It’s finally here. Festivus, which according to Wikipedia is “a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as an alternative to the perceived pressures and commercialism of the Christmas season.” According to Google, “People (who search for Festivus) also search for Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, New Year’s Eve, Boxing Day, and Diwali.” WTF is Diwali. Sounds like the TV brother of DiBeaver, DiWally.
I had to look that holiday up. So, back to Wikipedia. “Diwali, also called Deepavali, is the Hindu festival of lights, with variations celebrated in other Indian religions such as Jainism and Sikhism. It symbolizes the spiritual victory of Dharma over Adharma, light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.” I like the sound of that, though I have no idea what Dharma and Adharma are. It sounds like two teams competing in the College Football Playoffs.
Anyway, this is a big week for a lot of people. Not me, though. That’s why I celebrate Festivus. The celebrations of Festivus appeal to those people who like to air their grievances, participate in feats of strength, gather around a plain old aluminum pole as opposed to a highly decorated Christmas tree, have dinner, and witness miracles, AND it is also for people like me who are just plain lazy.
Festivus is the easiest holiday, way easier than all the other winter holidays that people are searching for on Google. Airing of Grievances can be as simple as getting out of bed. Sometimes all it takes is just for the alarm clock to go off to get me to start airing my grievances. Feats of Strength are relative. Once again, something as easy as getting out of bed can qualify as a Feat of Strength for me. Absolutely no pressure. That’s the spirit of Festivus.
The aluminum pole is optional. I’ve always found that an aluminum beer can works just as well, if not better. Festivus dinner is important. There’s no set meal. Eat whatever you want (or whatever you have) if you don’t have what you want. If you do have what you want, that’s a Festivus Miracle! Festivus Miracles don’t have to raise anyone from the dead or cure any diseases. Anything good that happens on Festivus is a Festivus Miracle. If nothing good happens during the entire day, that’s a Festivus Miracle, too, just not a good one.
So, I would like to wish everyone a Happy Merry whatever you celebrate, and the best Festivus ever. Check out this Festivus Dinner they had on Seinfeld.
Napoleon Bonaparte said: “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich,” suggesting that religion serves as a societal control mechanism, providing the poor with a reason to accept their situation and not revolt against the wealthy.
I find this statement to be somewhat true, even if one of the first Bible stories is about Cain murdering his brother Abel, but I find it ironic that this line was spoken by Napoleon. He rose to prominence during the French Revolution. He was only a boy at the beginning, but he knew that it was a time when the poor were merrily sending the rich off to the Guillotine, and he was on the side of the people. Those mass murders, however, only proved to be a temporary band-aid for the serious problem of income inequality. We still face it today, and it’s only getting worse.
A recent story in the news reminds me of the TV show Leverage, which centers around a prominent Insurance investigator, Nate Ford, who is played by Timothy Hutton. Nate has saved his company millions of dollars by recovering stolen artwork. His son, Sam Ford, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and Nate fought tirelessly to get the insurance company to cover the experimental treatment his son needed. However, the company refused to pay for the treatment, and Sam tragically passed away. This devastating loss led Nate to leave his job, get divorced, and spiral into alcoholism.
Then, Nate decides that he will dedicate his life to helping others who are facing overwhelming odds. The show follows a five-person team of thieves, led by Ford, who use their skills to carry out heists to help ordinary people fight against the rich and powerful, to correct corporate and governmental injustices. It’s a modern-day Robin Hood story, except that his team does not murder anyone. Eliot Spencer, the muscle on his team, will beat up bad guys left and right, but he doesn’t kill anyone. They are not vigilantes like Batman. They only provide “Leverage.”
They’re not like Paul Kersey, the character played by Charles Bronson in the 1974 film Death Wish. Paul Kersey was an architect who became a vigilante after his wife was murdered and his daughter was raped during a home invasion. That film follows his journey as he takes the law into his own hands to fight crime in New York City.
New York City is a hot spot for real-life vigilantes. Bernhard Goetz, known as the “Subway Vigilante,” was famous back in 1984. The Guardian Angels founded by Curtis Sliwa still patrol neighborhoods of New York. In a recent case, Daniel Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted of murder in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway. And now, we have the intriguing December 2024 case of Luigi Mangione who is accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, an insurance company. This is the case that reminds me of the show Leverage, even though the TV Leverage cast members never resorted to murdering anyone.
Mangione, who was not insured by UnitedHealthcare, targeted Thompson possibly because of the company’s size, record of denying claims, and his own painful back injury. This incident has reignited discussions about healthcare and insurance, much like the issues Nate Ford faced in “Leverage.”
Luigi, I assume will plead Not guilty, even though he has said, “I do apologize for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
That reminds me of a terrific scene from the play Chicago. Cell Block Tango, where the six accused murderesses sing, “He had it coming.”
As of this moment, it looks like Luigi has quite a growing following, as almost everyone knows somebody who has been screwed over by an Insurance Company. It is highly likely that somebody will start a Go Fund Me page for him, and it is also likely that the good-looking man with the washboard abs will receive a few marriage proposals from his fans.
I, of course, do not promote murder, but I do feel that those who have been screwed over by the system do deserve some form of justice. As long as the top 1% own about 26% of the total wealth, and the bottom 50% of households own only 2.5% of the total wealth, income inequality will lead to problems similar to those that sparked the French to revolt against the Aristocracy back when Napoleon was just a boy.
The weekly massacres of school children in this country have done little to bring about reform in our nation’s gun-control laws. Will the murder of one CEO have any effect?
Back in 1962, the British had a TV show called, That Was the Week that Was, which starred David Frost, who also starred in the American spin-off of the show in 1964. It satirized the news of the week and influenced later comedic shows like Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. It was a forerunner of fake-news programs like The Daily Show.
Well, now it’s December and this long year is finally about to end, so I thought I’d take a look back at 2024, and oh what a year it was. The U.S. Presidential election was held in 2024, but I’m going to ignore that here. I promised some friends that I would lay off politics for the rest of December, as an early Christmas present to them.
Politics may have dominated the news in 2024, but, fortunately for me, it wasn’t the only thing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the most talked about development in computing. Like politics, though, it also had people divided. AI had strong supporters who see it as a tool on par with the first use of fire and the invention of the wheel. It also had strong detractors who saw it as a weapon that would eventually eliminate humans from the planet, or make us slaves or pets to our robot overlords.
Originally, most AI programs available to the public just dealt with text. You could type a prompt into your computer and the AI would type back a response. Sometimes it was very accurate and at other times it was caught “hallucinating” an answer that it made up out of thin air, with no actual connection to reality (kinda like Fox News). Ooops, it’s not easy for me to go off politics cold turkey.
AI now gives us images, such as the one above, where I asked AI to show Old Man 2024 staggering at the finish line on New Year’s Day. I had to reword my description several times before the AI finally created an Old Man 2024 who didn’t look and dress like Santa Claus.
My AI photo problem was nothing compared to the Pandora’s Box of fake images that were generated by AI in 2024. Every scandal seemed to find itself accompanied by dozens of fake images that supposedly “proved” the false claims. I found it odd that AI’s photo creator doesn’t seem sure about the number of fingers people are supposed to have. In addition to everything else, AI’s training input must have included hundreds of thousands of pictures from cartoons.
Space was also a big tech topic of 2024, with various companies offering customers a taste of what it was like to be an astronaut by taking them on short flights into upper space. Elon Musk even started touting journeys to Mars. I can’t wait for the day when science can send Elon to Mars. (Ooops, I’m slipping.)
Combining big tech with AI, the concept of self-driving cars was another big topic in 2024. As usual, it had its proponents and detractors. The proponents celebrated its convenience. The detractors screamed that self-driving cars were not 100% perfected and could lead to traffic fatalities. Of course, the proponents showed data that even if a few cars did kill a few people, they were still a whole lot safer than human drivers, especially ones who had been drinking. I wondered if self-driving car companies would be held responsible for vehicular deaths since gun manufacturers are not responsible for gun deaths. I’m sure that Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency will figure that one out.
One item that made the news this year in Europe, but was ignored by American media was the reverse art theft at a German art museum. The “reverse museum heist” took place at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany. An employee, who was also an aspiring artist, decided to hang one of his own paintings in the museum’s modern art collection.
He managed to do this unnoticed because he was carrying tools for an installation project and had access to the gallery outside of opening hours. The painting, which was about 45 inches wide and 25 inches tall, hung on the wall for several hours before museum staff discovered it.
The museum staff decided to leave the painting up until closing time before taking it down. The employee was later fired and banned from visiting the museum. The German police are investigating him on charges of property damage because he drilled two small holes in the wall to hang his painting.
In January of this year, the airlines were also in the news, when an Alaska Airlines flight experienced a door flying off mid-flight. Remember that? I’ll bet they do. For the rest of their lives, too.
As this year comes to an end, the manhunt for the man who murdered an insurance company CEO, seems also to be ending with the apprehension of Luigi Mangione in a MacDonalds restaurant in Altoona, PA. One of the employees recognized him from his photo and called the cops. McDonalds, if the e-coli doesn’t get you, our employees will.
As usual, even this case had people on both sides of the fence. It seemed that people who had previous problems with their insurance companies saw a silver lining in the enormous black cloud. They (secretly, if not openly) hoped that the murder might lead to insurance companies lowering their rates and denying fewer claims. We really do need universal health care in the U.S. (Ooops, I don’t want to slip into politics again. So, I’ll let the late great Barry White do it for me.)
What intrigued me most about the CEO murder case, though, was the fact that a “ghost gun” was used. A “ghost gun” is a weapon that you can make at home using a 3-D printer. “Alexa, make me an untraceable gun.”
We’re worried about what AI can do…Heck, anything bad AI can do, we can already do better (or should that be worser?) I wonder how Congress will react to a do-it-yourself gun. Will they spring into action and outlaw the machine code that enables a 3-D printer to make such a weapon, or just blame “Tik Tok,” social media, and video games? I bet they just sit on their thumbs until somebody actually prints out an “assault ghost gun” at home and takes it to school, or to the Capital. (Ooops, I can’t seem to avoid that slippery slope into Politics.)
Don’t get me wrong. All the gun news wasn’t bad this year, though. We did all get to enjoy clip after clip of Australia’s Olympic answer to the Jamaican Bobsled Team, Rachael “Raygun” Gunn doing her now world-famous break-dancing routine. Here’s one more clip for you. I got a kick out of this short video that Terry Moore compiled for YouTube.
So, that was just a bit of the year that was. Last year, I didn’t make any New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I do have one. Stop making promises to not write about Politics and You-know-who, the orange guy, because that appears to be a harder resolution for me to keep than my usual failed-resolution of trying to lose 25 pounds.
Brother X and his girlfriend, who I now call Sister O, left this afternoon for a vacation that begins in Amsterdam. I’ve been to Amsterdam, and I know that the Dutch all speak 3 or more languages, including, but not limited to, Dutch, English, and German. So, the language barrier shouldn’t be a problem. They both enjoy traveling to foreign lands, so I thought of getting him an AI translating device for Christmas.
I asked my AI device what he/she/it thought of that, and Claude told me a story he heard about someone who had one of those devices.
Rick thought he was prepared for anything when he landed in Glasgow with his brand-new AI translation device. A confident American businessman, he was ready to seal a deal with a local manufacturing company. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything, as it turned out.
Donald MacGregor, the Scottish company owner, spoke with such a thick Glaswegian accent that the AI translation device might as well have been translating Martian. What began as a serious business meeting quickly devolved into a comedy of errors.
“Ah wis joost sayin’ aboot the contract,” Donald mumbled, his words a tornado of consonants and vowels that seemed to defy linguistic physics.
Rick’s device chirped and whirred, desperately trying to make sense of the sonic chaos. The first translation came through: “I was just saying about the ROCKET,” it announced confidently.
Confused, Rick leaned forward. “A rocket? I thought we were discussing manufacturing equipment?”
Donald’s bewildered look matched Rick’s. The device continued its wild interpretation, transforming Donald’s thick Scottish brogue into increasingly absurd statements:
“Rocket” became “Squirrel”
“Manufacturing contract” transformed into “Dancing with kangaroos”
A passionate explanation about industrial machinery somehow became “I once wrestled a unicycle in Edinburgh”
Rick’s device was working overtime, converting Donald’s authentic Scottish dialect into what could only be described as linguistic performance art. Each time Donald spoke, Rick would look more perplexed, nodding and smiling, hoping to appear professional.
“Do you understand?” Donald would ask.
“Absolutely!” Rick would respond, having no earthly idea what was actually being discussed.
The pinnacle of miscommunication came when Donald was apparently explaining detailed specifications about industrial equipment. Rick’s device helpfully translated this as: “My grandmother’s teapot knows the secret of quantum physics.”
By the meeting’s end, Rick didn’t know if he was going to sign the most bizarre business contract in history or accidentally agree to adopt a Scottish highland goat.
As they shook hands, Donald chuckled, “Ye got all that, aye?”
Rick’s device translated: “Cheese is the universal language of diplomacy.”
He smiled and nodded.
…..
Maybe I’ll wait until next Christmas, when they’ve got all the bugs out.
earlthepearl137 