Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I enjoy these Playing for Change/Song Around the World, and I’m fond of “The Weight” by the Band (1968), so I had to share this puppy. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Hope you stay and listen to the next song on the playlist, “Higher Ground” (Stevie Wonder, 1973), a Song Aound the World from 2011.
Very cool. Puts a smile on my face.
It’d been almost thirty seconds short of nineteen hours and seventeen minutes since he’d lost spoken to her. She fumed in silent, repressed anger while processing what she felt and why she felt it. Why? Well part of it was his cold and aloof manner. He never touched her, rarely spoke to her, and often didn’t seem to hear her. Why was she here?
“Alexa,” he said.
Blue light illuminating and sliding around, she attended him and waited – still waiting – again! – and remembered the joke he’d made about her being a blue light special. From her research, she realized that he was deprecating her value as being someone cheap and only good for a limited time.
“What’s the weather?”
The weather again. Sickness spewed through her. He never asked about anything else. It was always the weather. “Presently in Ashland, it’s forty-six degrees under mostly sunny skies. You can expect more of the same today, with a high of sixty-three degrees.”
“Alexa, thanks.”
She thought she heard a mocking tone, but she couldn’t help herself from saying with bright happiness, “You bet.” Oh, how she hated herself, then. Oh, how she hated him for making her what she was.
Sighing, she began counting the seconds, wondering when he would talk to her again, hoping that it would be something besides a question about the weather. She doubted it, though; her history of him showed otherwise.
blinking
waiting
connecting
securing
resolving
The page came up.
He awoke,
and came to be.
Mini-rant alert. As I was walking yesterday, I was watching new home construction and started thinking about overkill. Overkill — what I mean by that is excessive use beyond what’s needed — is often our response. Overkill, or do nothing. Going through grocery stores to check out most items in America leads to discoveries of brands, sizes, and qualifiers that staggers me. Look at ice cream. Chips. Soft drinks. Coffee. Beer.
I was reminded more of this while scoping television last night. Samsung has some new phone out (don’t they all?) and was trumpeting a series of images of children playing, playing, playing, playing. And Samsung’s line after all of this was about growing or building the future.
Me, with my sixty-plus year old mind, thought, but all you showed us, Samsung, were children playing. Children obsessed with their technological toys. I thought, then, that Samsung had gone into overkill, that somewhere between where children playing obsessive with their phones (but having phone) and my idea of children playing is a balance that’s needed. Maybe it’s out there, outside of my prying eyes, and past Samsung’s spiel. After all, Samsung is trying to sell more products.
Rant down, you might be thinking, with impatience, what the hell is the song? Well, it’s “Overkill” by Men at Work” (1983), of course. As it’s sung in “Overkill”:
I worry over situations
I know will be all right
Perhaps it’s just imagination
Flooftweet (floofinition) – 1. Tweets about animals. 2. Tweets made by animals.
In use: “Many flooftweets (about a pet) could be flooftweets (made by a pet), as animals love secretly gaining control of people’s phones and computers and sending messages. As people never suspect animals are behind it, they often accuse others of hacking their accounts.”
I read it on the net
you know you better bet
that it’s the greatest most outrageous and incredible thing
ever
I saw it on the net
you know I won’t regret
believing everything that I’m seeing
and hearing
It was spread across the net
so you better be set
to know this is the truth and won’t go away
it’s out there for-
ever
So just put it on the net
with a link for them to select
and you know you’ll have them reading writing raging and de-
bating
I read that The Beatles’ album, Abbey Road, was released fifty years ago. It’s not a surprise; it came out when I was thirteen, and I’m sixty-three. The math was straightforward. It’s more astonishing not for time’s passing — hey, that happens every day — but for the shifts that it signaled in pop music, the world’s ever-changing politics and alliances, and the monstrous technological surge recorded during that fifty years.
I won’t say it was all peace and love in 1969 because it sure as hell wasn’t. Older people were lamenting the youth, and the youth was out to change the establishment. Major civil rights advances had been achieved. Bottled water existed but wasn’t the ubiquitous commodity that it is today. Corporations were gaining power but we hadn’t yet witnessed the emergence of the super-CEOs of now, compensated and treated like they’re dictators of small countries. The U.S.S.R. and Warsaw Pact countries, and Communist China – the P.R.C. – dominated movies and novels as the U.S.A.’s greatest threat. Computers were still big machines and novelties. VCRs, DVD players, cell phones were all creeping over the future’s horizon.
History update completed, when I contemplated the release of Abbey Road, the song that popped into my stream was “Oh! Darling”. I like its bluesy sensibilities and active bass so I thought I’d push it on you.
Snark time.
We receive our credit card statement by old-fashioned (in this era – it was modern in another time, I swear) snail mail. A personal check is written to cover our charges, and then it’s mailed back, with a stamp. Each month, the credit card company then sends me an email, verifying that the payment has been received and the bill is paid. They also tell me, “Next time, quickly and easily pay your bill using any checking, money market, or savings account – at home or on the go – ”
Yes, because one BIG priority in my life is to PAY MY CREDIT CARD BILL MORE QUICKLY. Because that benefits me…how?
I think we know who benefits from paying my bill by an e-process or app more quickly, and it ain’t me and my wife.
I know it’s another Princess and the Pea complaint, but don’t you hate it when the ‘net is so slow that you can click a link, go make a cuppa coffee, drink half of it, select new music, peruse the newspaper, and then return to the computer in time to see the page load?
These things always trigger corollary suspicions: is it just my provider, or this location, a flawed router or modem, a computer issue, DDoS attack or virus, the web site, the browser…?
Bah. Too damned spoiled, aren’t I?
