Something to Think About

 Saw this one the other day.

“People born in the 50’s have lived in 8 decades, 2 centuries and 2 millenniums. We had the best music, fastest cars, drive-in theaters, soda fountains, and happy days. And we are not even that old yet – we’re just that cool.”

Well now. Time to unpack this for just a bit. First, if like me you were born in the late 40s, then you can update it to 9 decades, 2 centuries and 2 millenniums. Just saying.

Whoever dreamed this up has bookended the amazing time span with some pure braggadocio. I might have quit after the centuries and millenniums bit, but to give credit where credit is due, we lived through an amazing stretch of musical virtuosity. From rock and roll and soul, to jazz and country. Aside: I get why Springsteen’s music rights catalog sold for $500 million, but how the hell can Justin Bieber’s music be worth $200 million. Answer me that!

I’m not really sure that boomers are all that cool. It’s only a quirk of the calendar that we’ve experienced 2 centuries and 2 millenniums. There are some Gen X, Y, and Z peeps who have crossed through 2 centuries and 2 millenniums. Maybe not with as much panache as boomers but who’s doing the ratings.

But back to the best music and fastest cars. Boomers are forever touting how great we are, which might account for all the inter-generational badmouthing we experience. Was our music better or are we just not listening to the current product (Bieber excluded)? Were the cars faster (Tesla shatters that myth and it runs on batteries for crying out loud)? As for drive-in movies, yes, that was fun unless you forgot to detach the speaker when you tried to leave at the end of the movie. Soda fountains? Meh. Brew pub bars are more entertaining.

Lastly, the whole cool thing. Hula hoops were cool. Tie-dye was cool. The summer of love was cool. The peace movement was cool. Bellbottoms were cool (the revival not so much). Woodstock was cool. Do later generations have things and times that were just as cool? Sin duda (without a doubt).

Let’s just say we’ve lived through extraordinary times and while we used to be cool, the cool factor has chilled a bit. I can live with that.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Berra of Good News

Well, it’s happened again. Yesterday I ran into someone that everyone thinks is dead. Why it always happens to me is a mystery. In any case, who should I spot leaving a yoga studio, with a catcher’s mitt no less? Why it’s Yogi Berra!

Yogi! My man! How are you? And what are you doing here at a yoga studio? And what’s with the catchers mitt?

If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.

There you go. Another classic Yogi answer.

I never said most of the things I said.

Sure. I have that problem too. Where are you headed?

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

Exactly. But just like in baseball, you need to master the mental part in order to build winning teams.

Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.

So true. Why do you think you had some of those awful losing seasons?

We made too many wrong mistakes.

Yep, I get that. Is it possible that those teams just needed to practice more?

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

I think I follow that logic. But you always swore that you could learn a lot just by closely observing the way the team played.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

So true. And nobody’s perfect.

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

I was just thinking the other day that so many of the Yankee greats like Mantle and Ford have left us for the great diamond in the sky.

You should always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.

That’s the truth. Speaking of the truth, over the years there have been a great many stories about you.

Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.

So what’s ahead for you? What are your plans?

The future ain’t what it used to be.

So I’ve heard. There are a lot of baseball fans who would like to know Yogi Berra’s secret to managing a winning team. Can you sum it up for them?

In baseball, you don’t know nothing.

Well said. So long Yogi!

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

AI Overload

Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence. I like to think that much of the grey matter in my brain is highly artificial, but they are talking about programs such as ChatGPT. Here you have a program that can compose music, write a play or a fairy tale, answer test questions, and even write poetry or song lyrics.

Yeah sure, but can it dance?

Seriously. Proponents of A.I. believe it will be a great asset for outsourcing the scutwork that has to be done every day. It’s already ubiquitous in such applications as Siri and Alexa, web ads, drones, facial recognition, spam filtering, translation apps, and self-driving cars. So what’s the big deal?

The dealbreaker for me is that we may end up with a lot of stuff that has no soul or sense of humor, and yet people will ooh and ah over the marvel of the technology. As a writer, my most valued commodity is my voice. When I discovered that I had a distinctive voice, it was one of the bigger aha! moments in my life. Whether it’s a good voice or bad voice may be up for debate, but I know that it’s what makes my prose unique. How can or will ChatGPT match that?

Will anyone be raving about how A.I. is so creative and imaginative? I doubt it. Humans do that. Everyday. Have been doing it for centuries. Whether it’s a painting, a play or a novel, if you remove the voice or the creative seed, what are you really left with? Answer: Something artificial. Instead of a seed you may only have the pits.

We’ve already accepted the fact that we cannot speak to a real person when we try to resolve a banking problem or book an airplane flight. We obediently toddle off to the chat feature to converse (that’s a stretch) with an A.I. bot that wants to know wants to know the nature of our problem (as if they are sentient enough to care). More and more of our daily interactions are going to be with the artificial intelligentsia.

Maybe they have the right name for A.I. after all. It is artificial. You might even say it’s synthetic. I prefer natural fibers.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that's not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.