Penguins

 I couldn’t let a blog slip by without mentioning the penguins.

In this crazy world, where I am able to waste inordinate amounts of time watching short videos, penguins are quite high on my list. Animals generally get my viewing time, as do swearing toddlers but penguins are some of my favourites. 

So, along with my obsession with the orange idiot that the Americans elected to run their country, I am now delighted. I’m here for the penguin content. Memes, reels and cartoons of penguins are everywhere and my lazy dopamine hit is joyous.

In the ‘Independence Day’ trade war the Trumpanzees chose a whole list of countries that would have tariffs. The president announced each item as though it were a game show, claiming that he was getting back the countries that had raped and pillaged their land. Russia wasn’t on the list but the islands of Heard and McDonald in Antarctica have a tariff of 10%. No human has visited the islands for over 10 years and so the world is wondering what the penguins have done to Trump and the reels and memes are fabulous.

The hill to die on

 Blogging has seemed pointless.

The world is going to hell in a handcart. 

The Trumpanzees have come up with a new catchy slogan for a global trade war. (Liberation Day)

Wars rage. Natural disasters happen daily. A foot appeared in the sea in Thailand during an earthquake. (A while ago I jokingly wrote about storms being angry giants). People stayed in their rooftop swimming pools while the earth shook and water splashed over the edge, only pausing to set their phone to selfie mode. 

Meanwhile, we are all being asked to do more with less. 

The solution, apparently, is AI. 

This is currently my hill. The one I’m going to die on. 

Like a dinosaur, refusing to grow longer arms and not stare, unblinkingly at the incoming comet, I absolutely refuse to believe that AI can write faster and better than my own brain. Intelligence is preferable and I can’t help thinking that if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it and some of us need the practice. 

In the future, people may agree with me. I was never convinced about Flora, stubbornly sticking with butter, despite the heart disease in my family because I wasn’t keen on artificial. I didn’t want to eat plastic, butter tastes better and the choir warm up Betty Botter just wouldn’t work if we were singing about partially hydrogenated sunflower oil spread. Recently, health researchers have started to agree with me, although they haven’t mentioned the song. 

My problem with AI writing is that it always sounds like an arrogant teenage boy.

“Errm, I think you’ll find that if you are, in fact, bitten by a squirrel, you will have to seek urgent medical attention.”

“Penguins do, indeed, have knees.”

I wonder if this is what people thought in the Industrial Revolution? 

I always get morbid around Easter, when I forget that it’s not all about chocolate start to consider the awful nature of human beings and people dying on hills. 

If it is all getting to you too then I’ll share a child’s drawing from many years ago. 

Before you get any ideas and run it through AI, where, no doubt, the big-headed teenage boy will give you an explanation of fellatio, it is a picture of Jesus getting his feet washed by Mary.