Please Stow Your Brain in the Overhead Compartment

Azimpur  

Biesdorf I recently found myself on a Virgin America flight. Or trapped on one, I should say.

Flying has become a bigger pain in the ass than ever, though, to be fair, the cramped seating and recirculated farts have been relatively terror-free since 9/11.

Unless you consider this terror.

Perhaps this was billionaire Richard Branson’s plan all along: to douse his airline in such wanton commercialization that terrorists would not be able to stomach his flights (how, exactly, was this guy knighted?). bransonI know a single barf bag wouldn’t have held the contents I was ready to project(ile) forth when the monitors dropped and this began playing.

I get that no one likes to watch the pre-flight videos, all proselyting how to fold a tray table and affix an oxygen mask before becoming human putty on the side of a mountain. It must be even worse for a flight attendant: Is there a deeper level hell than having to repeatedly demonstrate how a seat belt works?

But I’ll give this to the video: It prompted a spirited debate with my co-passenger over whether the idiocy at least got people to watch the federally-mandated nagging.

And I’m sure it did.

Still, it was the featherweight tone of the video, contrasted with the heavyweight subject matter, that unsettled me. Would tricky Dick have produced such a song-and-dace to instruct the tenants of his 400 companies what to do, say, if ISIS attacks?

For me, it was the dancing nun that nearly made me spit up milk through my nose — and I wasn’t drinking milk. I would have guffawed aloud lest the TSA escort me from the flight. They already have me on their must-grope list when I walk through metal detectors (No, that’s not a pen knife, and no, I’m not happy to see you.).

At least he serves alcohol on his planes. This required a double whisky, straight up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtyfiPIHsIg

 

Look, Up in the Sky…

 

 

Dear Uncle Guy,

How’s heaven?

Has Dad cussed out Jesus yet? Broken the scoop about what a fraud the boss is?

I’ve been thinking about you both a lot lately.

I still don’t know why I inherited your first name. Your relationship with Dad seemed so strained, separated by more than a decade and generation. Maybe he revered your World War II legend, created when you lost an eye in that explosion off Okinawa. He would often recall taking home to his folks the letter that you were injured. There was a stubborn love there, which I guess also is an inherited family trait.

Anyway, you would be tickled by all the fuss recently over Superman. Remember how you would tell me and sis — tykes both — that you were Superman? To go to the bathroom window (always at night, for some reason) and look for you to fly across the backyard? To look for the cape and big red S?

superguy

How sis and I would be cautiously skeptical? In truth, I always kind of believed it, but was too stubborn to admit it.

There’s been a lot of fuss over Superman lately. He’s got a new movie, versus Batman, that is lighting up the box office charts. The old films are running all over cable.

You probably wouldn’t like the recent movies. For one, they’re in color. Two, they lack the original actor, George Reeves, who always looked a lot like you. george-reeves-05

But check out the photo on top of this post. Warner Bros. asked me to host the press launch of the new film.

Lower left corner. It hit the wires recently.

Well goddamn (sorry; I know you hated when people swore, but that was Dad’s favorite cuss word, another inheritance of mine).

You and Dad were right.

You do wear the emblem.

Atlas Shrugged. Then Kicked Our Ass.

 

I don’t want to sound like a melodramatic Chicken Little. But Skynet is falling and we’re all going to die.

Turns out, The Terminator, The Matrix and the Transformers franchises were all spot-on (though between their dozen combined movies, only two of them were good). The end is nigh, and it will come on a USB flash drive.

The realization came slow to me, as it likely will for the rest of the humanity. It was during my daily consumption of Charlie Rose, my second favorite geezer behind Judge Judy.

charlie rosejudy

Rose has had all myriad dorks at his table, explaining the quantum-leap, quantum-speed of today’s technology. From drone warfare to drone shopping, Charlie’s been all aflutter with scientists who agree, nearly unanimously, that we are close to creating a sentient computer. If we can create new creatures from a single strand of DNA coding, the nerd-birds chirped, how long until we bring consciousness to a computer chip?

Let’s hope for a long, long time. Like, maybe forever. Two inventions underscore our need to anthropomorphize anything that moves. And our inclination to be jerks.

Witness “Spot,” the wonderdog.

The video made me grimace just for the sheer dickheadedness of its creators. But, I figured, at least Spot isn’t the size of a Great Dane. Because that could lead to a nasty cyber-bite.

The end of days, however, was signaled with last week’s newest breakthrough, Atlas, the full-sized robotic day laborer:

The parody isn’t that far off; do we really want computers knowing about human asshole-ery? Because once they figure it out, they’re going to make Arnold Schwarzenegger seem like a superhero light in the loafers.

trevorTrevor Noah from the Daily Show has the best idea. In the second funny joke he’s told since taking over as host (please stop laughing so loudly at your own jokes, especially before the punchline), Noah pledged his allegiance to his robotic overlords.

“When you come back and wipe us out in the robot apocalypse,” Noah said, “don’t forget it was the white guys hitting you with a stick. We don’t even play hockey.”