New Power Generation

 "The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign." 

This was the advice from a former real estate tycoon and convicted felon. Odd combination, you might think, but it seems to suit the Beast With Tiny Hands just fine. 

The suggestion that you would be stupid not to let some faceless corporation build two to three acre monstrosities that will suck up your community's natural resources so that the real estate convict can continue to generate ugly memes that further his vision of how the world should be. 

Like all con men, the current resident of the ruins of the White House would rather that you di/n't take too long examining the "details" of any and all plans to plop one of these energy vortexes into the vacant lot near you. Each one of these server farms use as much power as one hundred thousand homes. I'm not sure if you've noticed that lately gas, electricity and so on have all become more expensive. Americans paid ten percent more for electricity on average in 2025 than the year before. The Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory reported that by 2028, data centers could be sucking up twelve percent of U.S. electricity. 

And how about water? Estimates put daily use for AI could reach thirty-two billion gallons of water a day for the creation of funny cartoon versions of your family photos. And if you have taken a look at a map of where these centers are popping up, you may have noticed that they are frequently popped into locations that are already water stressed like southern Arizona, the Colorado River Basin and Texas.

Then there is the matter of powering them. Gas and diesel powered generators are used to keep your cat memes coming. These are the ones that show up before the public has a chance to react. They tend to spring up long before environmental impact statements can be prepared or the Supreme Court can give their personal okey dokey on the continuation of construction on the ballroom that is way out of scale for the hands of the oligarch making those funny videos of ducks. 

The only reason communities would not want a data center n their back yard is because they want to have a say in how their community's resources are used and/or abused. If some of this money and energy were put into universal health care, maybe the aforementioned community might be willing to take the risk. Just think of the number of servers you could slide into the space occupied by the average golf course. 

Just sayin'. 

Burnout

 My morning commute was interrupted by a pair of blue cars, with a third one waiting by the curb. As I approached the intersection, the first one roared to life and began spinning donuts. After a couple passes, the second joined in behind the first, sending clouds of burned rubber into the pre-dawn sky. 

I had a number of possible responses. The first was to try and ride around the intersection. I didn't feel like going out of my way. Nor did I feel that making any sort of attempt to disrupt or disturb their absurd ritual. 

Both cars had a passenger hanging out of their window, documenting the ridiculousness on cell phone video. It did occur to me that taking my own pictures or video might cause these young men to pause in their revelry. Their stinky, hot, testosterone-infused revelry. 

I kept my phone in my pocket. 

As they finished up a third and forth circle around the intersection, I was the only bystander to this showcase. I wondered if this was merely a rehearsal for some later occasion when they might be cheered on by a larger crowd. I stood there, hands resting on my handlebars, standing astride my bicycle, waiting for the show to end. 

The sideshow. 

The first car peeled off and sped down the street with his partner close behind. I waited for a moment before proceeding on my way, making sure that these early morning chuckleheads were not going to come screeching back as I made my way across the street. To my mild relief, they had begun to tear around the corner a block down, allowing me to continue on my way to work. 

Through the stench and mess they had just created. 

It only occurred to me when I got to school that any one of the chuckleheads involved could have been former students of mine. So very proud. 

A Look Into The Past

 I miss my mom.

This is true just about every day, but it was felt acutely by me last Saturday night. 

While flipping about the channel lineup on our television box, I landed as I often do on Turner Classic Movies. I did this as part of a routine that has me patrolling the hundreds of possible stations by leapfrogging over the flotsam and Hallmark to land on the islands of movie outlets that will still offer us commercial-free watching. TCM is an oasis of sorts since their internal promotions are generally for their own extensive library of films without spending too much time promoting Bill Maher or a bunch of dragons. It is also where my mother spent a great deal of time in her golden years, watching the movies of her youth.

On this particular evening, my wife was feeling just a tad out of sorts, and so as we finished up dinner I rolled on down the dial to that spot where I figured we might find some quiet satisfaction. 

We did. 

Cover Girl, starring Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth had just begun. The all-singing, all-dancing feature from 1944 was just the ticket for pushing the current event malaise away, returning us to those days of yesteryear when movies were escape. Showbiz was a hard-luck chance that every boy and girl was willing to endure for that one chance at stardom. And love. Rita and Gene danced and sang in glorious Technicolor to songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. It was, as the name of the channel suggested, a classic. 

I longed for the opportunity to share our experience with my mother, who would have been able to supplement the TCM host's rapturous memories of the production. She would have been so happy to have shared her own account of that bygone era, and remind us all of "the good old days." 

When it was over, after a quick break, Fred Astaire joined Ms. Hayworth in another musical romp called You'll Never Get Rich. By this time, my wife was transfixed. Her mood had escaped the cellar from which it had been dwelling, and she went to bed with a goofy smile. 

I could thank the folks at TCM, but I would also like to appreciate the tutelage of my mom, who opened that door for me so very long ago. 

I miss her. 

Trial

 It could have been the setting. 

Leaning back in the padded chair, pillow behind my head, and a needle stuck into each arm so as to immobilize me for just over two hours, this seemed like the optimal position in which to subject myself to Nuremberg. The 2025 retelling of the events of 1945 in post-war Germany was something that I had initially avoided going to my local cinema to endure. Hadn't we just decided that Nazis were bad and deserved to be punished? 

At that time, there were more than a few winks to be shared about how "history repeats itself" all while watching history repeat itself. But this couldn't really be. It's one thing to allude to fascism. It's another to make one to one correspondence to the Second Trumpreich to the Third Reich. 

Yet, as I lay there, strapped to that comfy chair with my blood making its slow progress from one arm through the platelet stripping machine back into my other arm, I bore witness to the trial of Hermann Goring, portrayed by Russell Crowe. I watched U.S. Army psychiatrist Rami Malek, portrayed by Freddie Mercury, work to understand and then reveal the hidden weaknesses of Hitler's second in command. 

Spoiler alert: It turns out that the best way to get inside this slab of a Reichsmarshall was to appeal to his vanity. It seems that he, along with a great many of your big Nazis, were narcissists. Far more concerned with their places in history and on the pecking order to the head pecker than actually solving the problems of their country. At one point, the prosecution that has put Hermann and his goons on trial lists the countries and territories invaded by Nazis in their insistence that they had been their all along. Like Putin with Ukraine. Like the convicted felon and his Sharpie. 

As I watched history play out in front of me, with my bleeding under the strict observation of a medical professional, I began to wonder why I hadn't selected a binge of Gabby's Dollhouse instead of this two and a half hour reminder of just how awful human beings have been and apparently still can be. 

When it was all over, and Goring avoided the hangman's noose by ingesting cyanide, the psychiatrist, now discharged returns to America, where he writes a book and becomes an alcoholic and spends the rest of his life warning about the potential resurgence of a Nazi regime before he commits suicide. By cyanide poisoning. 

The medical professional pulled out the needles and put band-aids on my arms. I surrendered my headphones and went back out into the world, less a few billion platelets. And happy to have my reality grounded once again in what could be. 

Is There Really Any Such Thing As Permanent Ink?

 I have, in the past, written in this space about one Amerigo Vespucci. If that name doesn't immediately tickle your memory center, I remind you that we are living in the United States of Amerigo because some saucy wanderer named Christopher Columbus chose to scribble his buddy Amerigo's name on a map when he figured he had found India. It would have taken an even bigger leap of ego to declare the continent into which he ran his ships Christophia, or some such idiocy. 

At least that sort of idiocy was connected with an arduous voyage across the Atlantic at a time when most of the planet believed that they lived on a flat plane upon which the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria might have fallen off into the abyss. Nope. Not this time. The convicted felon who seems to have a spokesperson role with Sharpie pens made an Executive Order in which he declared the name of Lake Ontario would be "forever" changed to "Lake America." 

Even though this body of water has been recognized for four hundred years by the Wendat name Ontario. No other country or cartographers outside the "united" states is compelled by this order to make any changes. This is just the adjudicated rapist's method of projecting his idiotic spasm of frustration with our neighbors to the north regarding trade negotiations. You know: Canada. The land mass he proposes should become our fifty-first state. 

This echoes his tantrum of a year and a half ago when on a whim he chose to order executively that The Gulf of Mexico be hereby named "The Gulf of Mexico." This ignored five hundred years of precedence and was accomplished not by any diplomatic or military means. It was done primarily for show, and like Lake Ontario, no one outside of "official US databases" is required to go along with this charade. It's another in a series of extremely white trash attempts by the Second Trumpreich to deny the rest of the world in which we all live. 

History is written by the victors, according to folks like Winston Churchill who happened to be the winner of a war. The former game show host and pedophile in the ruins of the White House has on little if anything except two contested elections, and most certainly not the war he declared in order to take people's minds off the fact that he was best friends with the most notorious pedophile in history. He hates to lose. Witness the tarp that still hangs in front of one of his most ridiculous renaming efforts on the Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts. 

Make no mistake. This is not a winner. This is not any sort of adventurer. This is a man grasping, not at straws, but a Sharpie. 

Not Just A Sweet Transvestite

 Confession time: I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theater once. 

Once. 

I had friends and acquaintances in high school who made a weekly pilgrimage to the midnight showings at the UA Regency theater just off the Pearl Street Mall. They dressed up. They recited the lines. They carried in newspapers and toilet paper and squirt guns. Not unlike the way I absorbed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by listening to my brothers prattle on endlessly about them, I gained a rather thorough connection to all that went on during those late-night viewings from my friends. 

It was one of those friends who eventually became my roommate for several years who had not only participated in the Rocky shenanigans, but had taken note of one Tim Curry, who played Doctor Frank-N-Furter, having originated the role on stage back in jolly old England. And not just any brief connection, but went out and purchased the solo albums of Mister Curry. When I lived with him, I was able to become familiar with the "hits" he produced during his recording career. 

I Do The Rock. 

Working On My Tan.

Simplicity. 

And many more. 

But a world that already had a Freddie Mercury really needed a Tim Curry to be an actor. For me, most notably, he was the original Pennywise the Clown. And the butler in Clue. Mister Curry more than held his own on a pirate ship crewed by Muppets. 

And that voice. He made the noises of many an animated character, primarily villains. Like Hexxus, the toxic pollution spirit in Ferngully. Not quite so evil, but more confused was the pater familias of the Thornberry clan, Nigel. 

Now all those sounds have been silenced, but we can linger on their echoes, thanks to recordings and memories of fifty years ago, when there was a light - over at the Frankenstein place. Tim Curry stomped and pranced and made his way devilishly across the Terra. 

He will be missed.

Aloha, Tim. 

Stasis

 In Stand By Me, one of the young searchers makes note of a TV program that was popular back when the movie was set: "Wagon Train's a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training." This musing, posed by Will Wheaton in the role of Gordie, tends to be obscured by the very vehement discussion that is taking place around the same time between Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell pondering whether Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman. 

But it was Gordie's observation that came to me as I watched an episode of HBO's Stuart Fails To Save The Universe. For those of you who may not have fallen under the spell of episodic television as it now occurs in limited chunks on streaming services, this is a spin-off of the now settled Big Bang Theory. In this "new" series, a phalanx of secondary characters from the old show are put into a situation for comedy that involves a machine that allows them to hop from one reality to another. This very literal plot device has them moving from one set of circumstances to another, each one conveniently tailored to fit the half-hour format. Once I got to the fourth episode with my wife, I began to wonder exactly what the point was. They just kept wagon training. 

Sadly enough for me, this troublesome bit of ennui surrounding television does not exist solely in my relationship to Stuart and his dimension-tripping pals. I feel it more and more as I watch any show that pretends to prolong the contractual obligations to the network upon which it appears. Sitcoms by their very nature are stuck with a group of players whose predicaments tend to torment them for twenty-four minutes only to be resolved just before that last commercial break. This format is periodically skewed by a "special two-part episode," not to be confused with "a very special episode," which tends to be less about extending a story but instead providing a thoughtful examination of a serious social problem with special guest Henry Winkler. 

Shortly after that, the denizens of that TV neighborhood will get right back to wagon training. 

I have considered what might have happened if the castaways on Gilligan's Island had ever really been rescued. What sort of post-traumatic syndrome would await those seven victims of a shipwreck once they were returned to the relative comfort and safety of "the mainland?" My guess is that they would eventually have found a way to retreat back to the isolation and anonymity of that deserted island. After fifteen years of living off of coconuts and pineapple, I suspect that their intestines might explode upon ingesting their first cheeseburger after a decade and a half. 

I'm guessing they would have been better off if they had just kept wagon training.