Matt Of All Trades

Boston Dynamics has dancing robots. Endearing or creepy? Robots are getting more and more lifelike by the day.   Which led me to this weird but serious question: When do we cross the line before we are affectionate toward them? Are we already there?   This thought came to me within the past few weeks after Boston Dynamics put out a video of dancing robots. Said robots were well, almost endearing.  Though the idea of having an emotional attachment to robots isn't new, I think it's going to become more and more part of our lives.  What if you start loving a robot like you'd love your dog or cat, or even your spouse? Where does that put human beings? Or other living, loving creatures like real dogs?  A couple years ago, one of my young nephews got a robot dog for Christmas. The robot dog was programmed to figure out how to follow my nephew's leads and preferences, and it did so beautifully.  The robot dog was cute, had a few mannerisms that real dog...

A new Me Decade? I'm writing off the jerks.  Matt Walsh is the repugnant, smug sort of fellow who says things like the gun ownership is a more important right than voting and that it should be easier to buy a gun than to vote.  He's an idiot who I don't normally pay much attention to. I mean, why even bother? But this fairly recent tweet from Walsh for some reason stopped me in my tracks: "Got on an elevator without a mask. Guy with his wife demands I put one on. I say I don't have it, but you'll be fine, calm down. He stops the elevator and storms off, calling me 'disrespectful.' It's true. I am. I am not going to respect your paranoia. Get a grip." This tweet crystallizes for me the ethos of all the entitled jerks out there, the ones that have been given "permission" by the Former Guy Trump to ignore the civility, intelligence, reasonableness and we're all in this together attitude that most of us are more or less into. They...

Jeff and I prepping for a hot air balloon trip, September, 2019. Today's his birthday, and I marking the day by being thankful for being Watson to his Holmes.  Here's one very good reason among many to honor my husband, Jeff Modereger today, on his birthday. Nearly one year into Covid-19 "sheltering in place" with him at home, he still hasn't killed me. Yet.  I do hope this next year of Jeff's life is better than the past 12 months. Of course, I wish that for (almost) everybody. But since I'm so close and in love with Jeff, I wish that even more for him. For such a rough year, Chief, as I call him, has remained remarkably cheerful.  Despite all the bad news. Even before the pandemic really took hold last March,  his beloved mother passed away.  He carried on.   Then, the pandemic shut everything down. Chief, a very social guy who still loves his work designing theatrical stage sets, had that taken away from him.  No theater due to social distancin...

The song "Leader Of The Pack" certainly has its fans, but its also quite a piece of 1960s oddness.  Every decade has its style mishaps, its entertainment embarrassments and it's creepy moments, and as far as I'm concerned, the 1960s had one super, doozy of one.  We take you back to 1964 with song "Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las.  While the song, and a video that's still circulating out there might have been super cool back then, you have to cringe and laugh at this for sure.  The video is a the bottom of this post, you HAVE to watch. But I'll set it up for you. I shouldn't mock, but I can't help it. The video in particular has so many wonderful moving parts. The lead singer's hair is one of the Seven World Wonders of structure. The "Leader Of The Pack" protagonist is a creepy guy who is way too old for our structure hair lady.  No wonder her parents forbade her from seeing this dude!   The two backup singers have the classic K...

I have bizarre dreams. Last night, Lucille Ball  helped me with hail stones.   I like to tell people, sometimes, how strange my dreams are at night.  Nightmares are rare, but my dreams are definitely not something that can be easily analyzed.  Take last night for example: In the dream, I asked Lucille Ball to use the bongo drums in front of her to mimic how different sized hail stones sound as they crash down. You know, dime sized, quarter sized, golf ball sized, baseball sized. The sounds Lucy created for each sized hailstone sounded exactly like the videos I've seen in real life of videos with the corresponding hail sizes. Finally, in the dream, I got out of control, so I asked Lucy what sound wrecking ball-sized hailstones would sound like.  Lucy said, " I dunno. Go ask Miley Cyrus." Which of course let to some sort of version of the video for the hit Cyrus song "Wrecking Ball." Yeah, maybe I need some serious therapy.  Or a wrecking ball to the bra...

I had to start fresh with this blog today.  Blogger changed the way everything is done, making things far more difficult in the name of "improvements" which I fail to see.  The changes left me without access to my blog, called Matt Of All Trades, so I abandoned it at the beginning of August. But I've been missing it ever since. I'd built up a readership there, that has now been destroyed because of Blogger, but after struggling, I concluded they've left me no choice but to start over.  So yeah, I'm whining. Deal with it.  You can see all my old posts at  http://mattalltrades.blogspot.com/  so feel free to take a look at the oldies but goodies.   This new version of the blog has the URL  https://mattalltradesvt.blogspot.com .  Not the vt at the end of mattalltrades in the URL.  That's the big difference.  So we'll give this a whirl.  We'll see where this takes us!