Rise of the Machines

No, I haven't seen the new Terminator movie. (Not the same title, anyways.) That's not what this is about.

Check out this little nugget of ridiculosity. Virginians are not allowed to smile when getting their picture taken at the DMV. New computer software aimed at improving prevention of fraud and identity theft by comparing mugshots over time won't allow it.

It's not the first time we've made machines and forced ourselves to accommodate to them. I sit at a desk all day with a comfy chair and wrist pad and perfectly adjusted monitors so that I can stay sitting longer and be more productive. (Don't get me wrong, I like my job.)

But this one is harder for me to stomach, somehow. Just wait. Next they'll (it's kind of fun to lump all the nasty people in power into one steaming pile and suggest that all of them are out to keep us down and make our lives miserable) be banning people from driving whose knees bend the other way. Sound far-fetched? The dark future is coming, my friend.

Renaissance of the Nerds

Ever since this went down a few weeks ago, it seems as though Kathryn and I have been going through something of a nerd-renaissance.  (And yes, I was able to spell that last word without looking it up.)

I'll be brevious.  Recently Kathryn and I were driving and a bird flew across the front of our car.  It stayed in view after that, and pulled a sort of horizontal 180 degree flip, followed by a wicked upswing that was all the more impressive given the short amount of time it all happened in.

Here's the conversation that ensued:

Me: Did you see that bird?

Kathryn: Yeah, that was cool.  It did like a feinting wonky.

Me: You mean a Wronski Feint?   (Kudos to the Muggles who didn't let me down by giving me something to hyperlink to.)

Kathryn: [laughs]

In the conversation that followed, Kathryn admitted to sometimes intentionally botching up Lord of the Rings character names so that I could get them right and correct her.  Sorry Chica, but after blowing me out of the water a few weeks ago in our house Nerd-Off, nobody's buying it!  Plus, I think if we were trying to make Jesus cry by taking something he said and making a general 'principle' out of it, we could take the time when he said he'd be ashamed of us if we were ashamed of him and apply it generally to identity issues, such as being true to ourselves (which is essentially the same as being true to whatever personality or trend we follow anyways) - in which case, not being true to one's own innate nerdness is, by some form of logic, tantamount to messianic desertion.

Nerd out.