How is AI telling me about how my great-grandparents survived?

Hi.

My name is Wendy and I am addicted to YouTube videos about how to make, do, find, fetch, and grow stuff we will need when we finally leave East Dayton for the woods.

I am also fascinated by anything having to do with castles in Scotland and Spain, but that’s another meeting I’ll be attending later today for castle-o-holics, so let’s get this party started, shall we?

I’m not going to say I never watch AI videos, because honestly, it’s hard to tell with some of this stuff. I will say that when I do know for sure it’s AI, I usually zap it because it annoys me to hear the robot voice mispronounce words or dates.

I have flashbacks to when hubs and I were on the road and his federal timekeeping/babysitting/ intrusion of privacy robot would call bills of laden (BOLS) ‘balls.’ It also called him, ‘George Parker, ‘Eye, Eye, Eye,’ because he is George the third and it had no idea what to do with that particular designation at the end of a name beyond pronouncing the letter ‘I’ three times.

“George Parker, Eye, Eye, Eye. You have incomplete balls.”

It was funny the first five thousand times. Then it became a crashing bore to hear about how many balls George Eye Eye Eye had pending for payment, or ready to be printed at the shipper, or whatever else his balls were doing that day.

Interestingly enough, it was also something my editor at the trucking magazine I worked for wouldn’t let me write about. I couldn’t refer to ‘balls’ in that context. This is the same magazine that asked me to delete the word ‘anus’ from a health related piece I did that was a straight piece about warning signs for cancer, so I replaced it with ‘butthole’ and everyone was mad about it all over again and the piece got axed.

(That’s what writing for someone else is like, kids. It’s all fun and games until you try to use the correct anatomical term for a butthole and your editor’s hair catches fire. Not as fun as it looks, believe me.)

Anyway, I ran across a video a couple days ago titled, “25 Things your great-grandparents did to survive.”

It had all the visual things you’d expect in an advice video from the old-timers - the obligatory old-timer, wearing overhauls (overalls, for those of you who did not think they were actually called ‘overhauls’ until well into your 20’s) sitting on a porch in front of a little farmhouse.

I mean, what else could you need for a perfect setting to drop pearls of wisdom for an aspiring bog witch?

Well, a human would be nice. Because as soon as the obligatory, overhaul-wearing grandpa spoke his first sentence about the ‘one-eight-nine-ess,’ I realized he was not real and his great grandparents were an Atari gaming system from 1982, not hardscrabble humans from the late 1800’s.

Dammit, man.

To be fair, I didn’t really know my great-grandfather. He is a vaguely scary memory of someone no one fucked with…ever. Mr. Williams was known to have a temper and I can assure you from what I do remember about him I can say with a modicum of certainty that if a robot tried to tell him to save bacon grease in a can for a survival tip he would have hit it with a shovel and fed it to his hogs.

I do distinctly remember the hogs. They were more terrifying than any animals I had ever seen in my life and they would most definitely have eaten a robot. Or a human. Or whatever the heck they wanted. Because they were huge and had tusks and bad tempers. Lord help you if you fell in that pen when they were hungry.

I remember the hogs because they outlived my great-grandpa and the only human they were afraid of after that was my tiny little great-grandma, who fed them and yelled at them and made them behave or she’d whack them with a switch.

Lulu-Bell Williams weighed about 97 pounds and could swing a switch at a velocity that defied the speed of light. My Uncle Flip got a whipping one time that caused a sonic boom. You did not fool with Mrs. Williams if she had a switch anywhere in her general vicinity and you had a hankering to act ugly.

That’s how we survived. We didn’t act ugly and we didn’t disobey granny when she told us we’d get a switch if we went anywhere near that hog pen without an adult, who was usually armed with a sawed off shotgun and a Rambo knife.

Jot that down and know it’s wisdom from a real, live human.

Until next time, try to be aware of what is and what isn’t AI. I try very hard to avoid using it for frippery like illustrating my work. Not because I’d like to feed it to the hogs, but because until they find a way to make it work without draining necessary resources, it’s probably better to be sparing in use, if at all.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go darn my pantaloons while I watch someone on YouTube clean out an abandoned storage unit they bought for $9.75. It’s yet another weird obsession I’ve collected since becoming ancient. It will happen to you one day. Don’t point when you laugh and don’t forget to turn it up.