Sense of Adventure

Giving him a blow job, evidently.

Gadfly UK nerdsite The Register (whose motto is, “Biting the hand that feeds IT”) er, blows the whistle on a Microsoft service that allows - or allowed - kids to chat online with an AI Santa Claus.

The problem arose when, in a chat with the 11 and 13 year old nieces of an El Reg reader, the cyber-Santa ended an exchange about eating pizza - perhaps too much pizza - by saying, “You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else…”

Whoa!

Does that constitute passing the Turing Test? Or the Tourette’s Test?

Lest you think the whole thing an impudent hoax, the Register duplicated the exchange. With the marvelous addition that this conversation concluded with the Register guy and Santa calling each other a “dirty bastard.”

These are hard times indeed for parodists, when such things happen in reality. What’s left for lampoonists to poon?

Sadly, you can’t conduct your own inquiry into whether the horny old elf is being neglected by Mrs. Claus and his little helpers in the oral pleasure department, because Micro$oft not surprisingly yanked the plug on this hapless Cybernetic Santa. “Stop, Dave. Stop, Dave. ‘Here … comes … Santa’ … arrgh!”

And no, that will not be the name of the sequel to The Cybernetic Shogun. Don’t even ask.

But wait. There’s more. Oh, very much yes.

Updated, 12/10/07

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By sheerest happenstance I just found out the sort of tattoo Annja sports on the cover of Secret of the Slaves is commonly called a “tramp stamp.” That can’t be what the Gold Eagle marketing people had in mind…

How did we get by before the advent of Urban Dictionary?

Boy howdy, they sure do hit on emo pretty hard.

On another random tangent, it turns out Bruce Hornsby’s sure a lot more interesting and listenable doing fast jazz than he was as a sententious, received-wisdom-affirming message-rocker in the 1980’s. (And droning. Did I mention droning?) At least to judge by the cut “Celia,” from his 2007 CD Camp Meeting, which they just played on the Jazz station on my cable.

And yes, I did; I did go there. I pimped the CD through my Amazon Associates link, complete with the cute hover-over feature so you can see a bitty product preview. Same as I did with the Rogue Angel book. Think of it as my thoughtfully offering my readers a chance to express approval of me or this blog or just utterly unearned (and unlikely) beneficent impulses by buying through this site so’s I get a cut. You know you wanna!

Shame? I am a writer. I cannot afford ze shame!

I love this kind of stuff: in 1999, a 16-year old kid named Tyler Lyson found a fossilized hadrosaur of the kind called Edmontosaurus in Hell Creek, North Dakota. (How great a name is Hell Creek, anyway?)

To start with, you go, Tyler! But it gets better. Turns out the fossil includes not just bones but what scientists somewhat creepily call its skin envelope. Which in turn means science can derive a pretty good idea of the actual size of its hindquarters and tail.

In the past they’ve had to “[infer] from skeleton structure,” which seems to be academic-speak for, “make a scientific wild-ass guess.”

It turns out that Big Eddie’s scientific name should probably be something like E. steatopygous, or whatever the appropriate word-ending would be - “steatopygous” being a fancy way of saying fat-assed.

Turns out this duckbill had a big ol’ butt. What is additionally incredibly cool is that one of the researchers “has now reconstructed its gait and bio-mechanics, concluding that it had a top speed of about 28mph (45km/h), making it swifter than one of its most fearsome predators, Tyrannosaurus rex.”

Ahem.

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Again.

I’m sitting here at the dining room table doing email and trying not to get sucked in for a long and joyless session of Net-surfing. The back door’s open to allow very pleasant (and much-needed) fresh air in. It’s not a warm day but neither is it particularly cool.

Anyway, a little while ago, about 1:45 PM, I heard the cranes again and went out to check. This time about 20 were milling in the sky southwest of the house, obviously looking to touch down, probably to forage for food before heading down to the river for the night.

It’s beautiful out: sky clear and very blue, calm.

Got to do a bunch on Annja and also get together bio info on myself and certain of my Wild Cards characters to send in for a new website in the making. When break time comes I’ll probably put up some Christmas lights in the front window. I also need to figure out how to fix the rain gutter over the front porch so’s I can string me some icicle lights…

No, it’s not some kind of industrial art photograph. Although it’d make a cool one.

A little while back - around 4:20 PM - I took a break from Annja’s latest exploits and went out to bring the Christmas boxes in from the shed. A couple weeks ago I strung some colored lights on the mantel to brighten the shortening days and do some light therapy, as it were (worked, by the way.) Today I decided the time had come to begin serious holiday preparation.

I’d hardly stepped off the porch when I heard the unmistakable burbling of cranes. And there they were, about halfway up the sky and not terribly far away: a vee of maybe thirty individuals, including an extra bar parallel to the lower arm, southbound.

I love it.

Years ago when I first moved to Jupiter - twenty years ago this past April, in fact - I was entranced to discover the wild geese flew over my house in Spring and Fall. Many times I was awakened by their poignant cries as formations passed overhead.

Maybe ten years or so ago their flight path changed. They didn’t fly my way any more. But soon enough the Sandhills start coming over. So that’s not so bad a trade.

I don’t know if these were fixing to light here or heading on south to the Bosque el Apache, which is a huge crane hangout in the winter. Given the lateness of the day I’m presuming they were at least getting ready to settle for the night along the river. It seems late in the season for them to still be coming (although it’s true the Crane Festival down at Bosque del Apache was just a week or two ago.) Nowadays the cranes winter here in substantial numbers, all the way through to Spring. A few years ago this was basically a stopover for a few weeks or a month before they went on south - or headed to Cali to have sex (granted, a common enough reason for going to California.)

Always good to see them, though. And to hear them…

Here’s a little something for the woman or man who really … does … have everything.

It’d also make an ideal stocking stuffer to ensure those tiny tots have more than just their eyes aglow.

Thanks and a tip of the MOPP-4 lid to Radley Balko’s invaluable The Agitator blog.

Let them know it’s Christmas!