Awaitng The Robolords

The United Nations wants a moratorium on killer robots. Really. This is not part of an elaborately crafted promotional stunt for the new Michael Bay blow-'em-up. This is a U.N. Human Rights Commission report from last week that deals with legal and philosophical issues involved in giving robots lethal powers over humans. Didn't they read Asimov? ''A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Unless the robot in question happens to be the once and future Governor of California. and you happen to be listed in the phone book under "Sarah Connor."
Okay, all kidding aside, we all really know that we're not talking about Skynet becoming aware. This is not a ride at Universal Studios.

According to a report written by Christof Heyns, a South African professor of human rights law, the United States, Britain, Israel, South Korea and Japan have developed various types of fully or semi-autonomous weapons. In the report, Heyns focuses on a new generation of weapons that choose their targets and execute them. He calls them "lethal autonomous robotics," or LARs for short, and says: "Decisions over life and death in armed conflict may require compassion and intuition. Humans - while they are fallible - at least might possess these qualities, whereas robots definitely do not."On the other hand, he notes that LARs "will not be susceptible to some of the human shortcomings that may undermine the protection of life. Typically they would not act out of revenge, panic, anger, spite, prejudice or fear. Moreover, unless specifically programmed to do so, robots would not cause intentional suffering on civilian populations, for example through torture. Robots also do not rape."

Perhaps Professor Heyns is unfamiliar with Proteus in "The Demon Seed." Or the actions of the Gropenator. Alas, I don't seem to be able to separate fantasy from real life. This is one of the failings of the human mind, after all. 

The United Nations is scheduled to have further discussion on this matter at the end of the month. This should give Professor Heyns and the rest of the Commission to get some more background information. But just a little heads-up: "Demon Seed" isn't available on Netflix. Coincidence? Time will tell.

OU812

Please pardon the confetti and streamers. We're still cleaning up around here. It wasn't the Cinco de Mayo celebration that got out of hand, but that was pretty tremendous. It was the automated "Another Year Has Passed Since He Started Blogging" system that popped off somewhere around midnight. This makes eight times that the sirens, bells and whistles have interrupted my sound sleep and brought me fully awake to reckon with the fact that I have been telling anyone who clicks here about What I Believe. That and the tiny number-shaped confetti that gets stuck way down in the deep pile shag carpet are enough to make me stop fussing about this particular date. Especially since this is really just First Blog Day Observed.
The real streak began on the Monday following, when I began my absurd commitment to writing something here each day, trivial and/or otherwise, just to keep piling up stats. Eight years of three hundred and sixty-five days apiece give me, well, you do the math. I'm stuck on the notion that after all these years I still feel compelled to share my innermost thoughts on pop culture, politics, relationships, school, parenthood, sports and holidays, all served up with a patina of nostalgia.
I received an e-mail last week asking if I would be interested in discussing my blog with a documentary filmmaker who, as a project for his university study, claims to be interested in me. Or maybe just people like me. There are a lot of us. The ones who continue to type away in mild obscurity about relatively obscure events and opinions. I can say this with some confidence since, as one of the statistics that I look at is page views, I average a dozen or two visitors here each day. Most of those are my friends and family, many of whom are compelled by me to keep track of What I Believe because I have nudged them that way.
Then, every so often, I get one of those unsolicited comments. The one that says, "You are wrong and you should be ashamed of yourself." Or maybe, "Keep up the good work." Either of these come as a pleasant surprise, since as far as I know, I'm writing these things to fill up forty-five minutes of each day, making a great big stack of my thoughts that someday will be warehoused in the Library of Congress. On a disc the size of Duran Duran's Greatest Hits. Or maybe Blogger, which has been kind enough to share this web space with me for free all these years, will simply wink out of existence and all we will have are our memories of my memories.
But let's not dwell on that now. There's still so much to be pleased about. I was able to get myself through the Pinhead Administration by blogging about it. I was able to process my feelings about moving from fourth grade back to computer teacher. You have been able to witness my shift of parenting from the seven-year-old dad to father of a teenager. We have all learned a lot. Or at least spent some quality time clicking on those links I learned to add a few years back. Enjoy the day. I know I will. And now it's back to picking those little number eights out of the rug.

The Real Deal

Everyone knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man. He told us so. In so many words way back in "Iron Man." Since then, he's been seen in a pair of sequels as well as "The Avengers." He also popped up in a cameo at the end of "The Incredible Hulk." All of these moments have been captured on film, over the past five years, in hopes of reminding us that Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. Unless you've been watching some of Iron Man's adventures on TV. Then there are plenty of choices for his alter-alter-ego.
I mention this because I overheard a group of fourth grade boys arguing the other day. This is nothing new, since fourth grade boys can argue about most anything and everything, but this particular debate focused on super heroes. One of them insisted that Iron Man was "a real guy." That makes since, since their cultural awareness as ten-year-olds would put them solidly in the movie franchise wheelhouse. For the past half-decade, Robert Downey Jr. has been the man in the iron mask. That's why it was so easy for this same kid to insist that Spider Man was not a real guy, since there have been two of them. This is the moment at which I show my age by reminding anyone else who watched the Spider Man TV show back in the seventies about Nicholas Hammond. The effects were atrocious. The costume was awful. But it was my favorite comic book hero brought to life.
The folks at Marvel helped blur this line more fully by enlisting Lou Ferrigno's help in "voicing" their Hulk as they wheeled out a third actor to play gamma ray bombarded scientist Bruce Banner. The actual Hulk was made up of tiny pixels generated in a computer somewhere, but Ed Norton, Eric Bana and Mark Ruffalo provided points of contact for those pixels. Still, obviously the Hulk is not real.
Batman? Real. He's Christian Bale. Unless you're over twenty. Then the parade begins. Superman? That one used to be easy. I guess the folks at DC Comics aren't as committed to the man behind the mask. Or maybe it's all just an illusion. I won't tell those fourth grade boys. They're still awaiting the results of this week's matchup on WWE Raw.

Lessons From The Past

I woke up with this word in my head: detente. It was probably because I had been watching a rehash of "All The President's Men" that included an attempt at reminding us that Richard Nixon wasn't all bad. After all, he gave us detente, or what the web dictionary defines as "the easing of tensions or strained relations (especially between nations)." That parenthetical is the part for which Tricky Dick gets credit. He opened China. He went to Russia and spoke to Brezhnev. While we tend to think of Ronald Reagan as the guy who ended the Cold War, he probably couldn't have done it without the groundwork laid by President Nixon: detente.
Flash forward some forty years and I look out on the playground. I see a herd of fifth graders who have spent the past six years dealing with each other in one fashion or another. Some of them are quite adept at handling themselves. Others take more coaching. At lunch a few days back, two girls who have attempted to share the lightly recognized position of princess of their class gave up any pretense of getting along and commenced to slugging it out. Not very princess-like. The physical confrontation was over in a couple of seconds. Our principal stepped in and brought them to the office where they were allowed to glare at one another from across the room while parents were called and consequences were determined. The aftermath on the yard was not as clear cut. Factions formed. The two and a half punches and slaps that were lobbed became the discussion points for a hundred and fifty kids. "Didjooseethat?"
The temperature is rising as we creep closer to June. I know that all the frayed nerves and perceived slights are starting to weigh on the students and staff of our school. We don't need to be best friends here. We just need to get along for the next six weeks. We need detente. I wonder if I could reconcile sneaking in some American History into our curriculum before the end of the year: Richard Nixon and The World Playground.

The Long Ball

It's a pretty rare occurrence when a baseball player can hit home runs on back to back days. It's even more rare when that player can hit a home run on back to back days during the same game. That's what Brandon Moss did on Monday night for the Oakland A's. In a game that lasted for six and a half hours, for nineteen innings, from Monday Night into Tuesday Morning, the Athletics held on to win, thanks for that pre-dawn tater Mister Moss sent out into the mostly empty stands. For those who stuck around, it must have been more than cathartic. It must have been historic.
Perhaps that is why I feel just a little more sheepish about how I dealt with the situation. I tuned in to watch the game after catching a score that told me Oakland was behind four to one. By the time I got the television all warmed up, they had fallen behind six to one. I told my wife that we could probably go to sleep, since it looked like the local team had run out of steam.
"Don't count them out," my wife reminded me, "These are the A's."
So we watched for a little while longer. Sure enough, in the bottom of the eighth inning, it was a one-run affair, with the A's still coming up in the bottom of the ninth. We had seen this before. Last year we were treated to fifteen of those walk-off wins, complete with the whipped cream pies and buckets of Gatorade. But it was getting late. It was a school night. We decided to put it in the hands of the baseball gods and get some shuteye.
Little did we know that the game would go on for another three and a half hours. Playing more than the equivalent of two full games, the Los Angeles Anaheim Former Disney Angels battled toe to toe with the scruffy boys from Oakland. The two teams traded runs in the fifteenth inning, and so the game continued. They played until it became the longest game in Oakland's baseball history. Shortly after one thirty in the morning, they were finished. It was epic.
I slept through it. And I earned my wife's mild scolding: "I told you so." I should have listened.

Why Not?

I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues before school about his plans for the summer. He and his wife were looking forward to a three week getaway to Europe. And suddenly I was back at the mall. With my wife. We went to the mall last Saturday night. We ate at the food court. We had Mongolian Barbecue. It was exotic, for us.
While we ate our noodles and savored the high impact plastic interior of the decor, I told her that I had this inkling about just driving up the highway and getting a hotel room. This was my devil-may-care notion that was probably fueled by the large Coke, but it came from a place that was rooted in the words that started our relationship, way back when: "Why not?" That attitude had taken me a long way. Over the years, however, the weight of adulthood with all its attendant trappings had given me all the reasons I needed to answer what was, at one time, a rhetorical question. On this particular evening, the answer was "the dog." We had wandered away from our home base without first securing care for our collective best friend. She would have been very unhappy with us had we decided to stay away. We would have earned any and all of the consequences from stranding our sixteen year old dog indoors overnight. My wife and I finished up our Mongolian Barbecue and headed back to feed the dog.
Meanwhile, my colleague was feeling stuck with his own burden. His pet bunny needed to be cared for while they were away for most of a month. "I guess it's a little like getting ready for parenthood," he imagined, "but not really." I told him he was in the right arena, just a few sections away still. Having anyone or anything dependent on you for food and bathroom breaks takes a lot of special training and commitment. We have been fortunate over the years to have had a number of good friends who have bonded with our dog and made it possible for us to carry on as if we were carefree. As for the kid, we haven't had many trips away from the homestead that didn't include him, so there's really no test for that.
But it's coming. In the past year or so, he has started to insist that my wife and I leave him and "go out on a date." Our initial responses have been mildly skeptical. Why does he want us out of the house? We've seen "Risky Business." We don't want to come home to a cracked Faberge egg and a brothel being run out of the basement. In that case, I'm pretty sure the dog would tattle on him.

Everything Old Is New Again

The Twinkie that I once kept in the butter compartment of my mother's refrigerator would have turned thirty this year. Common sense and a matter of propriety kept that snack cake from ever making it this far, but if would have been interesting to compare the old with the new. This July, those golden, creme-filled treats will be back on your local grocer's shelves a mere eight months after they so tragically disappeared. The new "bakers" of these sweet sponge confections have assured us that no labor unions will be involved in the generation of new iteration of Hostess' flagship goodie. This should allow us unfettered access to Twinkies for a good long time. What a relief.
Of course on Al Gore's Internet, one can find page after page of "secret" recipes that would allow one to create a homemade Twinkie, if one were to be so bold. This reminded me of the words my mother said to me about one of my favorite baked goods: her chocolate chip cookies. She told me, "If you like them so much, you should learn to make them yourself." That is precisely what I did. I thought myself very clever at the time, calling her bluff and all. As it turns out, it was a great deal for both of us, since all that pressure to keep the cookie jar full was taken off my mother's shoulders, and I was free to take whatever liberties I might with the ingredients and size of the cookies I baked.
Decades later, I'm still making cookies, but the fist-sized globs of dough I favored in my youth have shrunk to a more discrete one-bite size. After years of eschewing nuts, I have begun to reintroduce crushed walnuts into the mix at the request of my wife. It's back to "Chocolate Chip Classic" at our house.
Which is just fine, since that means that our interest in Twinkies remains primarily one of curiosity. Maybe when July rolls around, I'll bring home a package or two. Not to eat, mind you, just for the sentimental and experimental value.