Happy May Day! In 160 countries around the world today is a holiday. It’s the equivalent of our Labor Day which we celebrate in September. And making my own labored connection to another event that begins today, I imagine you have by now heard of “No Mow May.”
The “No Mow May” idea started in the UK and is only four years old. Its intent is to allow flowers to bloom and even weeds to grow on untended lawns for a lengthy stretch in spring. Its practitioners do so to provide a friendly habitat for pollinators like butterflies, grasshoppers, and particularly bees emerging from hibernation.
As with many fledgling movements it’s already controversial as to its benefits and/or pitfalls but it’s not a hardship for me to adopt, although I do enjoy mowing our lawn. In Maine of course that’s a seasonal thing which is only possible or necessary for half the year. If I do the “No Mow May” I only get to cut the grass for about five months.
I’m doing even less mowing these days because our older grandson likes to mow too so I hire him when he’s available. I’ll need to adjust his pay this year since even the lunch specials at my local Chinese restaurant are now the cost of what you used to pay for dinners.
But the sad bottomline is that our lawn isn’t much to look at. In fact as I look out the window at it, it’s badly in need of a do over. When I called it grass earlier, I think I exaggerated.
Yes, I’ve tried reseeding on my own and one year we even hired an outfit that calls itself “The Turf Doctor” to aerate and do that. I believe I followed their followup instructions diligently but neither I nor the good doctor could revive the patient enough to take it off of life support.
All is not lost however. Later this summer if the rain is adequate and the light is just right, there might be enough green to cover what’s bare and it will look fine compared to the backyard of the only other house I have ever owned.
Our property here in Maine is about as small as the town of Camden permits for a single family home but the amount of lawn I had to mow on my Los Angeles property was a postage stamp that could fit on the envelope of what I mow now.
As a kid I remember cartoons with Elmer Fudd shooting his rifle down a hole while that “scwewy wabbit” he thought he was obliterating munched on a carrot beside him.
The Looney Tunes writer/animators must have had Southern California backyards like mine and if I could draw, perhaps I could have been one of them. Why? My evidence for believing that I know the source of some of their stories is summed up in a word: GOPHERS!
I had been a gofer of another breed before encountering the rodent variety. My first summer job was at my local newspaper where I discovered that the managing editor hid nude pictures of women under his desk pad. How did I know? One day I spilled his coffee. But real gophers?
When I had watched those cartoons, Elmer may have thought he was firing into the ground at Bugs Bunny but shortly after we bought our house in Los Angeles I suspected the writers might have been simply superimposing what they wished they could do to the critters responsible for the holes in their lawns.
One day I spotted a mound of dirt on top of where grass should have been. In short order more mounds appeared. The internet existed back in the 1980s but the first search engine wasn’t released on it until 1990. I had to actually ask a neighbor to learn what was going on.
Once I knew I needed to find out what to do and that was when things became, well, cartoonish. I took the do-it-yourself route and I morphed into WiIe E. Coyote chasing Road Runner.
I found a hole under one mound and stuck a hose down it and turned on the water and waited… and waited… and waited.
Gophers construct a serious network of underground tunnels some of which can be as deep as six feet. As a kid in Pennsylvania my friends and I fantasized about digging a hole to China. I’ve found a tool on the internet of today that calculates exactly where we would have come out and it’s in the ocean off the western side of Australia.
By standing there with my hose for longer than it might have taken to play all four sides of the Beatles White Album I now wonder if I may have contributed to sea level rise on the other side of the world even before our current and frightening awareness of climate change.
My next move was a trip to a hardware store where I got some coaching and bought gopher bait (i.e. poison) in the form of pellets. Yes, that was arguably a cruel step but it didn’t stop the demolition andthe yard was now looking like the burial mounds of the fallen heroes in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.
Things were getting a bit desperate and my next purchase from the armory of pest weaponry was the equivalent of going nuclear– I bought a gopher bomb!
The thing had a fuse and after you lit it and placed it yelling “Fire in the hole!” was optional.
What happened next you might not believe but I’d swear under oath that it did. As I stood there waiting to hear an explosion, instead I witnessed an expulsion. The bomb slowly appeared again. It was being pushed back to the surface.
OK, I must admit the bomb wasn’t going to explode anyway. It was supposed to fill the gopher housing project with smoke and I assume get the tenants to surrender waving miniature white flags. That didn’t happen.
After ruling out grenades and flamethrowers I was down to my last option which in retrospect probably should have been my first— gopher traps. After placing one I came home that afternoon and…
THE END
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I began working at ABC News in 1983. My office was on the “Prospect Lot” at the eastern end of Hollywood. It’s called ABC Television Center West now but its history dates back to 1913 when it was built as the Vitagraph Studio in the earliest days of motion pictures. Al Jolson was heard claiming “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in the “talkie” the Jazz Singer that was filmed there in 1927.
Network television shows came and went. Lawrence Welk floated champagne bubbles and Dick Clark shot hits up the charts from Prospect’s sound stages. Let’s Make a Deal and Family Feud transacted and bickered there.
When I arrived, Prospect had already been the home of the daytime soap opera General Hospital for 20 years and amazingly still is. The doctors from both G.H. and Grey’s Anatomy queued in their fake blood splattered scrubs at the Lot’s commissary. The ABC Los Angeles television affiliate KABC was located on the Lot and so was the network’s news bureau.
I mention all this because at one time the place had hundreds of employees and most of them were unionized. The largest of these was the one I was in– NABET (The National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians). Camera and sound people, videotape operators and editors as well as news writers and producers were all in the union.
When I was hired permanently in 1984, there were over 400 “NABETs” at Prospect but by the time I left in 2010 there were fewer than 100. The drop in union membership nationally is not recent news. In the mid 1950s 35% of American workers were in unions. Last year it was 10%.
Some of the attrition is the result of companies wanting freelance work forces– we called them “daily hires” –without any obligation to provide them health insurance or pensions. But automation and robotics have also increasingly been reasons why union workers have been displaced.
What does this have to do with today’s cartoon? Movie and television writers– the Writers Guild of America –went on strike yesterday and one of the big issues they want to negotiate in addition to wages, staffing and terms of employment is likely the opening skirmish over the future of storytelling.
The Writers’ strike has everything to do with jurisdiction. Its negotiators are confronting the question of who will control the impact and implementation of artificial intelligence and the use of computer generated dialogue and scenes created by a.i. that could alter or even replace the original work of the writer.
At ABC News in 1998 I and over 2,000 other NABET members were “locked out” by the Walt Disney Company after our union staged a one day strike during negotiations for a new bargaining agreement. The issue was health care benefits but it was after the other outstanding matters had been resolved and a new contract ratified that the real winner and loser became apparent.
The union surrendered jurisdiction– I’d like to think unknowingly but certainly naively –over technologies coming down the pike. Old technology was being replaced by new. Film had already become obsolete and replaced by videotape and tape would soon be replaced by the zeros and ones of digital innovation and an influx of computerized equipment. NABET had ceded control to operate much of it.
In New York City take a walk sometime past WABC’s news set at Columbus Ave. and 66th St. The news anchors are in the chairs looking at the cameras but the people who used to be behind those cameras are not.
The cameras move and their lenses zoom in and pull out by themselves. The algorithms embedded in the equipment can carry out actions that no longer have to be performed or directed by people. I’m not so sure I’ll be around but I wouldn’t be surprised if Max Headroom (remember him?) was waiting in the wings somewhere in Silicon Valley to make human news anchors anachronisms.
With the speed that a.i. is shaking up the world in so many areas and directions I’ll bet what those initials stand for now might soon need to be changed. How does Alien Invasion grab you?
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I’ve taken a break but the news hasn’t of course…
Remind me that if I ever decide to run for president of the United States that I should not launch my campaign on Twitter with the help of Elon Musk.
And did you know that the Walt Disney Company has decided to spend some money in Florida afterall? Let’s see there’s already Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland… Groundbreaking took place today for Karmaland.
So, let’s say you were in a canoe with Trump and DeSantis and you capsized. Both of them are in the water flailing their arms and yelling that they can’t swim. Do you try to rescue Trump first or attempt to save DeSantis?
So, now you know the kind of nightmares I’ve been having…
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