The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Robot Blows Up Terrorist in Dallas

I don’t know about all the rest of you out there in America, but I’m a little alarmed at armed robots. The Island County Sheriff’s department will be buying self driving Google squad cars soon and pulling over speeders and all us South Enders whose tail lights give them probable cause for whatever they want to do next. Course, they won’t need deputies. Just photo ID our license plate and send us the bill. Breathe in the built in breathalyzer and fill out the form on the police laptop. If we try to make a break for it, well, good luck with that….These things will have more armaments than a Bradley fighting machine.

Robocops. I guess they’re here. All us wrongdoers are in for an unwelcome visit from the future, looks like. Great for the folks who walk a straight line, or so they think. What have I got to fear? they’ll say like they always say before the door is busted down and they’re hauled off for some offense they think they didn’t do. But you know, and I know, they must be guilty, why else would the police bust down their door? Sure hope the robot cop doesn’t get the wrong address and detonate the bomb in their livingroom.

Personally I don’t think we should be teaching our machines to kill humans. I know, I know, we got drones doing it now, but I don’t care for that either. Bad precedents for when the little goobers with their advanced artificial intelligence are smarter than us with our not so big brains. Try to program them later that they should play nice with us humans, good luck with that. They aren’t near as forgetful as we are.

Might, though, go a long ways toward slowing down our population growth here on the South End, miscreants going missing. But it seems like overkill, no pun intended. Busted headlights are one thing, arrest by robot is another. Our only hope, probably, is the lawyers. They aren’t going to care for robojudges and juries. Justice isn’t just expensive down here, it’s downright profitable.

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I got a new neighbor recently who bought the farm next door to us so naturally I wandered over to introduce myself, a one man South End Welcome Wagon he may have mistook for a snoopy neighbor. The 17 acres, barn, shops and 1930’s house went on the block after its previous owner declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time, obviously a slow learner, but like he always told me: No Brains, No Headache. I assume he’s poor now but migraine free. When he went under the last time he owed me a few thousand dollars. I still have a small headache. And trust me, I’m no smarter.

“So what do you do?” I asked my new sharer of a long property line he’s just had surveyed. He’d recently been laid off, he told me, not certain if he was required to testify against himself, maybe plead the 5th. He had a wife, kids in college, another house down in the City. I could see he was growing uncomfortable under the wilting barrage of questions I interrogated him with, maybe he should talk to his attorney first. He admitted he intended to build a house up on the hill, but money was tight with college tuitions, other mortgages and no job. I nodded my understanding.

“So what’s next?” I demanded, relentless as a prosecuting attorney turning the final inexorable screw before extracting a confession. “Well,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe starting a microbrewery or, I don’t know, a nano-distillery up here at the barn.”

“Lemme get this straight,” I laughed, boring in now. “A brewery? Hellfire, man, you came to the exact perfect place!”

“What do you mean?” he asked, truly alarmed now he’d spilled too many beans.

“You got no job, money’s scarce, kids are in college, your wife’s working and you want to build a house … but first, you plan to open a distillery or a brewery. What I mean is, “ I explained, smiling broadly, “ you’re a kindred spirit. You got the same dream as all of us South Enders. Welcome to La-La Land, neighbor!!”

It’s good to know — at least for this Old Timer — the newcomers will carry on our time honored traditions. Long live our Southern Values!

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When I first got out of college with my fabulously useful degree in English, I moved to a Polish farmhouse in northern Wisconsin. My neighbors, assuming I was destitute since the house had no running water and only an outhouse for a bathroom, decided to help me out by setting up an interview at the local school bus company. I didn’t know how to tell them tactfully that I didn’t mind poverty near as much as I minded work, but that seemed like a tricky argument to make and still remain friends.

So I went to the interview. I wore my worst jeans, the one with multiple tears and holes and patches, a rumpled t-shirt with frayed neck, and some shoes that looked like they’d been eaten by rodents all winter. I took my most indolent attitude, my hippie hair and tossed on a ratty hat for good measure. Nobody up in this redneck neck of the woods would hire me, I figured, but at least I could tell my neighbors I went to the bus company and they wouldn’t employ me, god only knows why.

The bus office was basically a shed and it was there I met the manager and his mechanic. We bantered a bit, talked about living in an old farmhouse with a pump over a 40 foot well out in the middle of the yard, joked about the outhouse and the woodchuck that lived in it, told a few stories and basically killed some time between the morning and afternoon bus runs. They seemed like nice fellows and they were greatly amused by me, I could see. Finally I got up to go, my work here done, and Walt, the manager asked when could I start. Start? I said. Start, he answered.

And so I got my first job after college. My advice to Mr. Trump is: be careful. Be very careful. You just never know in this mixed up world who might be willing to overlook your obvious flaws and give you the job you only pretended to want.

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Kellogg’s announced this week they will be opening a fru-fru cereal bar in New York City. These are the good folks who developed a technique for flattening grains and removing most of their nutrients to make a dry product in a box the modern breakfast eater can slop some milk on and wolf down before running off to a long day at the office. We all grew up with this stuff and whole aisles in the grocery store are devoted to it. Course they figured out how to add chocolates and sugars to appeal to the kids, advertised it on the cartoon shows and addicted another generation of eaters who get their nutrients primarily from the added milk. Thanks, Dr. Kellogg.

Like most American kids who grew up on black and white Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, Mars bars and processed breakfast cereals, we just took this stuff for granted. Advertising made Tony the Tiger’s sugared flakes look appealing and the Trix Rabbit made us beg for those food colored balls of basically air. We could eat an entire box of Rice Krispies and still feel hungry. We did eat entire boxes of Cap’n Crunch and felt nauseous from whatever chemical the Food Conglomerates used to artificially flavor the stuff with. It may well be the whole thing was chemical, nothing tasted anything close to wheat or corn or rice or anything else grown in soil even with healthful doses of pesticides and herbicides. Obviously, if it was advertised on Saturday morning cartoon shows, we’d demand it from our time-saving moms and they would oblige. Nowadays we should call this child abuse and the corporations who spoonfed the American family with this slop should be treated like tobacco companies and the fast food industry, purveyors of death and diabetes.

The New York cereal bar plans to charge $7.50 a bowl for their nostalgic pablum. They do, in their defense, sprinkle lemon zests and other thrilling spices to their corn flakes and they did say they weren’t going to overcharge with excessive prices like $13.50 a bowl. And the cereal baristas will definitely not add the milk themselves. Too personal a decision, they said, for them to take that privilege from the buying customer.

I guess it’s only a matter of time before we get the Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich bars and the Jiffy peanut butter and jelly cafeterias, the Hamburger Helper restaurants and the Spam counters, Frito Lay Potato Chip Delis and the Twinkie Lounges. I know we’ve been sold a bill of goods back in the Leave it to Beaver era, but seriously, do we have to have our noses rubbed in it?

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