About 1984, I got arrested in Cobb County Georgia for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had a little weed on me, which I had shoved into my skivvies before I was handcuffed. While in the holding cell at the jailhouse with a few other new arrivals, I decided I needed to get rid of it before I got processed in and sent upstairs, so I broke it out and surprised my temporary cellmates with a little treat in a home-made pipe fashioned from the foil out of a cigarette pack. It was cool. If nothing else, the 4 or 5 of us were a little less stressed about our current situation. One of the guys in the cell with me was especially memorable, because he had been arrested for drunk driving while he was at a lake partying with his friends, all because his keys were in the ignition so they could listen to his radio. He wasn’t even in the car when the cops showed up.

Fast forward about 2 or 3 years and I’m back home in the Florida panhandle. At that time, I drove a cab for a living and one evening I was out with a fellow cabby hitting up some titty bars and stuff. We’re driving in his car, and I told him the story I just told y’all, down to the details about the poor guy and his DUI. About the time I finish the story, we’re stopping at a gas station for cigarettes or something, and we get out of the car to go inside and out front of the store are two scroungy looking dudes selling clumps of mistletoe (it was near Christmas time). I’ll be damned if one of those guys wasn’t the exact same guy in my story. I recognized him immediately and about crapped myself and was like “Holy shit this is the guy!!” He totally remembered me, and we had a fun little mini-reunion of sorts during which he totally confirmed my story about smoking weed in a jail cell to my friend…

I do elearning multimedia and run in to AI schlock all the time and hate it. With the background and soft-focus I can see why you thought what you did. While AI would have done good with the dog’s face etc, details like the leash clasp would have probably been just poorly defined shapes or complete nonsense. That’s the stuff I key in on…

Ha! I came to post this! I’ve LMAO’d at every comedian I’ve seen on that channel!

actually now that I think back it was the water pump that regularly went out at 45k, and it was run by the timing belt. The noise coming from the water pump is what usually alerted me and I was able to replace it and the belt at the same time, which spared me from ever losing the motor. I drove that thing til it had over 160k on it, which was a lot for one of those…

I had an '82 Ford Escort. Those things were notorious for lunching the motor if the timing belt ever broke (which they did every 45,000 miles like clockwork) while you were traveling down the road. The valves would stop in whatever position they were in at that instant, and then the momentum of the car would keep the pistons moving up and down, bashing the piston tops in to whichever valves were unlucky enough to still be open, ruining pretty-much everything. At the same time I owned that car, my best friend owned an '82 Chevy Cavalier. We were constantly one-upping each other over who owned the biggest turd…

Back in about '89-'90 I was the assistant manager at a fast oil change place, and we had a regular customer with a maroon '76 Aspen with a bullet-proof slant-six who got his oil changed with us regularly. I could hear him coming. I’d know it was him without even looking because of the distinctive TAP-TAP-TAP -TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. We’d pull him in and he’d tell us to just change the oil and filter and don’t bother checking all that other stuff, so that’s what we’d do. We’d pull the plug and if more than a half a quart drained out we’d be surprised. After a filter swap, we’d fill it back up and restart it and it would go TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-tap-tap-tap-ta-ta-ta-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- etc and he’d smile and pay and be on his way. Of course, we’d see him again in about 3 or 4 months, same thing, rinse and repeat. The tapping was his signal to get it changed. Fast forward to '97, after working as a manager at other locations I came back to that same station as the manager there and I’ll be damned if that same guy in that same '76 Aspen didn’t pull in for the same service with that same oil-leaking loud-ass tapping slant-six, still hanging in there…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

I knew some folks that used to own a “dented can” grocery store named Dirt Cheap Grocery. They would find all sorts of deals on entire lots of nearly expired canned and frozen goods and what ever various other things they could find through their various connections. There would always be something different, and they would have some pretty incredible deals sometimes. I remember buying an entire case of frozen hash brown patties for $5. There were six 5 lb bags in there. we split it up with my wife’s sisters families. Another time they had those Michelina’s frozen pasta dishes that had just expired for 10 for $1. My favorite deodorant scent had been recently discontinued and they just so happened to get a hold of a big display bin full of hundreds of them and sold them for $1 a piece. It took me several years before I finally ran out…

Learned that lesson… I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn’t foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole…