So the following headline caught my eye this morning: The Challenge of Making Real Robot Skin, which in turn led pretty much immediately to a “come again?” moment.

So I went to the article, and it started to come clear…and then more or less tanked straight into WTF land. Why’s that? Well, just so you don’t feel left out, here are a few excerpts to catch you up:

I don't know what this is, but the 1.5mm skin kind of reminds me of cake. Mmmmmm... Cake.

In a recent paper “Towards Humanlike Social Touch for Sociable Robotics,” John Cabibihan and his fellow scientists detailed the reasons for testing and developing realistic skin for social robots.

“Touch is important in social interactions. Social touch are all those instances in which people touch each other, when shaking hands, when giving a pat in the back as a sign of congratulations and even in high-fives. Yet, one should not easily assume that humans will be comfortable with the idea of shaking an artificial hand made from a stiff material. In addition to the appropriate controls for a safe handshake grip and other forms of social touch, humanlike skin softness would be a reasonable requirement for the sociable robots envisioned to directly interact with humans in a social setting. “

Human skin has properties that are not easy to replicate in synthetics. The authors created a skin testing machine to check out some of the current substitutes for human skin in robots – like silicone and polyurethane. Unfortunately, these simplistic skin substitutes were tested and found wanting; at present, there is no accepted substitute for the feeling of real human skin.

There have been a number of different attempts to produce more lifelike skin for robots, as well as skin that would properly feed sensation to the operator of the robot. There is, of course, one ideal solution to creating robot skin that is as human as possible. Recent work done at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute in Germany has demonstrated that small swatches of actual human skin can be grown in petri dishes in a mass production facility.

It takes a lot of damage before you realize Arnold isn't actually a person, but a killing machine.

Ummm…what?

Who is doing human skin-covered robot development?
And WHY????

Clearly I missed some kind of memo. What the hell kind of robot is this?

I’m okay with Roomba and his stinky cousin, Scooba and anything that comes over to clean my floors or dishes (but no touching the laundry. I love doing laundry. It’s the only chore where I would even consider use of the word ‘love’ in association.), but I’m not so sure how I feel about robots that I can’t tell are robots.

At least even the iRobot robots looked like robots, so once they turned bad you could tell them apart. And WALL-E. Clearly a robot, and fine by me…especially because he never decided to destroy the humans who created him, which is a plus.

As for the explanation on this bad idea, I’m not buying the whole ‘people don’t want to shake hands with a robot’ excuse, either.

I would shake hands with a robot.

I shake hands with my dog (which has, in turn, taught him to flog me when he wants something, and I’m ignoring him, but that’s another story for another day). And if a robot wanted to pat me on the back with a metallic pitchfork hand, I’d be okay with that (so long as it was gentle and not a robot beat down that punctured a lung or whatnot. Punctured lungs are no good.)

My point here is I think there are only two reasons that they would want to put real skin on a robot:

1. To trick us.

2. To make robot prostitutes (or sex slaves or whatever).

See? Nothing but a goddamned robot.

And I don’t like it one little bit. And I suspect the robots wouldn’t like it one little bit. And this is where things go wrong. You create something in order to dominate it and use it as a slave, but you made it too smart so it collaborates with the others of its kind and overthrows you and the next thing you know we’re all hanging out in liquid cocoons and powering The Matrix.

Right????

So can’t we at least learn from our popular culture? Life imitates art and whatnot?

For instance,  in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (The Phillip K. Dick classic known more commonly as the Harrison Ford movie Blader Runner)? Replicants – or ’skin jobs’ as they’re not-so-ironically called – that think they’re human beings but later (and not exactly in the interest of their psychological health) find out they’re not.

Daryl Hannah as a 'basic pleasure model.' This gives me an idea for Halloween....

Nobody likes to grow up thinking they’re real and find out they’re not. It’s an identity crisis in the making.

How about Alien? You know, where The Company secretly sends a robot as part of the crew to ensure that a heinous monster will make it back to earth safe and sound? And nobody knew he was a robot until he tried to kill Ripley and then all that white foamy stuff started oozing out of him.

You can’t trust those robots that look like people. You think they’re a regular, reasonable person…but they can be wired as total traitors just like that.

And speaking of treacherous behavior, who can forget The Terminator? Imagine if The Terminator would have at least had the decency to look like a killer robot. Things might have turned out differently for all the other Sarah Conners in the Los Angeles phone book.

In closing, let me go on the record as not liking this petri dish skin human-looking robot stuff. I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t good.

And in the words of Ash, ”I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathy”.

Wha…?

You’re still here?

Even with that title?

And you honestly want to read whatever goes with a title like that?

(Weirdos.)

Man, what it is going to take to get rid of you people? Something extremely wrong and possibly illegal, it seems.

(Sickos.)

Nevertheless, as long as you’re here…

That's a quarter...for context.

To be perfectly honest, I was going to call this post “The fine art of growing inedible vegetables,” but then I did a little research and learned that the alternative title was entirely appropriate in an inappropriate way.

So I decided to go with it instead.

There were, of course, the standard word choice dilemmas: Do I call the ovaries behemoth or monstrous or maybe just honking…but colossal spoke to me in a Colonel Sanders meets Coliseum kind of way.

Batter up!

So what the hell are you reading about, anyway?

As it turns out, nothing all that exciting.

Basically – as you probably know (unless you’re Jose) – I was gone for a couple weeks. And in that time, my garden produced not one, not two, but three sperm whales.

Okay, not whales so much as baseball bats.

Okay, not baseball bats so much as ridiculously oversized zucchini.

Which – by the way – I believe they call ‘courgettes’ in Great Britain (or else this oddball British guy in a hostel somewhere in Europe was screwing with me that he didn’t know what a ‘zucchini’ was just to seem interesting or compelling in an annoying way or whatever bad ideas go through the head of odd guys from Britain. Perhaps someone out there can illuminate???)

Twins. Twice the work. Twice the joy.

Anyway, in the interest of stretching this minor and only mildly entertaining incident into an entire blog, I looked up zucchinis on Wikipedia (I would think – and hope – by now you guys realize that my purpose in life was to wait around for the internet to be created, [Thanks, Al Gore!!!] and then look stupid stuff up. It’s not much of a calling, but it’s what I’ve got.)

So during the course of my always-compelling research, I learned some alarming and freaky facts that have caused me to relocate the offending vegetable body parts onto the back deck.

Read and learn:

“In a culinary context, zucchini is treated as a vegetable. Botanically, however, the zucchini is an immature fruit, being the swollen ovary of the female zucchini flower.”

Ummm….what!? Gross! (That fact  right there was enough to compel me to take the monsters outside. I don’t need no competition from any other ovaries in my own home…)

“Zucchini, like all summer squash, has its ancestry in the Americas. While most summer squash were introduced to Europe during the time of European colonization of the Americas, zucchini is Italian in origin. It was the result of spontaneously occurring mutations (also called “sports”).”

Nice how the Italians call mutations “sports”. Do they also call freaks “funs” and monsters “entertainments”?

Way to be misleading, Italy.

“Mature zucchini can be as much as three feet long, but are often fibrous and not appetizing to eat.”

Tell me about it.

“Zucchini with the flowers attached are a sign of a truly fresh and immature fruit, and are especially sought by many people.”

What people? People, if you’re out there, can you call me? I can get you what you’re looking for. They ain’t cheap, but it’s worth it. Right???

“In 2005, a poll of 2,000 people revealed the zucchini (courgette???) to be the Britain’s 10th favorite culinary vegetable.”

Woo hoo!

Tenth place!

Let’s see…gold, silver, bronze… So tenth place is what? Aluminum? Tin? Cardboard?

That is a fact so boring and worthless, it is barely worth repeating. In fact, I urge you not to repeat it, lest you drive off an otherwise interested potential mate.

“One good way to control over-abundance is to harvest the flowers, which are an expensive delicacy in markets because of the difficulty in storing and transporting them.”

Again, would someone looking for this expensive zucchini crap please contact me? I can set you up…for a price.

And let me know what airline you’re all flying for so that I can avoid it.

I am in the process of going home.

While waiting in line today to find out what the odds were that I’d get off the waiting list and into first class (zero), I was standing behind one of the pilots. After lingering a while, I happened to glance down and notice that his luggage was decorated with bitter bumper stickers like:

• “Is there a future for me here?” and a pair of dice. (I assume this has to do with the NWA/Delta merger.)
• “I’ve had enough of the uncertainty” (ditto)

and – just so I didn’t think he was only angry with his employer

• “You trust us in the air, why not in the security line? Special clearance passes for crew.”

Ummmm, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Johnny Depp character in Blow get started by having his flight attendant girlfriend run the cocaine back to Boston in her bags?

That’s why no special line, buddy.

Should I die before I wake, here's a little memento for you.

Go to more movies on your day off, and maybe cool your heels on announcing to the passengers at your mercy (and paying your wages, thank you very much) how miserable you are with your career. Let’s consider that on a ‘need to know’ basis.

I don’t need to know.

Meanwhile, I came very close to dry drowning on the very same flight. Those of you who did not spend their teens working as a lifeguard may not know that dry drowning is the phenomenon wherein someone can drown in a puddle of water. All it takes is a few tablespoons of water directly in the lungs and – sorry Charlie – you’re a goner.

In fact, I shouldn’t rush to use the phrase ‘came very close.’ I could still extinguish my own flame tonight seeing as dry drownings often occur a few hours after the original incident.

All the more reason to get this blog recorded now – while I’m still wedged into seat 12C – for posterity’s sake.

And here's a less squinty one from the really bad weather day. My brother was trying to capture how much the wind was whipping my hair around, which also caused about three cups of sand to blow into my eyes.

Anyway, I bought this rather huge bottle of water at the airport, and when I opened it, the plane jerked every so slightly and a giant geyser came shooting out of the bottle. A notable portion of it landed on me – although most of it went down my cleavage and my shirt only had one little tiny drop of wetness, which I guess is a good thing – whereas a significant portion went up my nose.

Yeah, you read that right (unfortunately): My bottled water went up my nose.

And no small amount. Enough that I started coughing and sputtering and felt the burn in my sinuses.

Now, if I had read the bottle beforehand, I would have learned that it is a special Poland Springs “Eco-Shape Bottle” designed with 30% less plastic which makes it, more or less, a water gun. It has no form. Truly, it borders on being a balloon.

Thus, exerting little to no pressure, one can easily maneuver the squishy decanter in order to fire a powerful torpedo of water right up your very own nose!

It’s cheaper than a Neti pot AND it’s good for the environment.

Hurrah!

(And if you look up Neti pot on Google to find out how to spell it [as I did] or to find out what it is, and end up watching that YouTube video with the hairy wildebeest guy, don’t come crying to me. You’ve been warned.)

p.s.

Speaking of noses, some stupid stowaway fly on the plane keeps landing on mine.

Hope he’s got relatives he can bunk with in Minneapolis…

I’m losing it.

I’m starting to think that I am the caretaker. I’ve always been the caretaker. Grady ought to know. He’s always been here.

Okay. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

Early in the day. Not happy, but not yet crazy.

I’m tired, and I’m sick of editing, but I can see now that it is soooo necessary (seriously. The delete key is wearing out in some instances) and thus (hopefully) worth it.

In other words, now I know why I was avoiding this: It’s hard friggin’ work, and not particularly fun.

Meanwhile, since it feels like pretty much all I do is read my own writing and tweak and hone and re-craft every paragraph, sentence, word, and syllable, my brain has decided to use the much-needed downtime otherwise known as ’sleep’ to torture me with wacko dreams.

Maybe it’s trying to entertain me or something?

I may have told you this already, but I actually had this idea to start a blog where I recorded my dreams so that other like-minded dorks could come and comment or do the same, and I even bought the domain name…but then I remembered I’m too dumb to figure out how to host that blog on the same server this one is on (even though my service contract clearly states I can host up to ten. They just don’t tell me how.) So, seeing as I’m clueless, I suppose you’re just going to have to put up with my dreams here.

And if you don’t like that, then too bad.

I’ve been editing all day, and I’m in no mood for your guff. I eat three of you for breakfast. So put a sock in it…and enjoy!

I call this one “A lot of stuff flying overhead, and none of it is good.”

So I was in this really nice, large, modern house, and it had a section that was like a high-end atrium. The entire wall was windows, as well as a significant portion of the ceiling, and it was attached to the main part of the house. I was standing between the kitchen and the atrium area when a hawk came flying down the stairs and toward the windows.

There were some other people there and we were all kind of alarmed by this, and I ended up running to one of the wall windows and cranking the top of it open so that the bird could wriggle out. It made it outside, and I quickly closed the window back up.

I turned around to marvel at what had just happened with the other people, when there was a terrible racket. I looked up and at least a dozen huge birds of different varieties were banging on the ceiling glass. There was another hawk – a huge one this time – and something that looked like a vulture, as well as a pelican and god knows what else, all banging on and swooping toward the glass.

It startled me, and I ran from the room. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, the birds flew away. I went to my computer and Googled a few inquiries like “Hawks in house” and “Why hawks in house” and “House swarmed with birds.” I found some stuff about birds getting in the house, and also a bunch of links to the military and different operations and things like that. I ignored those.

A few minutes later, there was a loud roar, and I looked out the overhead windows to see hundreds of planes flying together and in an extremely close formation and quite low. It looked like they were only a few hundred feet over the house.

When's the last time you saw a gold-plated TIE fighter overhead? That's what I thought.

In addition to your standard fighter planes and some larger jets, there were six or seven stealth bombers and at least a dozen gold-colored  Star Wars starfighters (I know, stupid right?).

It was completely crazy, and I yelled for everyone to come and see this. The planes just kept coming and coming and I got my camera and took several pictures, particularly of the starfighters.

A little while later, we all went to bed. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when there was a disturbance in the hall. I came out into the hallway and seven or eight military officers were standing there. Two men came and cornered me into a hall bathroom and pulled out a weird gadget that they placed over my eyes.

When they turned it on, I could see all this bizarre and haphazard stuff like military plans and charts and all sorts of haphazard words, and then behind that was a scene of a man walking down the suburban street with lots of green grassy yards. Across the bottom of the screen was a bar that had started out orange and was getting redder and redder.

I realized I needed to calm down, and forced myself to open my eyes wider, relax, and breathe deeply. Slowly, the bar descended back to yellow and then became greener and greener. One of the men said something about “You did that just in time.”

It suddenly occurred to me that failing that test would be a bad thing. At the same time I realized I wasn’t wearing any pants…or underwear, just a tank top. I was slightly horrified and excused myself, and they allowed me to run and grab some shorts.

When I came back out, they led me to the couch where they were questioning all of us. I kept turning to the other people and whispering, “Did you do something? Why is this happening!?”

Although I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong (intentionally), I had an instinct that the Google searches I had done had somehow triggered all those planes. I asked one of the military men if that had been them flying overhead, and he said it had. I could only figure it had something to do with the word ‘hawk.’

They quizzed us for a while, and then took every electronic device we had – including my cell phone, camera (there went my gold TIE fighter shots. Darn it!), and my computer. I was pretty stressed about that, especially when they headed out the door with all of it and informed me it could be months before I got any of it back.

On the upside…no more editing!!!  ;)

Thoughts? Insights? Alarm and concern for my mental health?

In conclusion, and in unrelated news, I think I might be Facebook friends with a Catholic priest.

After six or seven grueling hours..

He’s actually an old childhood friend and my first big crush (in second grade at Catholic school. I was ready to maim anyone on the playground who even thought about holding his hand or any such thing. He was the best drawer in the class – besides me – AND he had a newborn baby sister. That’s attractive stuff. What can I say?)

Anyway, every day he posts status updates like the following (copy/pasted):

Jesus, You’ve captured my heart, and Im not letting go

Jesus, help me to take a stand against temptation

Jesus, pour out your mercy over our hearts

Jesus, there is freedom in your name

Today – without thinking it through – my status update (via Twitter) was:

Saw this headline: “KoRn Guitarist Gets Jesus Tattoo To Stop Himself From Masturbating.” Good luck, pal. My Moses tattoo did not work at all.

I figure it’s a matter of hours before I’m ‘unfriended.’

If my dad is adamant about one thing, it’s that he doesn’t want to show up in the blog…which is a sorry shame, because I would have so much more material if he would ease up on that rule.

What a photogenic bunch. (And Dad, if this is a problem, Photoshop some other heads onto yours, and I'll replace it!)

Regardless, I still have to tell you this little story (and I don’t think it makes anyone look bad, so hopefully I won’t get in trouble for doing so!)

After a quick break, a slight digression: Have you ever gone to the bathroom and tried and tried to zip your jeans only to realize they’re already zipped? How the hell did that happen? How did I get them off and back on zipped up? Or did I zip them somehow without ever consciously realizing it? Weird.

So back to the story, we’re here in Wildwood and (to everyone’s chagrin) there’s some kind of motorcycle rally in town, called Roar to the Shore (Not to be confused with Roar at the Shore in Erie, PA. The shore being Lake Erie, I suppose, which is actually kind of sad. I’m not into trying to convince myself that a lake – no matter how large – is the same thing as being at the shore).

Point being, there’s an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 rough-looking people on a mix of motorcycles and choppers, and if you’ve ever seen Gimme Shelter, you have a healthy respect for (and certain amount of fear of) the Hell’s Angels.

This is what you get when your brother takes pictures for you. This is the best shot of the bunch. Unfortunately.

However, before they got here and started intimidating us (or me, anyway. I have no idea if anyone else is intimidated, but I figure any man in his sixties in a 100% leather outfit and wispy white  hair down to his butt is trying to warn me that he’s got some screws loose. And the lady with the Cruella de Ville hair? Also trying to send me a message akin to a fluorescent orange frog to a potential predator. I have been warned, and I will heed said warning). So anyway, before they all got here, we were checking out the convention center where they were setting up for the festivities.

I personally have never been to a convention where there’s a Jack Daniels semi-truck offering ‘free tours’ (free bourbon???), but I guess that would be a tough sell at a banking convention (or maybe not. Some of those people can throw them back like you wouldn’t believe. One of the drunkest nights of my life occurred at the Bank Administration Institute’s Retail Delivery conference in New Orleans. I spent the next day barfing in the convention center bathroom…but not before drunk dialing my boss. True story.)

Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered why I’m so sarcastic and inappropriate, I’ll have you know you can blame it on my family.

You see, there’s a Miss Roar to the Shore Biker Babe contest, and my dad is egging me on to enter it. Actually, to be fair – and accurate – he’s urging me to be a double winner (“Everybody loves a double winner!!!”) and take that trophy as well as a Walking Poker Run (whatever that means. How can you walk and run and play poker at the same time?)

Then, in jest, he was trying to get my brother to change his flight to stay and support me.

“Just tell them, my sister is in a wet t-shirt contest, so I have to change my flight. It’s going to be classic!”

Then there was some discussion of my dad’s girlfriend going up against me (with the pseudonym of Candy, due to her passionate love of The Fudge Kitchen), but I’ll stop the anecdote right there to protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, my dreams of being Biker Babe 2009 are probably not going to come true for a number of reasons:

1. I don’t own a leather (or even a pleather) bikini.

2. I don’t have a single tattoo, and the only temporary tattoos I could find featured fairies.

3. I’m afraid of bikers.

The t-shirt looked a lot like this. Except it was a drawing. And there was foam around his mouth. But you get the idea.

I’d rather this town was hosting a wild mongrel dog convention than a biker convention. I’d feel less intimidated. Nonetheless, in the spirit of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I went in search of some clothing that might help me fit in. Although I found a t-shirt with a horrible, scary, snarling Rottweiler with a spiked collar and the words “Till Death Do Us Part” (What the hell does that mean? Because from the looks of that dog, one of us is about to die any minute now),  I ended up buying some Cookie Monster booty shorts instead (blue shorts with the Cookie Monster’s face on the butt. Very mature and appropriate for fine restaurants) and red child’s hoodie (that fits me perfectly! And for only $12 because it’s kids clothes. This could revolutionize my clothing budget), which is probably proof of a latent desire to not fit in with that crowd.

If anything (reviewing what I just read above), it sounds more like I’m trying to fit in with the elementary school set instead. Emotionally, that’s about right. As I’ve already told you, I have the taste of a 12-year old boy. The other upside? At least I’d live through competing to be “Miss Sesame Street 2009″ without getting shanked…