Our Radioactive Cat

...leged to have lived with this feline in all his ups and downs and when the time came to make the decision on this treatment I didn’t think about it long. We’re fortunate to be able to afford it and I felt an obligation to make whatever time we have left with him as comfortable as possible. Until this absence this week, I didn’t fully realize what a presence he is, the way he bosses the dog, the other cat and even us around. The house is haunted by...

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I Made a Coffee Sandwich

...I used to speculate about what a “coffee sandwich” would consist of every time we went past the place. It took may years but I decided this month to bring some closure to this idle speculation. I based my prompt on the dessert sandwiches I ate on our recent trip to Japan. Typically, those sandwiches consist of a fruit and whipped cream filling served on fluffy Japanese milk bread called Hokkaido (北海道). I guess I could have invented a savory coffe...

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Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...simultaneously generate and read this textual nonsense leaving us all more time to garden, handcraft chairs and go for long walks. But that’s not, of course, the way things will work out. AI will likely just put already vulnerable people out of work. As for predictions of an AI apocalypse, what I fear more is a grinding idiocy. I’m really getting fatigued with seeing AI generated images that are just a kind of summary of the most uninteresting “il...

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Plague Times

There are two images that keep floating around in my head in this time when we genuinely seem to have a worrisome contagion at the door. One is of the 17th century beak masks worn by plague doctors. The other is the plague infected ship in Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu. Thanks to a fascinating website called Vessel Finder, you can track the real life COVID-19 infected plague ship Grand Princess, which is just off the coast of San Francisco...

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When Mushrooms Attack

...ngerous, AI generated mushroom foraging books, this seems like the perfect time for this blog to point towards the Japanese kid’s show Ultraman Taro, specifically episode 31, “Danger! The Poisonous Mushroom of Lies”. The episode opens with a giant, ambulatory mushroom, named Mushra, destroying a Japanese city. Ultraman Taro, a sort of size-shifting superhero, defeats the monster but not without a release of spores. After the battle the main protag...

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