Frantik Girl
Friday, July 16, 2004
More Urban Legends of the Future
Roomba Rescue
First told in 2006 by the cousin of a friend of the woman this happened to.
So this woman, in her mid thirties, she lived alone in a one bedroom apartment with a couple of cats. She liked to keep the place tidy, but hated sweeping three times a week to keep the cat hair down. So she decided to buy herself one of those little robotic vacuum cleaners… a Roomba. I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, it kinda looks like a hubcap and rolls around the floor.
Anyway, the Roomba was cleaning the floor one day and the woman decided she’d use all her free time to make herself a nice meal. She cooked up a steak for herself and sat down to eat. Now while she’s eating, a fine, juicy piece of steak went down the wrong way. She coughed, trying to dislodge it, but with every breath she felt it sliding deeper into her windpipe. She stood, her mind green with panic. The steak stuck in her throat, no air getting past at all. She tried giving herself the Heimlich, but to no avail. Her vision darkening, she stumbled toward the phone, hoping to dial 911 in time to save herself. Blackness engulfed her and she fell to the floor, her hand still grasping toward salvation.
The woman woke up a few hours later. She was breathing normally. The world was dark and she felt something hard and heavy with little pointy bits resting on her face. She smelled dust and new plastic. She raised her hands and found her Roomba balanced on top of her face, its vacuum positioned directly over her gaping mouth. When she checked inside the Roomba later, she found a cat-hair-coated piece of steak in its particle bin.
The Girl in the Fog
First told in 2057 by this one kid in gym class who knew a guy who lived near there.
Ever since global warming happened and the sea levels rose, there’s been a lot more fog in the Seattle Archipelago. On an average day, you can hardly see from Queen Anne Island to Capitol Island, let alone First Island.
One day, this 13 year old girl was walking home from school along the shoreline. It was a cold, lonely place filled with brambles and the tumbled remains of houses that had partially fallen into the Puget Sound. Of course, her parents had told her countless times not to play there, but she liked it because of the solitude and the occasional treasure left there by residents who had abandoned the area decades before.
As she walked along the glass beach, kicking an old soda can, the fog rolled in. The fog leapt off of the water, rolling across the land, engulfing the girl and everything around her like a grey blanket, like porridge, like wet cement. The girl could see nothing, not even her hand in front of her face. She could no longer hear the waves lapping at the shore. Even her own voice was devoured by the fog. She wandered, her hands spread in front of her, falling over broken furniture and cutting her knees on exposed rebar. For hours, she walked, calling for help. None came. Days passed… and then weeks and then months. She wandered in the fog, exhausted, cold and afraid.
They say that whenever that fog rolls into the Archipelago, the girl is still trapped inside of it. She wanders there, calling for help, growing colder, growing lonelier with each passing year. If you’re ever lost in that fog on that beach and she finds you, she’ll take you with her into that blankness to ease her grief.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
I Want a Roomba
Of course, I'd heard of Roombas. I'd seen cartoons spoofing Roombas. I'd heard people talking about Roombas the same way people talked about digi-pets and robot dogs that were so hot in the late 90's and early 00's respectively. I have even seen one in the flesh, sitting like a dumpy Frisbee on a vacuum display at The Bon. But I have not, until today, desired a Roomba. Then I learned some FACTS:
That Roomba was designed by the same people who designed the Mars rover.
That Roomba is smarter than a cricket, but less smart than a Chihuahua.
That Roomba comes in red.
It's a robot vacuum cleaner, sure. Sounds like a gimmick, a fad-to-be, something that rich people buy when hiring a housekeeper would actually be cheaper. But I believe in Roomba. I believe in what Roomba stands for: the future. My generation has lived with the tantalizing hope of a science fiction future within our lifetime. We weren't alone in ticking off the months until the year 2001 rolled around, but unlike the generation that had conceived the ideas of personal robots and Pan Am flights to the International Space Station, we were going to be young enough to enjoy it. We weren't blind, however. We knew commercial spaceflight wasn't happening and flying cars were a bust. Personally, I even felt a tad disappointed when the War Against the Machines didn't begin in 1996. All the cool milestones of technology and culture have been pushed back a few decades. For instance, we're only now beginning to experience George Orwell's vision... twenty years late.
I can vacuum my apartment, my place isn't that big. Every Saturday, with the regularity of ritual, I sweep and vacuum and dust. For the remainder of the day, my apartment is clean, but by midnight, the dust bunnies are already peeking their noses out and rolling across the floor. Nonetheless, I don't begrudge the work.
The Roomba's symbolic meaning is almost as, if not more, important than its ability to clean floors. Sure, it's ideally suited to low carpet and hardwood, both of which I have. Sure it can clean under beds effortlessly. Sure it would be amusing to see my cats run terrified from the room whenever it approached...
A semi-autonomous robot, built for a purpose and performing that task well, seems simple, but it's not something that has ever existed in the average home before. It's certainly nothing that's existed in my home before. The base model Roomba costs $150, which is only $50 more than I paid for my bottom of the line, Dirt Devil upright vacuum, and the Roomba does do the work for you.
We are in the prologue... the montage at the opening of the movie showing a brief history of robot evolution. The moody music plays, Linda Hamilton's voice rises out of the music, low and serious: "In the year 2004, robots served humanity..." And the first shot is of a dumpy little Frisbee looking thing that cleans floors.
I'm not going to hold out for a bipedal android that calls me "mistress." I want a Roomba.
Monday, July 12, 2004
Thoughts from a Proud American
Since the founding of the United States, one thing has kept our great shores safe for freedom, free for democracy and democratic for the electoral college… our brave Oceans. Atlantic and Pacific, these brave and selfless young bodies of water have done more to repel the forces of tyranny from our purple majestic mountains than all the armed forces in all American history. Spanning hundreds of miles and posing a nearly insurmountable barrier to large troop movements, these salty sentinels have ensured that no foreign army (excepting the British… just that once) could ever reach our hyperbolically nifty homeland.
As a proud American, I support our oceans and everything they’ve done to secure freedom for you and me. Whether repelling Imperial Japan’s incursion into Los Angeles, or keeping Saddam’s Republican Guard out of the White House, our oceans deserve our respect and gratitude. God bless our courageous oceans!
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
High Resolution
I'm not telling you anything new when I say that making resolutions is easy and keeping them is hard; but sometimes circumstances make resolutions easier. This is unusual, as circumstances are frequently cited as the monkey-wrenchers: my job is really hectic this week, things have been crazy at home this week, I didn't mean to break the pretty lady's neck this week. Circumstances make the little plans of mice and men go awry.
Despite common sense, I've made a resolution this week. I am once again unemployed (go me, it's my birthday!) and for the period of my unemployment I shall do the following: get up at 7:30-ish every morning, shower and dress, do a couple of exercises and then sit at my computer and work on my novel as if that were my 9 to 5 employment. Of course, anyone who understands my work ethic will know that when I have an office job, I spend a large part of it reading, surfing the net and writing on my novel. So if I were to truly recreate an office environment for myself, I'd have to take a break from writing and work on some mind-numbing data entry in the stolen moments between brilliant paragraphs. So if anyone has some data entry they need done, let me know.
