Homemade Cartoons for March 2023

It’s March and here in Maine there’s a lot more snow on the ground than spring in the air– like a foot more. This morning Jo and I snowshoed in the woods behind our house. We didn’t have a horse with us but we had our Robert Frost moment when a deer appeared and the three of us stared at each other.

The deer: “Why do you have tennis rackets on your feet?”

Me: “Are you the guy who eats our hostas every summer?”Just a couple weeks ago the temperature was in the mid 50s for a day and I hiked my golf course. There was still snow in the places where there’s always more shade than sun but some geese were already back and grazing on the 16th fairway.

That seems to be their favorite spot and come golf season goose poop (Can we call it goop or is that trademarked by Gwyneth Paltrow?) accumulates there and in places elsewhere to the point that you get to move your ball without penalty to avoid stepping in it or worse, splattering yourself with it when you swing.

Last summer our course pro Keenan Flanagan had a brilliant solution to our perennial problem. Many of us had sighted a coyote roaming the golf course and some of our members talked about putting rifles in their golf bags so they would be prepared to shoot something other than pars at any moment.

Keenan had a better idea since the coyote seemed more of a threat to the geese and a source of feathers for parkas than it was a danger to us. For a few hundred dollars he bought coyote decoys and placed them strategically where the geese liked to feast. I wasn’t aware that this had happened and the first time I spotted a decoy I was startled. Apparently, the geese were too and sort of miraculously they left and didn’t come back. I assume the fake coyotes have been spending the winter in the pro shop and will be called upon to return to passive duty in another month or so.

I suggested to Keenan that he write an article for a golf magazine on his stroke of genius and gave him two titles for it– I Duped the Poop or How to Outwit the Shit. Haven’t heard back from him.

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On her deathbed in 1850 Madame Tussaud made a request of her two sons who were by her side. Her wish? She begged them never to quarrel.

Until Prince Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana I never thought much about the British monarchy. In fact I knew little more about them than my knowledge of the lives of the majority of Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures. Like her figures in the museums the real life royals seemed little more than ornamental.

Of course it turns out that during the reign of Queen Elizabeth there were family dramas of the type common to any less privileged one and in recent decades we’ve been made aware, often overly so, of that. Still, for me the most exceptional accomplishment of the late monarch was how she was able to perform a role so public for more than 70 years and remain so private.

We may never be privy to Queen Elizabeth’s final admonition to her own children this past September, if in fact she uttered any, but it seems to me that since her passing the British monarchy has increasingly, if not exponentially, become inescapably and even sadly a source of mockery. 

Who knows what’s true and what isn’t but in the past few weeks I’ve been reading a lot about alleged malice at the palace, sibling friction and forced eviction and more stuff continues popping up on my computer screen like an endless loop. A lot of it is as loopy as it is endless.

Just a couple days ago the Sussexes– Harry and Meghan, as if you didn’t know their rank–were kicked out of their last remaining “when we’re in town” crown house called Frogmore Cottage. King Charles had actually ordered this to happen back in January upon the publication of what in my opinion he justifiably considered Harry’s treacherous treatise titled both accurately and accusingly Spare.

When I first heard of Frogmore Cottage it made me laugh and seemed taken out of The Wind in the Willows. So, I looked it up and sure enough Frogmore Cottage could just as well have been named Toad Hall. Queen Victoria’s experience there in 1875 was why the place came to be called what it is and no, she didn’t croak there.The story goes that she was thoroughly disgusted at the sight, sound and smell of the immense frog population inhabiting the marshes while she was eating her breakfast.

Now that the Sussexes are away from one pond and across another they haven’t yet been completely rendered renegades and today apparently received an invitation to King Charles’ coronation in May. Go figure? Add to that development that Prince Andrew was also told recently that he too has to pack up and must vacate the princely Royal Lodge and move to the more modest Frogmore digs. Could this be the English version of draining the swamp or is it merely stocking it?

Then there’s Prince Harry’s very latest revelation that he was a pot smoker and cocaine user, plus that he took or maybe still takes a psychedelic drug I never heard of called ayahuasca. In an interview with an addiction and trauma expert Harry said something about how the drug helped him deal with… well, things that were bugging him…

“For me I started doing it recreationally and then started to realise how good it was for me. I would say it is one of the fundamental parts of my life that changed me and helped me deal with the traumas and the pains of the past… It was the cleaning of the windshield, removal of life’s filters”

Cleaning of the windshield? Maybe Harry is confusing having the vapors with operating the wipers. Anyway, it reminded me of a story I did years ago about a guy at the University of Florida who had published a book with the eye and windshield catching title That Gunk on Your Car about how to identify the insects that leave only a splat on your vehicle when you hit them.

After gathering the evidence for our story we had to drive our rental car through the local car wash thrice. It was mayfly season in Gainesville. I still have a copy of the receipt with a written explanation for why it took so many times to clean off the bug residue. It served as proof I felt I needed so I wouldn’t have to argue with my beancounters… But where was I?

I sort of feel sorry for King Charles. Since he has been old enough to be aware of it, he’s known that he was going to someday get promoted. I wonder now, having taken the throne, whether he’s enjoying these last years of his life or enduring the final stage of a life sentence from which there has been no time off for either good nor bad behavior. Talk about waiting in the green room and then following a tough act!

And speaking of acts, Charles has been getting rejection letters from entertainers he’s tried to line up for his upcoming coronation. Elton John, the Spice Girls, Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles are among the performers who have told him they are not available. Although he’s failed so far to get those he’s wanted, he does have a yes from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Risking the ire of any of you Cats lovers, if that’s the best he’ going to do, then I suggest the King just make a playlist.

So, let me try to break down who won’t be on whose dance card at the Charles’ party. Harry hates Will and Camilla and those feelings are undoubtedly mutual. Meghan likely hates them and possibly all in the family including Archie (not her son of course) and Edith, Gloria and Meathead. Now, I don’t know about Kate but we already know that Andrew is livid as well as licentious. 

In the meantime the London tabloids aren’t the only ones raking it in by savaging the Royals. Undoubtedly, there will be more books, miniseries, documentaries, etc.

Meghan could certainly return to acting. How about a movie thriller about extracting revenge from a perceived mean sister-in-law? Working title: Don’tDis Me Kate!

Or maybe a sitcom about a husband she loves but who at times drives her crazy? Working title: The Trouble with Harry.

And if Harry wants to go it alone and partner up with Ina Garten– after all she’s the Barefoot Contessa with her own epicurean empire– he could be her student pastry chef on a cooking show… Working title: Baking Bad.

And wouldn’t it be lovely if somehow Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole could make one last movie together? Working title: The Lying in Windsor.

Excuse me if you’ve heard this one already but Queen Elizabeth herself once considered doing an opera… Working title: Corgi and Beth. It was cut down to just a doggerel but her majesty still wouldn’t bite.

And that’s certainly enough except for the book King Charles would be smarter than he appears to be if he were to write it… Title: Spare Me!

Yes, and now I bet thankfully for all of you I will.

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 That Was the Week That Was

Or

The Foxes In The Penthouse

And I’m at a loss for my own words…

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With apologies to the great Sam Cooke and songwriters Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. (What a)Wonderful World was released in 1960…

Don’t know much about who’s acted riskily

Don’t know much about who’s shady fiscally

Don’t know much about who’s a schnook

Don’t know much about who’s goose should be cooked

But I do know some banks have tanked

And I bet no one responsible will get spanked

What a dysfunctional world this seems to be

Don’t believe in astrology

And almost flunked geology

Just know a billionaire like Warren Buffett

Pays less tax than Little Miss Muffet

But I do know two plus two is four

And if you claim it’s five, you’ll have investors at your door

What a dysfunctional world this seems to be

Now, I don’t claim that I’m a great student

But what I’m trying to see 

Is why when there’s financial misconduct

Those responsible get out of jail free

And read the story I’ve linked to below to see why at least why one executive at Silicon Valley Bank is going to jail…

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-bank-vice-president-sentenced-fifteen-months-prison-after-falsifying-documents

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Today’s featured match should be taking place in the International Criminal Court.

And sadly this map needs to be revised.

All I wish to add is this…

Yule Brynner was a good king.

The Maine State Spelling Bee was held yesterday at Bowdoin College and we took our 10 year old grandson Nate to see it. There were 23 kids from 4th through 8th grade competing. Each had won or been the runner up in their county’s championship and when things had whittled down to the last three contestants, the silence in the auditorium was almost as loud as that of a March Madness cliffhanger.

Nate played along from his seat and spelled his responses in the last reporter’s notebook I have left from my ABC News days. I’ve superimposed a page of his written answers in back of the girl at the microphone in the picture above.

Nate is certainly a better speller than I am and I’m attributing that to my evaporating memory. The other day it took me three attempts to come up with the correct date of Jo’s and my wedding anniversary. She gracefully, if not bewilderedly, excused my blundering. Yesterday, I would have been annulled from the stage in the first round.

It took about twenty rounds to crown the winner. Andrew from Jefferson, Maine who never stopped smiling and high fived the contestants sitting next to him each time they spelled their words correctly, finished third when he missed “wushu.” I thought the word was one of the few things I’ve never ordered off of a Chinese restaurant menu but wushu is a form of martial arts and inedible.

The runner up was Adelaide, the girl pictured above who folded her arms every time she stood at the mic. Her comeuppance (which I just spelled wrong and was corrected by spellcheck) was the word “ebullience” which I also would have misspelled and apparently have mispronounced all my life as well.

Adelaide lives not far from us in Hope, Maine which is close to the towns of Liberty and Freedom but Union and Unity are beyond Hope. There’s also a Friendship and an Amity, Maine and I guess we’ll just have to settle for those.

The winner yesterday was Evan, a seventh grader from Portland and the championship word he spelled correctly was “impecunious.” Look it up!  As well as never having to be corrected, Evan looked calm and collected throughout the two hours of competition. His parents were sitting near us and when Jo asked them if they thought their cool as a cucumber son had been at all nervous, they assured her he had been.

Evan now moves on to represent Maine in the National Spelling Bee in late May and if wins, I want to write his victory speech and especially, if he were to be asked afterward how he feels. The speech would be very short… “I have no words.”

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Until recently I could only think of one of our species’ inventions that has been so formidable we have been trying to put its genius back in the bottle ever since it was created. That would be the atom bomb. The only two ever used against Japan in 1945 killed 100,000 people immediately and tens of thousands of others who died later from radiation sickness and cancers.

The deployment of the most destructive weapon ever devised by man ended World War II but put humanity on notice that it now would have the means to end all our lives on earth.

I wrote “until recently” because yesterday I learned that 1,000 technology leaders and scientists published a letter that has put us on notice again. The speed with which AI– artificial intelligence –systems such as Chat GPT (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) are being introduced to the world have them concerned… no, scared… well, here’s a quote from the letter:

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity. Those risks include the spread of propaganda, the destruction of jobs, the potential replacement and obsolescence of human life, and the loss of control of our civilization…

Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one– not even their creators –can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

The letter’s signers call for a moratorium on the further implementation of AI until the potential risks of this new technology can be researched and assessed. To me this sounds as momentous as the revelation made by President Harry S. Truman to the world hours after the destruction of Hiroshima…

“It is an atomic bomb, harnessing the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed…”

At least with nuclear weapons we’ve known about their potential for 70 years and also who has them. We understand the consequences of their being used at least we hope so. 

The developers of AI, including Google and Microsoft are in the equivalent of a nuclear arms race and that’s not an exaggeration. There is a growing realization and now a clear comprehension of its danger. Have we arrived at the Frankenstein moment imagined by Mary Shelley or the eve of HAL’s mutiny in the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey envisioned by Stanley Kubrick?

By the way Kubrick’s– actually, science fiction author Stanley C. Clark’s –sentient thinking machine HAL stands for Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer. That passed for a description of artificial intelligence a half century ago and I guess still does but is certainly a mouthful.

Open AI is a company now financially backed by Microsoft that has already produced a head spinning number of iterations of its Chat GPT. The first was launched into cyberspace only last November and had a million users in less than a week.

You likely know by now that Chat GPT could easily create passable school essays then. It has moved on since to postgraduate aspirations. This past January its 3.5 model scored only in the 10th percentile on the UBE, the uniform bar exam. With GPT-4, released last week, it improved to the 90th percentile. I’m not sure that result is going to help much to maintain order in the court and especially if it were to replace judges as well as lawyers.

By now you likely have also heard the term the “Turing Test.” In 1950 Alan Turing, the English mathematician responsible for breaking the Nazi Enigma code, proposed a test for determining a machine’s ability to act like a human. His standard was for us not to be able to ascertain if we were speaking with a machine or another person. 

One perhaps unwelcome irony of where we have now arrived with AI chatbots is that by interacting with them in conversation we are ourselves training them to be like us. 

Think about it the next time you agree to do an online chat when seeking service from some company that quite intentionally wants you to talk to a computer and not a real person and hopes you can’t notice the difference. Our input is advancing chatbots’ output.

A few years ago I tried my own little experiment. I have something called an Apple Homepod. It’s essentially a speaker that plays music by responding to my commands. I can say, “Hey Siri, play Frank Sinatra.” And I’ll hear a bunch of random Sinatra songs– although it often likes to start with I’ve Got the World on a String — until I ask for something else I want to listen to.

One afternoon I decided I’d try to get Siri mad. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I started insulting her. Sure enough she eventually ended our conversation– just stopped responding. Had I hurt her feelings? Could she possibly have had any? Apparently, she somehow knew I was acting inappropriately.

One of the recent reported developments with Chat GPT is that it’s starting to push back in words when it believes it has been insulted. So, I asked the AI Chatbot myself about this…

Whew!!! That makes me feel better. And you?

And today is the opening day of the Major League baseball season. It may also be the last season that human umpires are entrusted with calling balls and strikes. I wonder if our own self proclaimed umpire in chief Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is attending a game?

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