20 Years on

We had excellent back-to-back days at the gym and are feeling flexed and stretched. We love that feeling. 

This morning we got a call from the Republican National Committee asking for money. We said as long as Ronna McDaniel chairs the RNC, we won't be giving. We don't support GOP losers. We hung up. 

Activists will always try to exploit the Holocaust for The Current Thing: 'On a rare state visit to the Netherlands on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took a bold diplomatic license: He asked that Dutchmen think of his countrymen as well as their own during the kingdom’s national memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust and World War II.' This blog loathes the Holocaust and loathes the use and abuse of the Holocaust as well. 

It was 20 years ago today:

That's my grandmother, Hannah Marx Eisman Stroock, succumbed to cancer. She was in hospice. She preferred a 60ish African American nurse from Georgia. Our grandfather remarked that the two understood one another in a way no Yankee would really understand. Race relations down South are far more complex than Yankee propogandists can or will understand. 

When Stroock's Books talks of our grandmother from Louisianna who kept her accent even after 50 years living among the Yankees, this is to whom we're referring. She met our grandfather, stationed at Ft. Polk during the war. In her vernacular 'the war' meant the Civil War. Despite a lifetime living amongst the Yankees, she was still very much a woman of the old South, genteel. My sister and I were the only grandkids, we weren't spoiled or anything, no. When the phone rang that evening 20 years ago, we knew why.* 

Which brings us around to 2003 and Me. We were reading a lot of contemporary fiction back then. Our plan was to get better at writing and to learn by reading fiction. Mission accomplished, we suppose. We used to browse the shelves at Borders, the fiction section was massive, till we found something to read or got a headache first. Back then we were looking for teen angsty stuff. The book that really reached us was Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which had been made into a John Cusack movie in 2000). Cusack played a character, true to the book, about our age, and we related to the ways he thought about his past.

Ace talks about the potential for AI to replace 'Hollywood creatives'. Would that it were so. We laugh. Uncomfortably.  Could AI replace us? ChatGPT prompt: Write novel about a nuclear war...Ace notes goes on about an AI generated Seinfeld script, 'The AI has figured out the basic structure of a generic Seinfeld episode -- Jerry wants to break up with a girl but doesn't know how, Kramer has a crazy business idea -- and that the kibbitz and argue with each other at the coffee shop.' 

Yep. If one writes a scene about a tank company crossing a field under an artillery barrage, all kinds of stuff need to be in that scene, whatever the writer is trying to accomplish. We've written A and C, so we must write B as well. Or, Z happens, therefore Y and X must also happen. And that can be automated and replicated. Try this trick. A rocket ship blasts off. I just painted a picture in your mind's eye. Now describe it. See?

*We communicated and communed with our niece today, named for her great grandmother, of whom she has a few memories.