Canadian eh? It’s not uncommon for Canadian coins to be mixed in with ours when giving or receiving change. Most people just ignore it, if they notice at all, and carry on business as usual. I’m sure it happens more in northern states that are near the Canadian border than it does in the Deep South. A couple of days ago I noticed one quarter and two nickels amongst my change. (Technically the Canadians do not have “quarters, dimes or nickels” those are American terms. But many Canadians use those terms, referring to American and Canadian coins, because of the contact they have with our culture.) Several years ago I found a Deutsche Mark coin. That was highly unlikely, and now they have switched to the Euro.
This should have been in Happy Monday. We saved on it for a week or two then did not publish a Happy Monday post this week. We didn’t do anything much on the actual 4th of July; I worked in the yard some that morning while it was cool enough, or at least not oppressively hot, both at home and for a relative. I went through the Cook Out drive through for bacon cheeseburgers and Cajun fries then came home to do some inside work on the house. Do you know about Cook Out? It’s exactly what it sounds like; hamburgers, hot dogs, floats with a red and black table cloth motif inside the dining room. The burgers taste just like they would if you grilled them at home over charcoal. Yesterday I made some homemade pulled pork and almost over did it on the sauce. We’ve got a picnic lunch planned today and a real cookout & fireworks event tonight; this will be our 4th of July, planned and executed by some good friends on their farm.
Artificial Intelligence? In Terminator 2: Judgement Day the T-101 model has a telephone conversation with the T-1000, both of them pretending to be someone else. Arnold does a spot on John Conner impression and outwits the more advanced T-1000 who doesn’t know the name of the family pet. Artificial Intelligence in the Terminator franchise, like TheMatrix and I, Robot, has advanced to a level that threatens the existence of humanity. Most of the AI we see today is used to make creepy near-photo realistic pictures that are given away by the fact it doesn’t know how many fingers human beings have on each hand. Have you had AI offer to write for you? AI makes claims that it can boost productivity by creating blog posts and even generate social media buzz by posting to social media on your behalf. The same software that thinks people have between 8 and 12 fingers on one hand wants to write my blog posts. If you read the story above you probably recognize Hulk Hogan in both pictures. Those are real images featuring a fan that met Hogan twice, once as a kid and then recreated the photo years later as an adult. That’s not his son, he is not a computer geek as far as we know, and Hogan’s real first name is Terry. The AI simply made up a fake story but had no idea Hulk Hogan is a celebrity that the vast majority of Americans would recognize whether fans of wrestling or not. It can write words and sentences but just like the images there is always a tell. Maybe AI is not as dangerous as dystopian sci-fi movies led us to believe.
Camp Chick-fil-A – I’m gonna chalk this story up to a slow news week. The “news” here is about the social media outrage over a Chick-fil-A in Hammond, LA, offering a 3 hour summer program for kids to learn what it’s like to work at Chick-fil-A. For $35 kids can see what it looks like behind the scenes in Chick-fil-A’s kitchen, meet the cow mascot, meet the owner/operator, and of course get a free meal and a t-shirt. Critics jumped all over the camp announcement post on Facebook talking about child labor, corporate greed and one person even tagged the department of labor. A Chick-fil-A in Houston, TX, started having the camp a few years ago and all 200 spots sell out in a manner of minutes. The Hammond, LA, Chick-fil-A sold out all their spots within 24 hours and added additional dates. Mike Rowe (and many, many others) have come to the defense of Chick-fil-A for offering something fun during the summer that kids enjoy and that offers the “soft skills” young adults need in work environments. Chick-fil-A corporate has responded to the child labor complaints by pointing out that kids in the summer camp program will not be doing the actual work of a team member.
Dr. Pepper has overtaken Pepsi to claim the #2 spot in the cola wars. Pepsi has been in second place to Coca-Cola almost every year since 1985 (except for a brief period from 2010 to 2013 when it was Diet Coke). There was a time that Pepsi was doing so badly they put the company up for sale and Coca-Cola had the opportunity to buy it, and cheaply at that. But their reasoning at the time was if Pepsi was that bad off they would do nothing and see if it would just die. Whoops.
Negro League stats – If you are a baseball fan you have probably watched a few games this week, read an online or print article or perhaps followed this story for a long time. For the rest of you I will be brief because if you really cared you would know already; MLB has incorporated the former Negro Leagues stats into its official records. We know for a fact that the statistical record is incomplete. It took years of looking through old newspapers and microfilm for researchers to estimate they have 75% of box scores from Negro League games from the years 1920 to 1948. They only added to the official MLB numbers for players that played 60 or more games. There is a precedent for 60 games seasons but again, stat guys know already and non-stat people are not going to read more stats they don’t care about.
Home of the Braves – This image was posted in one of the baseball forums I follow. People immediately launched into how fake it is, calling it bad Photoshop from before the time of AI. Someone said it’s not even shopped, it’s just two image put side by side because the two never played on the same minor league team at the same time. I know the socks don’t match, I can see the giant M on the caps, I have no comment on whether or not Chipper looks fat… but the simple fact of the matter is that the picture is real. Someone jumped into the comment thread with his autographed copy signed by both players:
The M on the caps, and the logo’s on the sleeve, are throwbacks to when the Braves were in Milwaukee. This is from Spring Training down in Florida back in 1996, when both players were in Atlanta on the MLB team. That’s the world we live in. Not knowing what you are talking about is no longer a barrier to having an expert opinion and expressing it loudly. This person’s autographed photo, along with the explanation he provided, should have shut down the argument but he was largely ignored and people continued yelling stupid things at each other. I recently watched a short video of a pickup truck backing out of the driveway, across the street, through the neighbors yard and then through the wall into the house. Someone in a European country asked what sort of polystyrene American homes are made of. I explained how frames are wrapped in OSB that keeps the studs in place and gives the vinyl siding guys something to nail into. A random person that doesn’t know me from Adam called me a clueless idiot and further said I knew nothing about building houses. I replied that I knew some things about building houses… from the time I spent building houses. That person just silently removed his comment but some people double down.
Last August we posted this image of Van Til with the headline Technical Difficulty. We asked our readers to please stand by. In the months since then The Master’s Table has been viewed almost 13,000 times, even while no content was added. Thank you for standing by.
I know what you’re thinking; earlier this week I said not to expect regular recurring features like Happy Monday and Satur-deja Vu. So if you were not expecting it… what can I say? Surprise!
Yeah, no – I guess if you live in the State of California where they have rolling blackouts during peak usage times this might be necessary. The last time they opened a nuclear power plant was 1985. The population increased from 26 to 39 million in the years since. If you live in Texas, 78 degrees inside would feel a lot better than the 105 degrees outside. I live in Georgia and 78 at 100% relative humidity is sweltering. Our temp setpoint is 72 degrees during the day and we turn it down to 71 at night. Don’t get me wrong, I love summer. I would rather sit inside with the AC on than sit inside during the winter with the heat on. I love baseball games, swim parties, grilling out and late sunsets. I would rather cut grass than shovel snow. Everything people claim to love about fall – hoodies, bonfires, pumpkin spice lattes, snuggling up in blankets – those are all just attempts to keep warm.
Not a recent pic – I visited the Ark Encounter back when it was relatively new in 2016. I took the picture above before the sun, wind and rain started working on the exterior. I wrote a post this week about making the mistake of reading the comments when I saw an ad placed by the Ark Encounter on Twitter. Back in 2016 I wrote about my visit to the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. There are links to albums full of pics on Facebook from both places. Reading that 2016 post reminded me that used to really write, not just post pics and links.
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