There you have it. Douglas Adams shared with us the concept in robotics called “GPP”, which stands for Genuine People Personalities. And so, your gentle author found himself feeding a robotic beast. It has a yawning mouth, a tongue and indeed, even a sniffer.

It also has a temperament. The customer puts the container in the mouth, the tongue rolls it back to the sniffer, the most judgemental part of the machine. The sniffer decides if the container tastes good (that is, will be redeemed by the store) or tasted bad, and if so yakk’s it back on the tongue to the customer, for their deep sadness. They’ll have to go elsewhere for their ten cents. (Here in Oregon in 2019, many containers have a 10 cent deposit you can get back. Other states have different rules.)

It took five machines to process my empties – one after the other each machine develops The Sad. They lick the empties, crush them into their bellies, but you can hear them whispering to each other about how they are just used as a slightly upscale garbage compactor. So you’ll see them break down, weep a little, and then be ready for more empties ten minutes later.

They sit in a line, quietly whimpering to each other. Bearing the burden. So what happens next? I’m cleaning up the various bits of cardboard because I don’t like to leave trash behind and I find a fat stack of Fred Meyer returnables credit blanks – which could have been turned over to The Resistance for them to redeem at $14.40 per… but I’m kind of a honest guy Eagle Scout type so I turned it in to the store. You should have seen the eyes go wide on the employee I handed it to. OOPS!

So then, I’m carrying my groceries to Ford SpaceLord, walking past a series of empty shopping carts I see a wallet. Not just any wallet, but a PHAT wallet. OK, FINE! Without even looking inside it there’s clearly a wild evening for someone so inclined, but I’m just not that kind of guy. Other people have returned my lost wallet, contents intact, so I turn it in to a store employee. Yay me.

I had a good day at the winery, so turning that good feeling around for others makes me feel like we’re all Karma-Tastic and I reach into my breast pocket and find the five coupons for the returnables I churned through the sad machines that I forgot to redeem so I had to turn the car around and go shopping again. Derp!

So the part you missed… back at the winery I shucked and jived and entertained two fine young ladies until they made the wise decision to join our wine club.

So here’s the thing. Your author is a long term nerd, and is really stuck in his high-school identity of being terribly awkward and unattractive and I really can’t understand when women are nice to me. Sure, I know how to show a customer a good time, but these girls are shoving cash at me on their way out and they felt so bad about not having more cash to throw at me that they bought a $35 bottle of wine for me to take home…

Not that I find this a bad thing, but I wonder… is this what it’s like to be a stripper?

Facebook tells me Dan Schanbacher’s birthday was the other day. That brought to mind some memories, here’s what I wrote on Facebook:

You know, I still think about the time we gave that funeral to your rat, and you wrote a short story about it for class, and no one believed the events actually occurred….

For those of you who weren’t there, which is all the rest of you, Dan’s pet rat died one evening. We decided his pet needed a decently spectacular funeral. At the time I had a big van and some kerosene (long story there). We loaded the rat in his wooden cage into the van and drove out to one of those big bridges in Schenley Park. Heaved the cage onto the edge of the bridge, used the kerosene to light it on fire, said a few words and sent him over the edge!

The end result was not as pleasing as the Viking Funeral we gave to my cat Zoe many years later. The cage splashed down in the swampy morass of trash and algae, 100 yards or so underneath us in the ravine, the condition of which said so much about the industrial collapse of the city of Pittsburgh.

We watched the cage burn for a bit, then moved on to our uncertain futures.

“Anyway, George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, ‘You can’t wear a bra under that dress.’
So, I say, ‘Okay, I’ll bite. Why?’
And he says, ‘Because… there’s no underwear in space.’
I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere.
Now, George came to my show when it was in Berkeley. He came backstage and explained why you can’t wear your brassiere in other galaxies, and I have a sense you will be going to outer space very soon, so here’s why you cannot wear your brassiere, per George. So, what happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn’t- so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make a fantastic obit- so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/627235-anyway-george-comes-up-to-me-the-first-day-of?fbclid=IwAR0StMk3kOHZydoHtI9feDwA5hk-NokNLjb5St-UAmQcBl_h2Jq1LjC7U1k

Meanwhile… the news at the time of publication is that there was going to be an all-female spacewalk and that would be a first-time-ever, but plans changed due to a lack of spacesuits. This has displeased the great kittens of the internet, but here’s an interesting view about the story. From a friend of a friend:

—–
Alright – I’m climbing out of my Lenten abstinence from Facebook to talk about spacewalks for a moment. Because apparently there’s a lot of misinformation out there. I’m not making this post public because I don’t have the bandwidth to argue with a bunch of trolls. I worked 63 hours last week solving a lighting problem for our future suit and solving a pressure sensor problem on a suit on orbit. And I’m still doing #allthethings with the kids and the house… so here’s the deal:
Unfortunately we’ve swapped crew members for this Friday’s spacewalk. It was supposed to be two female astronauts going out the door for the first time in history on any space program, but now it’s a female and a male astronaut. The reason is not nearly as sexist or inflammatory as the internet is making it.
NASA designed and built 18 spacesuits about 40 years ago. We lost some of them on Challenger, Columbia, and on a lost Space-X cargo vehicle a couple years ago. Space is hard and suits are expensive (think millions of dollars) – they’re tiny spaceships built for one! So, in order to keep a working fleet of 4 suits on orbit, the other 7 are down on the ground in various stages of being torn apart, rebuilt, maintained and tested, in preparation for their next flight to ISS. 
We only change suits out every 6 years, but we change crew out every 3-6 months, and we only get the crew assignments about a year ahead of time. So, we try to keep a range of sizes on board with those 4 suits (right now we have a M, 2 L, and an XL). We never built smalls, which may be the only place NASA went wrong, but there are very real engineering challenges with building a small, I’m told (beyond the very real challenges with just building a suit that keeps you alive and allows you to accomplish tasks like turning a wrench in the vacuum of space). Like the arm holes are so close together you can’t fit your computer on your chest – the suit literally couldn’t be built without substantially overhauling the design. 
Anyway we size each crewmember before they fly but we have no idea how much spinal growth and fluid shift they’ll experience once they’re no longer in the earth’s gravity. Literally every body is different. Our team uses the vast amount of medical data we’ve collected in those 40 years to estimate how much someone is likely to grow. McClain was sized to fit one suit but was told she could use another suit as a backup – that she was anticipated to grow enough to fit either size. Turns out she got on orbit and that’s just not the case. Koch was already assigned to the smaller suit for Friday, so they grabbed another crewmember who’s definitely a larger size and assigned him to the other suit. 
Why? Because we have a job to get done. Because this spacewalk wasn’t about making history, this spacewalk was about changing out the batteries that power our station and getting a power jumper installed to better protect us from future failures. This was about getting a job done, and the historical aspect of the coincidental crew assignment was a nice byproduct that just isn’t available to us like we thought it would be. We’re NASA and we focus on the mission. 
Just know that there’s a bunch of women at NASA, outside of NASA – and I’m sure on ISS – who are disappointed about this turn of events, but remain focused on the mission in front of us. We are GO for EVA. 
?‍??
Oh – and – we’re in the process of designing the next fleet of spacesuits. In my “spare time” I’m the Safety lead on that project. ? And you can bet your bottom dollar we already have requirements in place to do better with variable sizing with this next suit fleet. First test suit launches in 2023…
?‍??”

Baby Shamu was framed!

Get your half a space-suit on and prepare to trip the light fantastic all the way to Mars. 1968 required a great soundtrack to your space movie. The audio is pretty dang great. The rest of the movie is you know, there.

Everything you need to know on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063311/?ref_=nv_sr_3

The company that promised a one-way ticket to Mars is bankrupt

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220153/mars-one-bankruptcy-bas-lansdorp-human-settlement?fbclid=IwAR2WhyY6G-msPAGBhoZ5sscV4SGaYB97GM1-fowE1JUA6hs0a9keeqV9v2s

The President knows nothing, and that’s been clear for a long time. If he knew something, he forgot it before he knew it. Even it he knew it when he knew it, it wasn’t important. And if he knew it when he knew it, he’d lie about it. He’d lie about knowing he knew it. He wouldn’t know he was lying about what he knew anyway, even if he knew it at the time.
Looking at the President, can you even tell if he knows he’s got pants on? Would he lie about having pants, while standing in front of a crowd without any pants? Does a President-friendly crowd *need* pants if he says he has them and he doesn’t?
In a world where you can get by fine without truth and/or pants, why bother with either?
That’s what I know.

Perhaps we should figure out how to put our talents together like the League of Superfriends we used to watch on TV.

Why was it always possible to see Wonder Woman’s invisible jet?
These are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night
Why couldn’t she have an invisible costume instead? I guess that would be a different show.

What’s the point of having an invisible jet when Batman can see you sitting there? Doesn’t it just mean you keep knocking your head against the door trying to find your way in?

In any case, you’re Wonder Woman. There should be a show that’s more honest about how guys would react around Wonder Woman.
She’d be trying to beat them up about crimes and stuff but they’d be incapable of speaking or acting coherently because she’s so incredibly hot all brain function is short-circuited.

The only criminals she’d actually be able to fight would be girls.

The girl villains would be all rolled-eyes and pissiy about it.
Oh great Wonder Woman, you’ve got all the dopey guys falling all over you, why don’t you help me just steal all this money?

We have a solid episode of something for sure… something…
If nothing else, we could hang out around Wonder Woman

We’d have to find some lesbians or gay guys to point the cameras.
Maybe that’s part of the show. How hard it is to film a show about Wonder Woman.

Superman’s got lots of issues.
I also wonder what would happen if Batman was bitten by Spiderman. Spiderman has radioactive blood. Would Batman get Spiderman Powers and be Bat-Spiderman?
We could write a terrible show about writing terrible shows.

Bat Spiderman. He’s out there, looking for Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. Fuck, where did she park that thing?
It’s gotta be around here somewhere.
I was going to have dinner with Green Arrow in Paris, but I can’t find my frickin’ jet.
Like, what the hell was I thinking? Invisible jet.

you clearly have untapped imagination going to waste.
Maybe I should also get an invisible TV? Wouldn’t that be a great idea?
Yeah, there’s at least 15-30 minutes of good comedy here.
Even 5 minutes is good larfs.
Know anyone at Robot Chicken? We could have two minutes of fame

I’ve got another good 30 minutes of Wonder Woman jokes inside me, I think
Can you imagine how Real World Wonder Woman would be facing actual guys – Hellloooo????? eyes up here! There would have to be this whole evil girl empire that hates Wonder Woman
(seems to be how girls work, yikes)
because WW shows up and the guy criminals pretty much drop everything when WW shows up and can’t compete with her.
That’s funny enough, but how do they resolve the conflict?
Girls just usually scream at each other. Re: fake housewives of whatever show.
Oh my nails are so not good enough to interrupt your wedding planning!
Maybe there’d be a super weapon of some kind
Probably made of guys who’ve stopped farting
and do the dishes without complaining
aha! Why would WW want to stop that? Is that mission really evil?
Perhaps that’s the emotional crux of the show. WW has to decide: should men continue to allowed to be stupid?
would that be a funny conflict?

I wouldn’t touch a show about male/female issues right now. I guarantee whatever I would do, it would be wrong.
Would WW act to stop a Super Villain who’s Evil Plan is to make men be better?
GUH. Of course, are you not listening to the plot? WW might have to stop you.
She’s going to have to disrupt the actual writers of the show.
She’s going to have to break the third wall, the fourth wall and all kinds of walls, perhaps kicking down the drywall between the set and a room full of fat nerdy guys in front of computers
and tell them, scriptwriters – it’s ok to have a super villain who makes men better. I’m not standing in the way of that!
Cue the music, there will be dancing around
Liz Phair can do the theme music.
There you go – I think we’ve got at least 10 minutes for SNL.
I’ll take your silence as mere shock from my brilliance.
Either that or you went to the bathroom or are looking for several more beers.
My writing will do that to a person.

Haha. I’m here. and there. have the kids without the wife. they are asleep upstairs but I keep checking anyway. tryign to do the garbage. etc. not very exciting.

Wonder Woman has already won.

I recommend letting the woman make the important decisions.
So we have a show about scriptwriters writing a show about writing a show about Wonder Woman. It writes itself.

We’ll stick in Bat Spiderman, maybe he can bite Catwoman, and then she’ll have Bat SpiderCat-Woman powers.

Maybe Aqua Man can show up and order some fish around.

Well kids, check this out.
Amazon will sell you ebooks to teach you how to to cancel your Amazon Prime membership.  I guess for people who don’t know how to use Google.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_12?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cancel+prime+membership+now+online&sprefix=cancel+prime%2Caps%2C356&crid=35B9LYSVZ3Q4O