Mind your own guilty pleasures

OK.  So I eat peanut butter out of the jar. 

Sometimes!  Not every time!  I admit to taking my spoon and dipping into the Skippy.  Yum! 

I don’t even sit down.  That’s right.  I stand at the kitchen counter with the pantry door wide open.  After a couple of nibbles, I bring out the apricot preserves and go full-on decadent:  Peanut butter residue in the jelly jar. 

It’s crucial to be able to explain yourself if you’re caught in such instances, so I can rationalize it:  Even though it’s gauche, it constitutes fewer calories than a straight-up, socially acceptable peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Yeah!  Never thought of that, did you?  And, it’s gluten free!  Take that!

You didn’t consider the possible benefits of my guilty pleasure because you were too busy judging me!  Oh yes you were.  No use denying it!  You got all uppity.  You would never eat Jiff out of the jar!  Or, more accurately, you would never fess up to doing it. 

Tell the truth now – you have a secret treat of your own.  Maybe you eat your peas with honey – I’ve done it all my life.  It makes my peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife!  Sorry.  My Asperger’s kicked in.

Still, most of us maintain an underground extravagance.  Perhaps you read romance novels under the covers at night and cry every time over lost love – it’s so beautiful!  Or, you can never drive past Krispy Kreme so you dispose of the incriminating wrappers before you get back to the house. 

I knew a woman – a weight loss consultant – who confessed she hid the evidence of her binge ice cream eating in the washing machine.  No one else ever looked there! 

Maybe you Google all your old flames and follow them on Facebook.  What’s that alternate email account for?  Or when your spouse comes into the room, you have to switch channels away from the Kardashians.  Really. 

For me, it’s “Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda.”  Well my, my, my.  I like watching this crusty old detective.  Mostly I love seeing the bad guy get what he deserves.

That also explains my indulgence in back-to-back episodes of “ForensicFiles,” the no-nonsense crime solving series proves time and time again that no matter how “highly intelligent” felons are, they cannot account for every insect wing or area specific weed pod or thread or fiber or eyelash!  Haha! 

My husband finds it macabre.  I say it’s no more graphic than Shark Week.

BuzzFeed describes a guilty pleasure as something one enjoys and considers pleasurable despite feeling guilt for enjoying it.  The "guilt" involved stems from a fear of others’ discovering one's lowbrow or embarrassing tastes.  Harmless, but awkward.  Borderline mortification.

So yes, I’m fearful.

I imagine my erudite friends would find it difficult to appreciate my weakness for the decidedly lowbrow adult cartoon, “South Park.”  I don’t want them to know I watch it and I certainly cannot recommend it to their genteel selves.  Cartman is so hilariously reprehensible!

They might not understand Kenny – neither do I for that matter, but that’s his appeal.  And how can I explain his gruesome death every episode – those bastards!

Oh yes, if I’m found out, there could be consequences.  So, if South Park ever comes up, I feign ignorance, or shock and revulsion.  I don’t want to be expelled from their book club!

According to that pre-eminent source of cultural wisdom, Wikipedia, “guilt·y pleas·ure” means “something, such as a movie, a television program, a piece of music or fashion, behavior, certain foods – or eating habits – that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.

Say, for example, Elvis.  Elvis is held in low regard.  Pretty sure dying on the toilet did it.  That, and the hair and the bloat and the sweat and the jumpsuits. 

But I cannot forsake the King.  Since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell, down at the end of Lonely Street, at Heartbreak Hotel… with my Teddy Bear and the volume up high when everyone else is out of the house.  Air guitar.  Swivel hips.  Sneer.

Please – don’t tell anyone.  Uh…thank you.  Thank you very much.

Aldous Huxley got it right

Item:  Man uses mind to control rat’s tail. 

OK.  Set aside your common sense reaction:  A man decides to use his mind and he uses it for that?  To control a rat’s tail?!   

What about the rat’s breeding habits, or his choice of residence, for example.  Why not use your mind to control one of those more pressing rat proclivities? 

Or how about a man controlling his own impulse to browse the channels for hours on end while the cable guide obscures the picture from other viewers in the room?  What about that? 

Or what if such a man used his mind to remember someone’s birthday, as a suggestion, or her ring size? 

But I digress. 

The point of the news out of BBC Future is that a man in the United States has successfully used his mind to control a rat’s tail in Brazil.  It’s scientifically documented. 

Yeah, me too.  I’m still hung up on the why of it all, but let’s press on. 

It’s a breakthrough, you understand.  The man wired up in a lab here thought “twitch” into an internet connection with the rat’s brain in South America, and voila!  That rodent wagged his hairless appendage as though he thought to do it himself. 

Still feeling a little underwhelmed. 

And they don’t mention any concern regarding reverse signals, from rat brain to man brain.  Nevertheless. 

Very serious grown men with clipboards and grant money, neuroscientists at Duke University, Harvard and the Pentagon, are focused on such brain-computer interfaces.  They are hell-bent it seems, to take steps beyond the already established ability of human brains to commandeer computer cursors, artificial limbs and virtual drones. 

We can extrapolate with confidence that they want that rat to dance to whatever tune is stuck in their heads.  It’s a small world after all.  (Sorry.)  Achieving that pinnacle they most certainly will move on to bigger and more bizarre brain-to-brain interactions. 

Hold that thought.   

Item:  Researchers at the 2012 conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams report lucid dreamers sending signals to each other over the internet while in the dream state. 

These guys strap on their brainwave headbands and when the EEG recognizes they’re in the dream state via rapid eye movement, it alerts them.  The first one to get that signal becomes lucid - self-aware in the dream state - and signals his pal who’s sleeping in another room, or another state.  

These Avant guard techies even created a rudimentary competition in which the dreamer who signals his counterpart first, wins.  Now they’re exploring dreaming-brain-to-dreaming-brain connections via social media.  What a time saver!  Find your perfect mate while you sleep. 

The dream guys jumped ahead of the Pentagon guys and their pet Brazilian rat.  They established a conscious - at least lucid - contact between two human brains in remote locations.  The difference is that the dreamers aren’t trying to control each other, they just want to play. 

And finally:  

Item:  Google has opened a new service to let people control their email, blog posts and online photos posthumously, as concern grows over what happens to a user’s "digital life" when he dies. 

This service allows living Googlers to set up binding instructions for what happens to their electronic legacies when they pass into that great Ethernet in “the cloud.”  It heralds a common clause in wills of the future.  

And it’s worrisome for those of us who’ve had this experience:  One of my LinkedIn connections died a couple of years ago but he continues to ask for my endorsements.  “Does ‘John’ know about project management?” the screen prompts hopefully.  “Does ‘John’ know about Microsoft Word?” 

It’s creepy.  And by the way, “John” was creepy when he was alive.  I didn’t like him in the first place.  We started out as Facebook “friends” because we worked together and I didn’t want to draw his attention by declining his request.  Twisted, I know.  Then, he never even “liked” my posts or LOL’d one time!  I guess he wants sympathy endorsements now! 

In summary:  Mad scientists work feverishly toward methods of controlling us from afar.  Fun-loving researchers develop dazzling means to connect and entertain us.  And search engines allow us to communicate from beyond the grave. 

We have, indeed, a Brave New Electronic World.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley

This grid makes me itch!

OK, that does it.  Who do I talk to about getting off the grid?

 Oh wait.  No action needed.  Now that I’ve written the phrase, “getting off the grid,” someone will contact me!  Men in Black tapping on my windows with smart phones and flashy thingies in their hands ready to scan me, diagnose my disgruntlement, prescribe and deliver just the right thing to make me feel all better.
 
Most certainly I’ll be seeing ads alongside my Facebook newsfeed touting log cabins, the joys of solitude, composting, and raising worms for pleasure and profit. 

That’s right.  Before long now we won’t have to say much of anything to prompt the newest savvy search engines hovering in “the cloud” overhead to send down a lightning bolt of customized ads catering to our every divergent thought. 

Here’s the deepest darkest news:  If Verizon has its way, your TV’s about to become a two-way mirror.  

That’s right; soon what has been a joyously stress-free passive experience, an evening transfixed in front of the flat screen complete with bad posture and dribble spots on the fronts of our shirts, will be transformed into a self-conscious job interview with Big Brother:  As we gaze in, the plasma will peer back out at us.  Sizing us up.  Playing that game.  You remember the game that used to be innocent whereby you sit in the mall and make up lives and professions for the people you see.   

Technology exists now that enables our TVs to look back at us and say, for example, “butcher,” then send you an ad for an apron with that chart showing shoulders and rump roasts and loins.  You know the one.   

Oh yes.  Verizon, jointly with Comcast, Time-Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, has applied to patent technology that will enable TVs to see directly through into people's homes in order to sell them stuff.  It’s listed under “Dangerous Ideas” on Big Think. 

Get this:  Verizon wants to create a "detection zone" around your TV.  In that zone, sensors built into the TV would catch "ambient actions" taking place in the room and use that information to display relevant advertising on the screen.   

Oh.  My.  God.  If that isn’t the creepiest idea ever to slither its way into the baskets of the snake charmers.  It makes MarkZuckerberg look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. 

FYI – under the watchful eye of your service provider your unguarded behavior is defined in the patent application as “a wide range of activities, from eating to arguing to playing with a pet.”   

If that’s not a hacker’s field day!  You know you’re going to wind up in a video set to music on YouTube, struggling with your Schnauzer over that last bit of strudel. 

The area around the Plath TV encompasses an array cat toys in various stages of mutilation and dismemberment.  It might actually be interesting to see what the commercial response would be to such a crime scene.  Would they alert authorities, or send me my own CSI amateur mystery detective crime-solving kit? 

And what might happen if two people are observed to be “snuggling together” with the TV on?  Included in the patent application is an example of how the technology would work in such a situation:  Ads could appear on screen showing a romantic getaway, a commercial for flowers, [or] a commercial for a contraceptive.  They actually said that.  Like it’s a good idea.  Something people might be glad about.  

In the same vein, Google’s trying to discover our “unmet needs for information” via GPS chips and “other sensors” built into our mobile devices.  Google Now already offers unsolicited directions, weather forecasts, flight updates, and other information when it thinks you need them.   

Contextual data can provide clues about a person and his situation, allowing Google to guess what that person wants.  “We’ve often said the perfect search engine will provide you with exactly what you need to know at exactly the right moment…without your even having to ask for it,” says Jon Wiley, electronic stalker, er, User Experience Designer for Google.  

Ha ha ha!  Thanks Jon!   

Psst!  Rather than getmyself off the grid, I want to get the grid off me!

 

Just Google your clutter away!

I’ve just learned Google’s lofty corporate mission statement is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Hey!  That’s MY mission statement! 

Well, at the very least I’d like to know what’s in these stacks o’ stuff on my desk.  There may be something important in there!  Something universally useful.

And I must sort through those piles of historic pictures of my family in stoic poses from Dust Bowl Oklahoma.  (My husband says I have the same stern look as my great-great grandfather, James Ledford.  Piercing eyes.  Pretty sure Grandpa got his way.  It worked for me too, in the public schools, that look.  But not so much with the husband and son.)

I have begun a preliminary assessment and laid out the pictures on our pool table in piles by generation and side of the family.  But people had to go and get married and then pose with each other across branches of family trees in many orchards, muddling up my system. 

If I ever achieve the mission of getting those pics organized and “universally accessible,” we’ll celebrate with a game of 8-ball.  How do you like that, Googlemeister?

Then there’s that cache of Tupperware containers in the closet in the guest bedroom that no one but the cats and I ever put noses on.  While I have no firm memories of precisely what’s in there, I’m sure as shootin’ not going to throw it away!  That closet has a door!

The utensil drawer in the kitchen reflects my ardent search for a perfect egg-flipping spatula.  Variations of imperfection are myriad, impressive and all present.  They don’t leave the drawer; they just work their way down, lower and lower in the spatula hierarchy, like items on pages 2 through 22 of a Google search.  No one’s ever going to look there, click on those links, or flip another egg with any of those rejects. 

That’s the utensil drawer.  If not organized, at least “useful” by definition.

But the most telling in the constellation of stuff needing a firm organizational hand in the Plath household is the de facto surrender of logic and incomprehensible attachment to the obsolete and unidentifiable jumble of the Junk Drawer. 

Chock full of paper clips, nearly spent note pads, rumpled recipes that sound really good, pens with a little ink, mechanical pencils without lead, and leads that don’t fit those pencils.  Oh we have crunkled cylinders of epoxy, a bent nail, an assortment push pins and that magnet with the vet’s name and phone number on it.  All of it filling the wells and straddling the dividing partitions of a drawer organizer.

Don’t judge until you eliminate your own Junk Drawer!

Google and I have this in common:  We provide the illusion of organization and accessibility.  We make our paraphernalia appear orderly.  I do it with closed doors and drawers, and squared-up corners on piles of papers.  I can find most of what I remember I have.  I can still get the car in the garage! 

I’m not worried about it.  I’ll get excited when our extraneous possessions come life at night and dance to the light of the moon.

But Google winks at us with instant access to colorful lists extending to the virtual horizon.  Answers to any query at any time.  Google’s actually at work now developing software that will anticipate our questions and provide us with what we “need to know” before we even think to ask.  Yikes.

This much is clear:  We both have too much crap-ola.  (Excuse me please.  I was overcome by an impulse of truth telling.)  

Ironically, you can find self-help sites dealing with disorder, confusion and chaos by Googling “clutter control.”  That search produces no fewer than 308 websites offering tips for putting a leash on your burgeoning bailiwick.  A person could argue that the list itself constitutes useless, disorganized clutter!  But it is accessible!

I didn’t see a single site that sorted out how to sort out too many options available on information searches. And I’m beginning to think Google is the one with the problem, highfalutin mission statement or not!

Meanwhile, I’m pondering Google’s Code of Conduct.

Really.  Honestly.  This is it:  “Don’t be evil.” 

Go ahead.  Google it.

Talking to the Terminator

Here come Google goggles.  “Wearable computing.”  Soon, we’ll be able to wear glasses that put internet access right in front of our eyes no matter where we go.  We’ll have online real time access to the World Wide Web and all its distracting, addicting content. Just like the Terminator. 

The Terminator had an agenda, as you may recall.  Even if he focused on you for a moment or two, you couldn’t flatter yourself that such a hunk of meat was interested in you.  It had nothing to do with you, unless of course you happened to be John Connor.  Or his mom.  His dispassionate computer eyeball was constantly gauging, measuring, calculating, and assessing.  If you didn’t have something he wanted, look out.  In fact, look out if you did. 

Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin’s picture is in the paper showing him wearing a pair of the “augmented reality” glasses.  Ostensibly, he’s in a conversation with a fellow attendee at a charity dinner in San Francisco.   

He’s looking at the other guy.  That is to say, his eyes seem to be pointed in the direction of the man who’s standing in front of him.  But we recognize his expression.  Like the Terminator, he’s glazed over, flat, expressionless.  He’s not involved in the topic at hand.  No, he’s engrossed in something else, maybe today’s Nasdaq, or a trailer for “Hunger Games.”  

He presents a portrait of that most maddening of situations, the one where you’ve been talking with someone about something you have in common, say your interest in the bags o’ dough you carry to the bank each day.  But gradually you realize mid-sentence that if ever he was attentive to you, he’s not anymore.   

He’s retreated into his own more appealing world.  He’s pretending, badly, that you matter.  Probably nodding on occasion and saying the requisite “uh huh.”  But don’t fool yourself, he’s gone.  No longer in the moment.  Now you’re the hunk of meat. 

Thanks a lot, Google.  Another web zombie in our midst. 

In truth, each of us has taken on degrees of web zombie-ism.  To a greater or lesser extent each day we join the ranks of the internet undead, arms and hands upraised, rocking in our chairs, staring expressionless at a point in cyberspace.   

Fewer and fewer of us display the badge of techno dinosaur.  It just doesn’t play.  We’ll dispatch a text from a phone with big buttons if we must, to stay in the game, to be cool.   

And therein lies the downside:  We’re not cool.  We’re not Terminators.  Not even old generation Terminators.  Humans can’t give adequate attention to two things at once.  Young folks aren’t that good either.  None of us are machines.  Not computers.  Not fast, not really.  Not mentally or physically able to multitask with the tiny powerhouses we hold in our hands and soon will wear on our faces, between ourselves and the world. 

I read recently that thumbing out an average text takes a driver’s eyes off the road for five seconds.  At fifty miles per hour, five seconds equals a football field.  Wow.  That’s dicey. 

Not that I text and drive anyway.  I gave it up early on when I confirmed I was a hazard using my cell phone while sitting at a stop light.  That’s right.  Feeling superior and responsible, I waited until I rolled to a full and complete stop in the line of cars at the light.  Only then did I pick up my cell phone to make a superficial and unimportant call, just like everyone else, only better.   

I pecked out the number of my voice mail, and while listening to my very own outgoing message, I unconsciously eased my foot off the brake and rolled ever so gently into the bumper of the car ahead of me.  

No real harm done.  The driver of the bumped bumper just waved me away.  The light had turned green and she seemed to take the bump as a nudge to get moving.  I think she had her iPhone in her waving hand.  That’s how we’ll interact in the virtual future.   

We’ll let our Google goggles slip down our noses and look over them at flesh and blood intrusions into our augmented reality.  Pause.  Assess.  Wave and move on.