the other hoof, you could be driving around in a jeep in the Veldt, and a rhinoceros could run YOU over. So remember to treat every living creature with respect, and stock up on your karma. Don't kill any animals you don't absolutely have to, and try not to put yourself into a situation where you absolutely have to. And that means YOU, idiots who pose on Instagram with a simpering grin and a dead giraffe that they shot with a twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft gun for "sport." If the giraffe was just pretending to be dead, wakes up and eats you for "sport," it will probably serve you right. And if anyone out there works for Google, feel free to circulate this article, in case you're working on a self-driving rhinoceros.
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