I FINALLY GOT A “SMART PHONE”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-28-19)

     I got a "smart phone" for Christmas, and I thought I would report on how I'm doing with it so far. To call it a smart phone in the first place is overstating things, because if it had any sense at all it would not be hanging out with me. But now I can do all sorts of things that I never could before. Want to know the correct time without looking at my watch? No problem! I simply turn on the phone, wait a while as it boots up, flashes the logo, tells  me who I'm secured by, tells me who I'm powered by, says hello to me, then goes completely dark. I try to turn it on again but it's already still on, just messing with me and we share a laugh. I punch in my security code wrong twice and right once, and BINGO! It's later than I thought.

     I can sext now! OOPS I tried to type "text," I swear. My fat fingers hit three incorrect letters each time I hit a button, and it's up to an algorithm to figure out what the hell I'm talking about. Or I can just use the words conveniently provided by the "auto-suggest," and the phone will tell me what it is I SHOULD be talking about. When I typed in "Let's go to the..." the auto-suggest suggested "police" and "hospital," so already this device knows me better than my parents did. If my train of thought has not actually left the station yet, I can just start out with "I," and keep picking out different words from the ever-changing selection until I have a sentence that the cell phone and I can both agree on. I have a sentence in my "drafts" folder that I am still working on, and should be completed by the end of this year.

     I just remembered, I haven't set up my phone mail greeting yet. Not too many people call me, so I can conduct most of the conversation right in the greeting. "Hi, you've reached Rick. If this is who I think it is, I know what you're calling about, but I don't want You-Know-Who to find out so call me back. If this is You-Know-Who, the answer is still 'maybe,' but it's not a hard 'maybe' so don't let it get around." The reason I don't get many calls is not because I'm unpopular, it's because everyone knows I won't have my phone on. I don't want to run down the battery. My wife says I should just charge the phone when the battery starts to die, like everyone else. But I never remember, and my battery dies, and then I forget to go to the funeral. What if I'm on Mount Everest, and there's a landslide, and I think I'm definitely going to perish, and I try to call the hotel to cancel my next night's reservation and get my deposit back, and the phone is dead?

     The other reason is that I don't want to be one of the cellphone zombies that walk around the Earth bumping into each other like human pinballs, living their entire life through a 3" by 5" screen. The irony is that you can use your iPhone to look up anything you need to know, but people using an iPhone very rarely look up. WATCH IT- You're about to fall into the Grand Canyon! Oops, too late, but these people are so good with their phones that as they're falling, on the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon they have already called to arrange a FREE mattress delivery.

     I'm finding it hard to trust a phone that doesn't have an antenna. There I am buried under that landslide and I have no cell service. If I had an antenna I could at least stick it up and wave it around so someone would see me and rescue me. And it's heavier than I'm used to, so my right pants pocket droops and it looks like I'm lopsided from the waist down. And I have so much to learn. How long is it acceptable to carry around the instruction book? The book weighs a pound and a half because it's translated into every single damned language and some languages are heavier than others. My wife said she would teach me how to swipe my phone, but wouldn't it be less risky to just to buy one?

     Surely I jest. The phone is a tool, and a useful and powerful one. You can look up anything in two seconds. Who was that annoying kid who played for the Angels and ALWAYS got a hit against the Yankees no matter what Cy Young winner we had pitching at the time? And how many times has my wife saved us by booting up her mobile GPS while we were trying to find the hotel? Even though as I've explained many times, there is a difference between getting lost and exploring "alternate, scenic, time-consuming routes." I just think think that the world would be a lot healthier if I used my smart phone a little more, and the rest of the world used it a little less. Oh yeah: David Eckstein.

     I've survived all this time without a smart phone, as hard as that is to believe. I didn't have one when I was a seven year-old kid playing with toy soldiers in the basement, where my Mom let me and my imagination percolate for hours. Now it seems like every child has a smart phone issued at birth, and it will remain to be seen whether it takes a toll on ideas and thoughts when someone else thinks them for you. Will children still play with toy soldiers with their hands, or simply watch themon a little screen? If not, those toy soldiers will have lost their fiercest war.

DON'T STOP

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-21-19)

      Last week we went to see a Fleetwood Mac tribute band with our friends Julie and Jeff at Daryl's House in Pawling. I like Daryl's House because it's a nice-sized room, the sound is good, the stage is close, and you can sit down and have a meal while you watch the show. I wish Daryl would move closer so I could go over to his house more often. I would probably like it less if I was Daryl, and I'm upstairs in my pajamas brushing my teeth, and I wander downstairs to see what's in the fridge and there's 250 people sitting around eating everything that used to be in the fridge. Did they eat those last two pieces of pizza that I was saving? Don't even bother to answer. I was going to order a burger before the show started- if I was at McDonald's they probably have something called a Fleetwood Mac, but instead I ordered a Philly Cheese Steak, since Daryl Hall is a Philly guy. 

 

      These days, rock and roll is sort of a dying art, because so many rock and rollers are dead. I saw Earth, Wind & Fire a few years ago, and Wind and Fire are both dead. Same with Blood, Sweat and Tears. You could combine the remaining members and you'd still only have Sweat and Wind. And then of course bands break up, they have legal battles, and one of the songwriters owns half the songs, and the other one owns the other half. So legally, the band can now only play the first half of all the songs. Thus, your favorite band might not survive (even the band Survivor did not survive). If they are still on tour, like the Rolling Stones, you would have to take out a second mortgage on your home to go see them in seats a couple miles from the stadium that have been set on fire to justify their low ticket price. A tribute band might be the only way you can get to enjoy the music that you love and barely remember.

 

      There are all kinds of acts of this type. There was a tribute band for the Police, but they were all arrested for impersonating an officer. The lead singer was taken in during a Sting operation. When I go to the Jersey shore I see the same Springsteen act at every bar I go to, and the singer sounds like he swallowed a fresh cactus before each performance in order to get that raspy voice. But sometimes the tribute bands can be sort of a "farm system" for the major league groups. Remember when Steve Perry left Journey and they hired a singer from a tribute band to replace him? It doesn't always work; for instance, if you are Cher, and you don't feel like going out on tour and you want to replace yourself, you're probably only going to find a drag queen who can pull it off convincingly. They recently kicked Lindsay Buckingham out of Fleetwood Mac, and he wrote about half of their big hits. So now all the Fleetwood Mac tribute bands have their Lindsay Buckingham guy chained to the bass drum just to be on the safe side.

 

      In between songs the lead singer was giving us a running history of Fleetwood Mac. The band is like one of those parties in the 1970s where you put all the car keys into a fish bowl, and at the end of the party you pick a set of keys out and go home with whoever came with the car. I was never invited to any parties like that, probably because I drive a Dodge Dart and everybody else drives a BMW. Anyway, Fleetwood Mac was its own soap opera, and the words to their songs are all secret messages about the intrigue and chicanery that were rampant at the time. Whenever they played "You Make Loving Fun," it was code for "Dude, you slept with the keyboard player, who is literally RIGHT OVER THERE, and she admitted to it by singing this song even though I wrote it!" And when they played "Go Your Own Way," it was code for "I did NOT! And even if I did it wasn't until after I heard what you and the bass player were up to!" Then the singer in the tribute band announced that she had just married the guitarist. Have we learned NOTHING from the lessons of Fleetwood Mac? After that announcement they played "Big Love," which is code for "Honey, can you pick up some milk after the show tonight?"

 

     The band was fun and the music is toe-tapping, and I'm thinking that this is a pretty good gig. These guys are playing four nights at Daryl's House, and they're touring up and down the East Coast playing good rooms. The hardest thing about appearing as Stevie Nicks is not the singing, it's finding a top hat in a ladies size 8. It's impossible, so you have to follow a female magician around and when she turns her back to saw somebody in half, BOOM- make your move. Once you clean all the rabbit droppings out of it, try it on, look in the mirror and be honest with yourself: Does it make you look like Abraham Lincoln? Winston Churchill? Anyone from Alice in Wonderland? If not, you're good to go.

 

      The audience totally ate it up, and how do I know that the audience totally ate it up? Because they burped afterward. At first I thought it was a little weird that the band should soak up so much of Fleetwood Mac's glory, but when you go to hear the philharmonic you give a standing ovation for the band, and they didn't write the songs either. And who do you clap the loudest for? The conductor, and he didn't even play anything, he just told a bunch of people WHEN to play, and pointed at them sometimes when he knew they couldn't point back. Maybe I would have clapped louder if he had taken the time to do his hair and dress up like Beethoven. 

 

     I enjoyed the band, the company, my Philly cheese steak and the music, especially when they did "Don't Stop," which is code for "We're about to stop now."

BIG GAME HUNTING

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-14-19)

     We host a Super Bowl party every year, only I can't say the words "Super Bowl" because I could be accused of trademark infringement. I've never knowingly infringed upon anything in my life and I'm afraid I'll get caught red-handed one of these days. "Hey YOU- what are you doing over there at the edge of that thing?" "Who, me? Nothing." "You're infringing upon something over there, aren't you- get away from there." "Me? Nooooooo. If I was going to infringe upon something it wouldn't be this crappy little thing, believe me." Anyway, kickoff is an hour away and I'm still drawing the boxes for the Super Bowl pool. One time I drew eleven boxes on each side and didn't notice until we picked the numbers.

     Now  it's 5:50 and we only have 10 people at the party and a hundred boxes to fill. And just like every other time I have to donate 30 bucks to prime the pump, and I do mean donate, because I NEVER WIN. You wanna know who wins? Somebody's wife who runs an art installation in the Brooklyn and doesn't own a TV and thinks football is kind of barbaric but loves my wife and bought ONE box for three dollars because my wife told her to, it'll be fun. Finally the party filled up and the pool filled up and the game was ready to start. First, of course was the National Anthem, but before that two girls came on the field and sang a pre-National Anthem anthem that I found out later was "America the Beautiful," although there wasn't a particularly strong resemblance. I also found out later that the two girls were "Chloe x Halle."

     But I'm here to report on the game, not all the other stuff. Somebody finally kicked a field goal, and the score was 3 to nothing for about an hour and a half. It seems to me you could multiply Chloe x Halle and come up with more points than that.

     Then it's halftime and the guy from Maroon 5 takes the stage. Girls know him as Adam Levine, and guys know him as The Guy from Maroon 5. My friend Jamie said hey that's the guy who lives right over in Katonah, and I said no that's the guy from Matchbox 20, this guy's from California, and Jamie said no that's the guy from Eve 6, and that this guy used to skateboard drunk all over San Diego and I said no that's the guy from Blink 182. And Jamie said, "So who the hell is this guy?" "I have no idea, but it seems like more math than I was expecting," I said. I read that Maroon 5 had been getting a lot of criticism on social media for performing in the Super Bowl halftime show. I figured the criticism had to do with the fact that they're kind of a girly-sounding band for a football game, but it turns out that it had nothing to do with that. Apparently they were being called out just for TAKING the gig. Everybody else turned it down so they could protest the fact that Colin Kaepernick couldn't protest during halftime himself because he isn't in a band and can't turn down the gig himself because he wasn't asked to perform. I think I got that more exactly right than anyone else who tried to explain it to me. The part that nobody explained to me is what does the halftime show have to do with protesting during the National Anthem? They should be protesting Gladys Knight for singing the National Anthem, but she seems too nice.

     Anyway the guy the guy from Maroon 5 is up there singing his heart out, and to show you that his heart is in the right place he whips his shirt off. That was no great loss because the shirt looked like a tablecloth that somebody laundered in with wrong color clothes, but the shirt he was wearing underneath was even uglier. When I realized that it wasn't really a shirt but a bunch of bad tattoos I turned to the girl next to me and said, "Jesus, how many horrible tattoos can you fit on one dude?" And she said, "Could you move out of the way, I can't see." I said, "He's got all that bad body art to hide the fact that he hasn't hit the gym in a while." She said, "He's completely ripped." "That's exactly it, he's OVER-ripped, and he's over-buff. Look at him, he can hardly move. That's not what women want, is it?" Well, what women really want is for me to get out of the way so that they can see the television.

     I left to get some more ice from the kitchen and when I came the Super Bowl was over. So, yes the game kind of sucked, and yes Tom Brady won again and we're all kind of sick of him since he seems even nicer than Gladys Knight and he's good looking like the guy from 3 Doors Down and his wife is a super-model and his dog is a super-model and his cat is a super cat-model, et cetera. But you'd better get over it, because pretty soon we won't have football to kick around anymore. Why? Because moms are getting wise to the fact that when the football announcer says, "Well, number 23 is a little shaken up on the play," that means that number 23 has internal bleeding and his foot is now facing the wrong way. Injuries are becoming such a problem for the game that now, even if you just say something stupid like most of the material in the above five paragraphs, they send you to the sideline to clear concussion protocols. When I was a kid and I got hit in the head, it was precisely BECAUSE I said something stupid, and the one who hit me was my Mom. And now those very same moms are ruining the game because they care about their kids. I've never heard of anything so ridiculous. But for now, I'm going to relax, have a cocktail and enjoy the game in the comfort of my own home, even though it's over, since I just got more ice. It's better than sitting in a crowded stadium with 10,000 Maniacs.
 

MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (02-07-19)

      My sister Kathy and her husband generously allow us to use her home in the Poconos for a ski weekend, regardless of the fact that she could be named in a lawsuit because of something I did on the ski slopes. Luckily her husband is a lawyer. A ski trip is a great way to stand up against the fierce New England winter weather and shout from the top of the mountain, "Give me your best shot, because right now there is NO PLACE in the world I would rather be than right here, with the possible exception of indoors."

      I just read that some guy is suing Gwyneth Paltrow for running into him while skiing and then leaving the scene. I guarantee you that if Gwyneth Paltrow ever hit me with her skis or any other part of herself I would come right back here and brag about it. "Hey, you'll never guess who I ran into?" My version of the story might involve some embellishment regarding how charming she found me, and that she laughed with me about something other than my skiing. So Gwyneth, if you're out there and you run me over with your skis, you should probably come back and finish me off with your ski pole, fair warning.

      As a skier I consider myself an expert novice. I've been fine-tuning my lack of skills for years now, but there's till plenty of room for improvement. And by that I mean that if you see me on the slopes you should give me plenty of room, in case I haven't improved. Simply getting off the ski lift can be enough for me to cause an accident. My wife tells me to keep to my own side and stay the hell away from her when we're getting off the chair. She's referring to an situation last year where there was literally an intermediate slope at the end of the chair lift, and even though I kept my tips up when dismounting and checked for loose clothing, I forgot to not stick my poles out to the side underneath her skis. I tried to blame the incident on Gwyneth Paltrow of course.

      Skiing is the one sport where people often feel the urge to dress up in costumes or dumb-looking hats, I'm not sure why. I saw someone on the lift line dressed in a bunny outfit like it was Halloween, and my mouth started to water automatically like Pavlov's dog, thinking that somehow I was going to get candy. The more I thought about it, the bunny outfit started to seem like a good idea, because I have a friend who is a ski instructor, and I don't want him to ever recognize me trying to walk back up the ski slope sideways with my skis on because I didn't know it was a mogul trail. Why don't they mark those mogul trails with a big skull-and-crossbones? Somehow I always end up on one of those damned things with one of my skis going in a direction that my other ski already tried and had no success at. They have warnings labels on chainsaws telling you not to use them inside, but I guarantee you that a mogul trail will hurt you probably worse and definitely faster than trying to use a chainsaw indoors.

      But we made it down the slopes and back up again, and at night we went over to Shenanigan's at Lake Harmony for Karaoke Night. The host begins by singing a song himself, to get the ball rolling and because he's the only one in the room who can actually sing. He starts walking through the crowd with that wireless microphone singing "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)," and when I turn around he's right in front of my face, singing, "You're a FINE GIRL!" And scaring the crap out of me. I turn to face the other way but there he is again! "What a GOOD WIFE you would be!" I'm afraid to turn around again so I just shut my eyes and wait until the song is over. I'm still a little traumatized by the incident but also gratified that I would make a good wife.

      I'm going to write a whole separate column on karaoke, because there's a lot going on there, but suffice it to say that every time we go to Karaoke Night I threaten my wife by saying I'm going to get up there and do "Summer Wind," with my World Famous Frank Sinatra Imitation. And she says Please, please do not do that, and I try to extort a few bribes from her, and we dicker back and forth, and while all this is going on, some idiot gets up to the mike, and what does he do? "Summer Wind." And not only does he make a mockery of the song by doing it perhaps better than I would have, but now I have no leg to stand on with the bribes.

      So I have to quickly pivot to Plan B, and I'm about to suggest that I storm the stage to perform "Strangers in the Night" in a Sinatra-off, but just then 10 teenage girls wearing "State Champions" jackets grab all the microphones and yell the song "Don't Stop Believin'," using only one of the notes, at approximately one million decibels. They only know one of the notes but they know all the words, so they don't have to bother reading them off the screen and they can concentrate on just the yelling, and of course their dance moves, which they stole from the cheerleading squad. Midway through the performance I had to turn my chair so I wouldn't be deaf in just one ear. Later when I could hear again I asked them what they were state champions of and they said field hockey, and I said thank god it wasn't karaoke.

     So, if you see a deaf looking guy singing Sinatra songs in a bunny costume walking sideways up a mogul trail, steer clear because it might be me.

A RESOLUTION SOLUTION

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-31-19)

     We're almost a month into the new year, and I wanted to ask you how your New Year's resolutions were holding up. If you answered, "Oh crap! Thanks for reminding me!" Then I'm guessing not so good. If you didn't even bother to make any resolutions because you knew you wouldn't keep them, then that's even worse. Those brave souls who fought the crowds and the weather on New Year's Eve in Times Square certainly took the whole thing seriously, even if you didn't. They were out there for hours with no umbrellas, because an umbrella could be used as a weapon. Don't you remember when the Penguin would show up at a gala for a gaggle of rich gals, and he'd point his umbrella into the middle of the room and this pink gas would come out, and before you knew it all the ladies were on the floor and these guys with black derby hats would stroll in and fleece the entire place and clean out the wall safe? Well maybe YOU don't remember that, but the NYPD certainly does.

      So, no umbrellas, and no porta-potties in Times Square either, because they could be used in a terrorist plot. All it takes is one commando to infiltrate the area and open the door to one of those things, and en entire city block could be immobilized. So you're left with hundreds of thousands of adults wearing adult diapers, and there's not even any alcohol to make it all seem festive. It's so crowded that everybody's packed in like sardines. Picture a bunch of sardines, perfectly sober, wearing adult diapers, and you'll begin to get an idea of the kind of commitment New Year's Eve takes. Plus, Times Square is a security nightmare, along with all the other nightmares I just described. Think of all the bad actors that could be on Broadway at any given time.

      So suck it up and honor your promises for the new year. If you really want to work things efficiently you should line up your resolutions in November, and that way you can ask for Christmas presents that will make it easier. There is plenty of new technology out there that can help. Make the whole holiday season work together to transform you into a better person. One way to ensure that you are living up to your goal of staying more physically active is to ask for a fitness tracker for Christmas. The fitness tracker can provide important physiological feedback to you, such as the fact that you are pathetic. You can program it to monitor your heart rate, calories burned, and the number of Dairy Queens within a two-mile radius.

      What about a refrigerator that actually talks to you? You can ask it to help your diet out by giving you misleading information about what's inside. "Close the door that light is right in my eye. What are you doing here, anyway? Do you realize what time it is? Well neither do I because you never set my clock. If you're here for the cookies your wife already ate them." "She did not, she's the one who told me to finish them up." "You know what? I happen to agree with the Fitbit- you're pathetic." I have a flashing message on my refrigerator that tells me when it's time to change the lettuce crisper filter. It's been flashing since 1985. Imagine if it could talk to me? What would it say? "CHANGE THE CRISPER FILTER YOU BLITHERING IDIOT." Or something to that effect.

      Some people want to clean up their house and start the new year off on the right foot. There are several robotic vacuums on the market that just wander around the room all day in a random pattern and clean your rug for you. In our house the main offender is the cat, who also wanders around the room in a random pattern and soils the rug for you. I remember when my wife had this black light that was supposed to highlight where the cat was messing up the rug. She could smell the evidence but she couldn't see it. It was like an episode of "Forensic Files." I said why don't you spray the area with Luminol, and see if the cat actually committed a crime? We got the cat from the cat pound, and I have no idea what his background was. He could have been an axe murderer for all I know- every time I try to pick him up it seems like he tries to kill me. He has those retractable claws like little stilettos, but I've never actually patted him down for weapons. Anyway, the genius of these robotic vacuums is not that they pick up all the dirt so great, it's that they chase the cat around and prevent him from staying in one place long enough to do anything that might constitute a misdemeanor.

      We're all living in this microcosm we call Earth, so our resolutions might actually intersect. If you have a resolution to take better care of your teeth, odds are that your dentist has the same resolution. I just bought an electric toothbrush that lets you know when you've brushed your teeth for one minute. The ADA recommends that you brush your teeth for two minutes, so I brush my teeth until this toothbrush goes off twice. I've found that it also comes in handy with my other resolutions too, so it's a win-win. For instance, I want to spend at least 10 minutes a day walking my dog, and my dog has that same resolution too. So I take my toothbrush along and brush my teeth until the timer goes off ten times. Another one of my New Year's resolutions is for other people to be nicer to me, so feel free to help me out with that one.

THE FUTURE IS HERE BUT ONLY TEMPORARILY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-24-19)

      If you're as cynical as I am you probably already know that we're all headed for Hell in a hand basket. And if you attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, you could get an idea of what Hell is going to look like when we get there, and whether the hand basket will get us there with an automatic pilot. And because I care about my readers, I am going to summarize the important things you need to know about the CES so you don't have to feel bad for missing it, and can concentrate on feeling bad for completely unrelated reasons.

      There were many robotic and automatic devices this year at the show, and many seminars to attend. if you bought a robot at last year's show, you could program it to sit in on an event entitled, "Trends Reshaping the Future of Mobility and Connectivity," and that way you could Reshape your own Mobility by walking across the street to the Diamond Cabaret and Reshape your Connectivity there without missing out on anything.

      Featured at this year's convention, the Royole Flexpai is the world's first folding smartphone. It has a flexible spine that allows it to be bent in half, enabling you to put it into your pocket, provided that you literally have deep pockets. The idea seems like a case of over-innovation to me, but when I thought it over a little more, I realized that the phone could save you the embarrassment of butt-dialing someone, unless your butt butt-unfolds the phone first.

      If you love folded laundry, but without the drudgery, the Foldimate automatic laundry folder is for you. The very first thing you should do is feed one of those folding phones in there and see if you can break the phone and the laundry folder at the same time while they are both still under warranty. I can think of a thousand things I'd like to fold, but just never had the means, motive or opportunity. For instance, I've always wondered what my cat would look like perfectly folded. What about all the businesses that are about to fold due to all the robots parading around at the CES? Just feed your failing business into the Foldimate along with a bankruptcy lawyer and presto!

     If you want to take the perfect shot of yourself, AirSelfie is a drone that will snap the photo from the air. The flying camera will shoot a picture of you along with a bunch of people calling Homeland Security.

      An innovation called the Y-Brush offers to clean all your teeth in 10 seconds. You stick some toothpaste into the tray, shaped like a set of dentures, and let the automatic bristles do all the work. Your teeth will be healthier than they've ever been, which makes it all the more tragic that you died of embarrassment when somebody caught you using this goofy-looking gadget. Luckily they will be able to identify you easily with your impeccable dental records.

      There were also a few tragedies at the show. A videotape that went viral showed a self-driving Tesla running over a promotional robot that was in a parking lot near Congress Hall, just the type of thing you would expect to happen at CES. My theory is that it was no accident, but the distraught robot threw itself in front of the moving car. The robot was probably hired as a valet to park cars, and now that cars are able to drive themselves, it was out of a job. What automatically comes around automatically goes around....

      People are looking into the future, and it doesn't look to pretty. All these robotics are taking over the factories, doing the assembly more efficiently, faster and with no coffee breaks. They can even program them to complain about the boss at regular intervals, and make fun of his hair, which looks like a rug that no robot would have assembled, because they would have done a lot better job. Then you go outside to catch a cigarette, and who's out there too? The robots, smoking away more efficiently and they don't get lung cancer. Anyway, my point is that nobody is thinking ahead to the ramifications of these household robots. I take out the garbage, I chop the firewood, I kill spiders, I do all kinds of useful things that I can't think of at the moment, but trust me, they are important. If somebody comes along and invents a robot that can do all of these things, exactly what is MY job going to be? Sure, I'm extremely handsome and droll and know all the gags from old episodes of "Get Smart," but a robot has all day to comb the internet for clever things to say. I'm going to come home from work, say something that I think is going to make my wife laugh, and that damned robot is going to be say something even funnier, sitting there smoking a cigarette with the laundry folded, all the dishes done and about 12 dead spiders there in a pile. And my wife is smoking a cigarette too, and she never used to smoke before. Do you get my drift or do I have to spell it out for you?

THE YEAR IN REVIEW- 2018, PART II

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-17-19)


     Already, really dumb things are happening in 2019, so I had better get through covering 2018. Here are the rest of the news items from last year that you swore you didn't have anything to do with, and no one believed you.

ELON MUSK LAUNCHES TESLA INTO SPACE
     When I first read this headline I assumed he launched his Tesla into a parking space, which seemed a bit of overkill, but Musk is kind of a nutty guy. In fact, he launched the Tesla into outer space on top of a SpaceX rocket that was headed there anyway. Once out of the Solar System, it was discovered that there are no charging stations for the car, so it will have to make an illegal U-turn at some point. The vehicle may eventually make it back to Earth, as soon as the GPS finishes recalculating a route with no tolls.

WOMAN DENIED EMOTIONAL SUPPORT PEACOCK ON FLIGHT
     In January a woman boarding a United flight at Newark Airport tried to bring a peacock along for emotional support, which ruffled some feathers at the airline. Isn't a peacock a bird? Why doesn't it just fly there by itself and meet you at the luggage carousel? And who's to say that the peacock didn't book the flight and bring the human along for emotional support? It isn't often you get to hear a conversation between a large pheasant and a psychologically fragile human, so let's listen in: "Okay- I really don't expect any more emotional support from a peacock than I would get from a cold pizza, but at least with you I won't have to fight for the armrest. I just want you to be there for me, man." "First of all, I'm female. And if I don't see a cup of coffee in front of me in 30 seconds I'm going to make a noise that will make your hair curl. And judging by the look on your face, you don't look great with curly hair." The human and the bird were both denied entry onto the plane.

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES APOLOGIZES TO GIRL NAMED ABCDE AFTER GATE AGENT MADE FUN OF HER
     I am a very sensitive person, and I would NEVER make fun of a person who was named Abcde. Instead, I will make fun of the letters themselves, parading around at the front of alphabet as if they were something special. If those letters ever try to board a flight that I am on without a child attached to them, the airline is going to hear from me and my emotional support peacock. You can't blame parents for wanting their kids to be the first in line. Abcde will always be ahead of that kid named YOLO, not to mention children named LMFAO and NSFW. And that nice mom whose daughter was insulted because she gave her a stupid name should send the airline a letter, but which letter?

16 COWS CHASE SUSPECTED CAR THIEF IN FLORIDA
     In August a group of cows helped police capture a criminal that was on the lamb. The bold bovines called for the female thief to stop, but she hadn't herd them because their voice was a little horse. The cows lassoed the perpetrator and tied three of her legs together, and for once the cow was the hero instead of the goat. And if ewe don't believe me there is police videotape to go with this.

WOMAN INJURED WHEN DYNAMITE SHE MISTOOK FOR CANDLE BLOWS UP IN HAND
     Honey, who put candles in the dynamite drawer? Raise your hand if you've done the EXACT same thing. If you can't raise your hand, well then I guess we have our answer, don't we? This isn't a funny story of course, but let's all learn from this: if something you are holding in your hand has a fuse attached to it,  don't light it with a match.

MOM ARRESTED AFTER KIDS FOUND HOME ALONE WATCHING 'HOME ALONE'
     That pretty much says it all, but I will say that as a training device for children's survival, this film is severely lacking.

BANKSY ARTWORK SELF-DESTRUCTS MOMENTS AFTER SELLING FOR $1.4 MILLION
     The shrewd shredder pre-programmed the painting's frame to tear the piece to ribbons once the gavel hit the block. That's why I always pay by check outfitted with a similar device.

NASA SPACECRAFT LANDS ON MARS AND TRANSMITS A PICTURE OF ITSELF
     Folks, if you think your tax dollars are being wasted, this story should put your mind at ease. NASA has spent about $830 million dollars on the InSight robotic lander, which touched down on Mars and promptly took a selfie, despite the fact that its hair did not look great. Of course, it has other functions too, like updating its contact list and trolling SpaceX's Tesla on Twitter. The Jet Propulsion Labratory has been trying to send it instructions for the rest of the mission, but it is now wearing headphones and has not responded. By the way, I happened to notice that nobody is taking a selfie on Uranus, but don't take it personally.