My sister and I were talking about how Mom sometimes talks to Alexa as if it’s a person. That reminded me of this old SNL skit. Hope you laugh as much as I did.
Cheers
The Comparison: Computer, Trump
It feels like my computer is starting to treat me like it’s Trump. It doesn’t tell me what’s going on or give me a reliable time window.
I’m accustomed to my computer telling me to do things but explaining why it’s doing things. They gave me options: do you want to update and shutdown, or shutdown without updating? Other options were also available.
Along those lines, the computer would inform me about how long it would take — three minutes, two minutes, six.
Yes, they were using computer time. This is not ordinary time. Comparable times are shopping time and waiting time.
“It’ll be just a minute,” I hear. “Maybe two.” Those minutes compound into ten. Fifteen.
Worse, though, are NFL minutes. Especially the last two minutes of a half or game. I did some research and the average final two minutes of an NFL game lasts ten to twenty minutes. Some estimates show that the final two minutes of a four-quarter NFL football game can consume about five to ten percent of the game’s total time, which is wild if you think about it.
The NFL does give us a ‘two-minute warning’. Unfortunately, they’re very terse about it. “This is the two-minute warning.” They should add, “The next two minutes can take anywhere from two and half minutes to eternity. Go use the restroom now, get something to eat and drink, and let your family know where you are.”
Computer time has now overtaken the NFL’s final time minutes as ‘the time that can’t be measured’. My computer doesn’t tell me many times now how long updates or searches will take. It leaves it vague: “This might take a few minutes.”
You think?
I was running a process to check for memory leaks the other night. Yes, on my computer, not for me.
Anyway, the computer warned me, “This might take a few minutes.”
Thirty minutes later, I was still waiting for an update.
And that’s like Trump. Time doesn’t mean anything when he makes promises or projections. Well, neither do facts, for the most part.
For example: Trump was asked when he would come up with his replacement for ACA. Two weeks, he told us, over five years ago.
When will the Iran war end? “When I feel it in my bones.”
Great.
Sounds just like my computer.
When will the search be finished?
“When I feel it in my hardware.”
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Blame
This was supposed to be done last Friday but my computer ate my bookmarks.
My Young Friend’s Thoughts
A young friend wrote this email and sent it out to our group last night.
::sigh:: I feel particularly human today. As I sit at the white kitchen table in front of my computer screen, the light of our day star shines through a faceted crystal as it twirls in the open window, scattering little rainbows everywhere as if the sun is giving me a way to appreciate its beauty without hurting my eyes. I look at the spectrum of visible colors dancing around me and sit with the mirrored spectrum of feelings I’m experiencing today.
Homo sapiens have officially traveled farther away from our blue planet than ever before, and I am beaming with pride for that collective achievement. The Artemis II team represents the best we have to offer, and this mission to push beyond our earthly constraints and explore out into the unknown is the very essence of what it means to be human. NASA’s “Earthset” image was the first thing I saw on my Instagram feed when I woke up this morning, and it genuinely brought me joy to share in a new view of our home world and where we are in the cosmos that has never before been seen or captured by human eyes. This is a monumental moment, and I love it.
Then I saw the list of collaborators on the Instagram post: @nasa, @potus, and @whitehouse. My joy rapidly receded and was replaced by other equal and opposite emotions. Here we’ve got a team of brilliant, dedicated, model humans bravely taking us to the frontier of exploration, and their massive accomplishments are getting co-opted by a demented, cowardly, serial grifter and his pandering White House that exists only to stroke his rotting, intumescent ego. The most anti-science, anti-woman, anti-diversity, anti-progress regime our modern nation has ever suffered is basking in the achievements of people they vocally despise while they try to cut $5.6 billion (23%) of NASA’s budget, a move that would slash their science program in half. The first woman to fly on a moon-bound mission is currently out there making human history on a spacecraft named after a Greek goddess that represented and defended everything quintessentially female, while at home, white Christian nationalists who advocate for ending women’s suffrage and support “biblical patriarchy” are leading prayer services at the Pentagon and gaining political power. The first Black astronaut ever to be sent on a lunar mission is piloting our future into the stars, while an alcoholic, abusive, lascivious, vapid, Fox News host whose greatest recent accomplishment is not sexually assaulting anyone this week, fires Black service members because “woke”. Kind, thoughtful, smart people are out there in the lifeless vacuum of space naming a bright spot on the previously unexplored dark side of the moon after a person they loved and lost, while down here, a senile, malignanat narcissist who rapes kids threatens to wipe out “a whole civilization” in the war he started so he and his billionare buddies could stay out of prison and make disgusting sums of money while helping Israel genocide their way into an exciting new realestate opportunity. This is a monumental moment, and I hate it.
This is what I mean by feeling particularly human today. I’m feeling absolutely everything right now and it’s wonderful, and horrible, and joyous, and infuriating, and inspirational, and disgusting, and just, overwhelming. And here we all sit today, uncertain of the future because our collective fates lie in the tiny, decaying hands of a greedy, failed business man with a full diaper and an empty heart. There’s a nonzero chance that everything changes today, and I wanted to share my perspective in case anyone else was feeling the gravity of this moment in a similar way but hadn’t expressed it. I love this planet with everything I have, but I hate the world we’ve made.
Internetus Interruptus
Our Internet connection was down this weekend. Started Saturday and dragged through Sunday.
We use Ashland Home Net. Owned by the city, we want to support our city. The service has been reliable. Like everything, though, there can sometimes be outages.
The net went down Saturday afternoon. We gave it time to come back up. Didn’t. So — reboot system. Still no connectivity.
I called our service provider and left a message. It’s a small organization and they don’t have someone in the office at night and on weekends. But they check their messages and get back to you.
They did get back to us on Sunday. We were out. I had my cell phone with me. “Private number” it said. I ignored it. Later, I listened to the message, which was Ashland Home Net telling me that they couldn’t find a record of our account.
*grumble grumble*
When we were home after our Easter festivities with friends, I pulled our records to call Ashland Home Net and give them our account number. The folder had notes from previous issues and fixes. This included one from 2023: “Netgear router inadvertently reset (button on side — beware).” I had the Netgear instruction pamphlet attached to the folder.
Aha.
I pulled out the pamphlet, followed the instructions, and got us back online.
I also called Ashland Home Net and gave them our account number, just to close that loop. And they called back, apologized for not being able to find us, baffled by that side of it, confirming that we were online again and weren’t experiencing any more interruptus.
Normal online life resumed.
Expectations Met
I tried logging into Gmail this morning.
This page came up:
“We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service.
If the issue persists, please visit the Help Center »“
Well, hell.
The “Google Workspace Status Dashboard” shows a green checkmark for the current status. Everything is working fine.
Just as I expected.
It’s just me.
Three Beeps
I nuked something this morning in the microwave. When it announced, “Done”, with five beeps, I responded by pressing the cancel button three times.
Thinking back with a smile, I remembered how I developed that habit. Those ‘three beeps’ are supposed to be for good luck. I first did it in the 1980s when we lived on Okinawa when we bought our first microwave. I started to nuke something but canceled it, inadvertently pressing the button three times.
Later, I had a good day. When I remembered that the next morning, I thought, I’m going to keep doing this, because maybe those three beeps brought me luck.
It’s all fiction. I did hit the cancel button three times today and smiled, wondering if it would bring me good luck, and then I made up the rest.
Thursday’s Theme Music
Ashland, Oregon — Thursday, March 5, 2026.
We’re winding through winter’s last days toward spring in Ashland. History provides us reminders that Ashland often experiences late winter to mid-spring snowstorms. I’d like more snow in the area, especially in the Cascades where our snowbank resides.
Today, it’s overcast with uncertain, flexing sunshine. 48 F, it feels neither warm nor cold, and our high is arcing toward just 50.
My phone has developed problems with receiving text messages all of a sudden. I’ve added fixing that to my todo list. I did get some updates from my siblings about Mom before the system went tango unform on me.
Mom is reverting to the behavior displayed in January. I drift toward remembering who she was and the complex relationships my sisters and I have with her. I contrast what’s she’s enduring with who she was, what and who she was trying to be, and where she arrived as a person. Much of it now is beyond her control. Doesn’t stop my sisters from getting angry about it. But we saw this pattern emerging. There was little we could do, which we learned with time, because we tried to do things to change the course.
I smile at some things, like her potato salad. My wife insists nobody makes potato salad like Mom. My wife tried but when she asked for a recipe, Mom was more about the ingredients and less about the measurements. One thing I learned from helping her make it sometimes was that Mom depended on tasting it and how it looked — color, texture. That’s hard to translate through recipes.
I was just settling into checking on prices, the war that Republicans don’t want to call a war, and other matters when breaking news arrived.
Trump replaces Noem at DHS, taps Mullin for job
I think at first, “about time”. Her arrogance and attitude doesn’t fit with what I look for in public servants. I temper that, though, with the understanding that she was carrying out Trump and Miller’s policies, and generally working as a functionary for Project 2025. It’ll be interesting to see how much this change will actually manifest as change.
On the heels of that thinking, I scoff, but of course Trump has replaced Noem. She’s become a lightning rod for negative impressions about Trump. With his popularity falling, he made her his scapegoat.
Today’s music is “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. When The Neurons first settled it into my morning mental music stream, I sang it as “Wild Kitties” for Papi’s entertainment. He did not seem entertained.
I’m not sure why the song is playing in me. I can see how its themes and melody is about yearning for another time, for a different outcome, even for hope. I suppose that’s where I reside now — wishing for other things than what now exists. It also came out in 1971, when I was fifteen, so I suppose remembering the song stirs some nostalgia for being back there — young, with Mom, facing a bright future.
I’ll close with best wishes for you and us to stay safe, be healthy and find new ways toward a peaceful, prosperous, and inclusive future.
Cheers
The Morning eMail
My wife heaved a sigh. She’d just come into the home office with her tea and settled down on her computer to check her email.
“My NYTimes is again in my junk folder, along with Ashland News,” she announced. “Two pieces of junk mail are in my inbox.”
“It’s probably the AI that’s supposed to be so helpful,” I answer. She laughs.
Complaints about her emails have been going all week. She uses Hotmail, which is now Outlook. Or maybe it’s the other way. Whatever you call it, she’s displeased with its performance. Every day, she has to check to see where her trusted emails have gone and delete the spam that now hits her inbox. As a product, the Hotmail/Outlook app seems to be going backwards.
It’s not consistent, either. It first started with her saying last Monday, “I didn’t get my NYTimes newsletter.” Then she said, “I found it in my junk mail.” That continued for several days before it went back to her inbox. That’s when Ashland News went to junk mail.
“I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Why is it doing this?”
A search of the net suggests many ways to try to fix this problem. None of them mentioned why the problem began. I decided to use AI to see what it said. ChatGPT blamed new adaptive AI which Microsoft introduced last year.
I passed that on to my wife, who laughed. “Great. AI is screwing up my email. What a perfect metaphor.”
I laughed, too. “I don’t know how much I trust of what one AI says about the other. It’s like wondering, what does your wife think of your girlfriend?”
A Little Yellow Car
I was prescribed post-surgery meds and went to the drug store to pick them up.
Walking through the drugstore parking lot to buy them, I saw a small yellow car. Circling closer, I confirmed, 1964 Dodge Valiant, just like my stepfather drove. Might have been a different year but it was the same model and color.
I remembered him bringing it home although I don’t recall what he drove before that. I rarely rode in it. This was ‘his car’, something to commute to work and go off to bet. George was a gambler and went to the horse races five or six days a week, trying for a big score. He won big twice. Once was a $25,000 Daily Double payout, providing the down payment on a newly built brick ranch in Penn Hills.
Later, he won enough to buy a new 1976 Chevy Camaro. Like his Valiant, this was pale yellow, three-speed on the column and a black and white checked interior. Sis hated that car.
All of us disliked driving with George. Tending to drive about five miles an hour below the speed limit, he also liked to get into the faster lanes but not go faster. This terrified us as other drivers pulled up, slowed down and then sped past with blaring horns. Mom would often snap, “My God, get out of this lane.” George wouldn’t budge, though, sailing on without regard to others’ opinions.
The yellow Dodge in the drugstore parking lot had tiny tires and petite chrome bumpers, appearing small and fragile among the huge SUVs and a couple of ‘compact’ Toyotas and Hondas. All the modern vehicles were white, black, gray, or silver. Nowhere was another yellow car.
Seeing it still brought a smile as I walked on, reflecting, what a different world. And yet, back in the 1960s, that Valiant would have shown up as so much different than the preceding decades.
Who knows what our 2026 cars will look like compared to the cars of 2086.
Michael Seidel, writer 