Five Years Out: Three Weeks in November

Yes, I know, this is Election Day here in the U.S., but—speaking of traumatic events!—it’s also the five-year anniversary of The Event. Well, more or less; the actual anniversary is on November 7th, i.e., this coming Thursday. But we don’t post on Thursdays around here, we post on Tuesdays*, and so you’re getting the anniversary post a couple of days early.

This being an anniversary that both begins and ends with a five, it seems like a good occasion to once again reproduce the entire six-part series on The Event for those readers who may not have seen it before, as well as for those readers who have been following the election and would like to take their minds off it by reading about somebody who was having an even more stressful day than they are. Probably. Anyway, read on for the tale of what to do, what not to do, and what might happen when your brain suddenly starts acting all weird!

* This is of course so that if I can’t come up with anything else to post about, I can always do a Teaser Tuesday.

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Happy Hallow….mas?

The scene at Lowes on October 20th:

If you feel like on All Saints Day there might just be some knocked-over trees and sliced up balloons across from those guys on the left, you’re not alone.

Happy Halloween!

Nice Try, Oregon Trail

So I’ve somehow gotten onto at least half a dozen recipe lists over the past year or so. I’m not sure how it happened, exactly. At first, I kept trying to use the “Unsubscribe” links or buttons in the messages to try to get off the lists, but, to quote Rocky the Flying Squirrel:

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Keeping The World Safe, One Video Of A Kitten Drinking Water At A Time

So last week, the automated processes at Facebook did this:

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September is National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month

Hey, look, it’s September, and that means, once again, that it’s Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month!

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The Early Years: Can We Lift It? Probably Not!

So this week I decided to take a break from being curmudgeonly about AI to sift through the giant stack of my old papers that my folks sent me a while back; but this time, near the top of the pile, I found something that wasn’t an old bad drawing or me asking rude questions. Instead, it was a mysterious list of weights.

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It’s The Words (And Sentences) That Got Small

So the other day, while putting together a post on that other, much more popular blog of mine, I noticed that there were all these mysterious, super-thick underlines appearing all over the place. As it turns out, these were yet another new “AI”* feature that WordPress had activated automatically which was analyzing my sentences so that it could suggest ways to “improve” them. Here’s an example:

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But Turds Are Non-Migratory

Ever since our dog Bean got bitten by a baby rattlesnake a few months ago (he’s fine now, after a course of antivenin, an overnight hospital stay, and of course a couple thousand dollars in vet bills), he and his sister Lulu have not been allowed outside unsupervised. This situation is likely to continue until rattlesnake season is over, especially given that we subsequently caught Bean investigating another baby rattlesnake, although at least this time he was keeping a healthy (seven feet or so) distance. Of course, this means that when they go out for their morning ablutions, somebody has to go with them, and because I’m the early bird around here, that someone is usually me. And speaking of early birds, lately I’ve been bringing the phone with me and running the Merlin app from Cornell University, because it’s interesting to see what birds have been hanging around. Surely this information is of interest to the cats.

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Spelling Bee Minus

This week, it’s time for another set of words that weren’t in various Spelling Bee puzzles, but should have been. Or that obviously wouldn’t be, but hey, they’re still funny, right? Right? 🦗🦗🦗*

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Spamcommentology: Your Moments of Zen

So at first, we were getting all kinds of random spam at the blogs; then for a while we were getting AI spam, where something that seemed very much like an LLM would leave comments that were clearly spam, yet also were clearly in response to the post to which they were attached. After that, for some reason, we entered a joyful period of very little spam, a Pax Spamana if you will. And what have we got now? Well, now we have dozens of spam comments that are clearly being assembled out of random constituents, making them mostly gibberish, yet also, weirdly poetic, almost haiku-ish. Let’s take a look:

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