When hand crafting is no longer a plus, initial thoughts on diseases, and a blabst from the pabst, brought to you this week from a clean desk and a very cluttered mind…

1. So many questions about life on this blog. It's like Sex and the City, but without the sex.
2. I developed a new line of artisanal water, but customers got turned off when I told them it was hand crafted.
3. I was tired of having the same old cheeseburgers, so I decided to skip lunch and make tacos for dinner. Ground beef, cheese, tomatoes, onions…what a great change of pace.
4. Tasting wine is like telling the doctor whether your pain is from 1-10. It all depends on your expectations, your ego, and how much little things bother you.
5. Who decided that every illness should be known by its initials? Erectile dysfunction is ED, reflux is GERD, and constipation caused by opioids is OIC. Meanwhile, why couldn’t they come up with more meaningful acronyms, like Flatulence At Regular Time Sequences or Zillions of Irritating Teenage Spots?
6. Speaking of initial impressions, did you notice that Pabst Blue Ribbon only became hip when they started calling it PBR?
7. The other night, I drove to a neighborhood restaurant and found a parking space right in front of the entrance. I walked up and down the street to look for signs that prohibited parking or required a fee. Then, I asked two people who worked in the restaurant to assure me I was safe to park there. Clearly, the Meter Maids are a terrorist organization.
8. It took a long time, but I have finally run out of patience with adults who don't have basic computer skills. Yeah, it was almost cute in 1989, but you've had more than 30 years to learn this stuff.

 
 
Of course, all the people reading this post are incredibly tech savvy 8G gurus who can program a computer and surf the web and click on this button to become subscribers. Right?

Take a quick look at the photo that accompanies this post, the one with the panels from three comics that appeared recently in my daily newspaper. (Note to Millennials: Ask your parents to explain what a newspaper is.) Today’s post was supposed to focus on those comics, but it turns out that you won’t be able to read the story online.*
 
That’s because I have discovered the one thing you absolutely cannot publish on the internet. Yes, you can post pornography, threats, vile characterizations, fake videos and the worst moments of some stranger’s life. The thing you absolutely cannot post, though, is satire.
 
I tried, I really did, and my failure offers up a lesson about the medium that transforms the message.
 
Quick flashback: I was sitting at the kitchen table and I noticed that three comic strips all focused on the same topic on the same day: women’s hair. It’s pretty common that two comics might touch on the same theme on any given day, of course, because there are only so many general areas (family, money, exercise, pets…) that are universal sources of mirth. When I saw the trio about hair, though, it reminded me of Auric Goldfinger’s explanation that, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.”
 
Genius!! I had been meaning to put together a post about conspiracy theories, but I hadn’t found the right way to tackle the subject. This blog is a politics-free zone, which prohibits any comments about 99.9999% of all conspiracies. But the comics pages are perfect. Nobody could really see a conspiracy among cartoonists, so a funny riff on a comics cabal would be exactly right.
 
So I wrote a post about the conspiracy I had uncovered among cartoonists to undermine America with their flagrant attacks on women, families and other institutions. I added ALL CAPS and bold type and underlines and SOMETIMES ALL THREE to mimic the suspect screeds that arrive in my morning feed.
 
And it’s pretty good, at least in comparison with most of my stuff, so I put it in the queue to run today. But then reality set in. The problem with putting satire online is that so many, many, many, many…many people do not grasp the difference between real and fake. Our subscribers would recognize the post as satire, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that somebody somewhere would miss the humor and launch a boycott against Blondie.
 
I tried adding a spoiler alert of sorts to the beginning of the post, but that’s like trying to explain why a joke is funny. I thought of adding a note at the end of the screed, but that would work about as well as the “thanks for sharing the fun” announcement at the end of the War of the Worlds broadcast.
 
In the end, I gave up. If we were sitting in a bar and I leaned in close and told you about the comics conspiracy, we could have a good laugh. On the internet, though, we’d cause a panic.

Damn. Now I need to think of something else I can post today.
 
* If you’d like to read the conspiracy rant, just leave a comment (include your email in the appropriate info box) and I will send the pdf to you by email. Don’t share it on the internet, though, because innocent lives are at stake.
 
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Tip jars in the doctor’s office, heroic Millennials, and an uncomfortable response to my humor, just in case you were wondering…

1. I thought I was very clever when I came up with the question, “What Would Spock Do?” Clearly I was correct, because more than 8 million people have gone to Google to see when I would make it so.*
2. I am intrigued by all the people who insist that Millennials are the most entitled and lazy generation ever, but express great hope they will lead us to a new and improved society. I’m not sure I grasp step two in this process.
3. We pretty much end up with the lives we build for ourselves. If we’re honest about it and look back down the road we’ve traveled, we’ll recognize all the turns we took to achieve this result. 
4. A doctor’s job is a lot like they guy who dries the cars in a car wash. Each takes care of the person in front of them now, often with no idea how many more are lined up outside, and each needs to move quickly to make sure all the customers are served. Of course, the guys in the car wash get tips.
5. Curtain at 7:30 means we will open the show around 7:53, unless someone is still having a problem with makeup, in which case we’ll start at 8:07. Meanwhile, what can we do to make sure the audience is in their seats promptly at 7:15?
6. Tone deaf statement of the week: “I couldn't find any work in my major after I graduated, so I decided to take a job at my parents' company.”
7. Flight delays are so normal they aren't delays.
8. I hate it when I make a self-deprecating comment about one of my failings and then the room gets much too quiet.

 
 
*Yeah, I know “make it so,” was a completely different generation, but I wanted you to feel smarter about yourself. And, while you’re reveling in your cultural hipnitude, how about taking the logical step of clicking here to become a subscriber?

More than forty (yikes!) years ago, I wrote a presentation about the dangers of becoming too reliant on technology. The technology of the time was the pocket calculator, and my concern was focused on the tendency of garbage in to become garbage out.

I was writing for high-school students and my point was that we need to know the basics in order to catch our keyboarding errors. Type 5 times 7 into the calculator and your answer should be 35. (Really, I checked this.) But enter the information incorrectly and you might get 28 or 40 or some other error that you wouldn’t recognize if you didn’t spend so many hours memorizing multiplication tables.

It was a brilliant argument and, of course, every student who heard it threw away their calculators and bought a gross of #2 pencils. JK. Instead, they all assumed they would be company presidents and their minions would do all the heavy lifting, and addition.

Fast forward four decades and I find I must sound the alarm again, this time in response to a more insidious danger of technology that comes in the form of masters who look like servants. Yes, I’m talking about you, Siri, and your co-conspirator, Alexa, and whatever Google calls its viper at your breast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone is going nuts about Siri taking notes when your kids sing that baby shark song, but that's just a head fake. Our internet gods will announce the end of eavesdropping and we'll lower our guard once again. That's when they'll pounce or, more accurately, devour our paychecks from ambush. 

That's because you might have paid to have Siri live with you, but Siri doesn’t work for you. Siri works for the companies who buy advertising and positioning opportunities from Apple. Alexa serves the highest-margin clients of Amazon. They reply to your commands, but their hearts belong to someone else.

In-home assistants are the avant garde of the robot revolution, the takeover of our lives by artificial intelligences that smile and smile while being villains. These devices are undermining the consumer’s advantage online, and eliminating the race to the bottom that is the design flaw—and consumer edge—of the internet.

Search engines enable us to find exactly what we want at the lowest total cost. We can see which offers are promotions paid for by advertisers and we can check the reviews of the low-cost offers to find out if anyone actually received the products they bought. We can take the offer that’s highest on the page, knowing somebody paid Google for the placement, or we can take a few minutes to refine our search and determine the best overall value for ourselves.

Delegate those decisions to Alexa and you might as well declare that money is no object. There is no simple way to ensure that she or Siri or the Google thing will get the best deal for us. We own the device, but we are absolutely not the customer.

When we buy a house, we don’t confide our maximum offer to the real estate agent because the agent works for the seller. We engage the agent, but the seller pays her, so her duty is to them, not us. We apply similar skepticism with insurance agents, stock brokers, lawyers and doctors, because we know they get paid more for certain advice and less for other recommendations.

We’re inclined to lower our guard, though, when the same servant that’s making our buying decisions is also playing our songs and ordering our pizza. She sounds so friendly and servile and efficient. How could you not trust her to get you a deal on humidifier filters?
​
The more we rely on counter-top assistants to handle our day-to-day activities, the more we’re likely to pay for everything we buy. Trust me on this. I was right on target with my prediction 40 years ago and I am overdue to be right again.
 
You know what else is overdue? You are. You are way behind schedule when it comes to signing up as a subscriber to dadwrites. Close the gap today by clicking on this link to receive all of our truly disturbing thoughts. 

​Am I the only guy who decided to change his birthday?

I’ve always hated my birthday, and for good reason. My chronological bday is May 13 (Uh, oh, did I just give too much info to the dark websters?), which means that my birthday will be within spitting distance of Mother’s Day five years out of seven. By spitting distance, I mean the weekend we would recognize my birthday would also be the weekend we recognize mom. 

First, there was mom and grandmom; later, mom and grandmom and wife; then mom and wife and daughter-moms and, oh, yes, I think Michael has a birthday this week, too.

I don’t suffer particularly from fear of the number 13, but you run into all kinds of paraskevidekatriaphobics who want to rain on your parade. 

“Your birthday’s this Friday? The thirteenth? I hope a black cat doesn’t cross your path, Ha Ha Ha. Hah. Snort. Chuckle.” 

Where was I? Oh, changing my birthday. When the girls got into high school, they joined (insert jazz hands) SHOW CHOIR (insert jazz hands) and their big show, appropriately titled Big Show, was…wait for it…Mother’s Day weekend. So, for six years, I spent most of my birthday weeks in the dark, videotaping the rehearsals and the shows, followed by dinners with other parents or the moms in the family.

At some point, it occurred to me that I could follow the example of America’s Presidents, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, and Jimmy Thanksgiving by “observing” my birthday on a date when I absolutely was not born.

Picking the right date, though, is a tough job. As far as I know, there is no Idiot’s Guide for Changing Your Birthday, although this is clearly an untapped market with huge potential. First, I had to find a date that didn’t put me into the cross-hairs of another holiday, so anything too close to Father’s Day or the Fourth of July or Arbor Day was off the table.

Likewise for dates that might conflict with major Jewish holidays, since I would hate to be unable to have birthday cake due to Passover or any food at all on Yom Kippur. It couldn’t be a date that was within a week or so of someone else’s birthday or anniversary, either.

And, being a Druid at heart, I wanted a date before the summer solstice, so my birthday would come during the time of year when the daylight is growing. That pretty much narrowed the opportunities to a month between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, plus a few weeks in the winter.

I’d put the quest on the back burner and then….drumroll…fate stepped in to solve the problem. The day we sold our house in the suburbs, planning to move into the city, all the tension and adrenaline of the process drained from my system. Unfortunately, I was driving downtown on the Kennedy Expressway at the time. As the arms of Morpheus enveloped me, I rammed two other cars.  Luckily, nobody was injured, including me, and I found the date that would become my new celebration of birth.

So Facebook announces my birthday each year and I get the perfunctory good wishes from many of my "friends," but insiders know the real date to send me a note. It's almost like being president of a secret club, without the initiation fees or the felt hats.

Am I the only person who has done this? I’m okay with being the only one, since that would make me unique and clever, but surely someone else has taken this road before.

Right?

Anyone?
 
One great way to say happy birthday to me is by joining the billions of other subscribers to this incredible weekly ramble. Subscribers get all kinds of free stuff, including access to each of our posts and, well, that’s pretty much it. Anyway, click here to subscribe and maybe we’ll be writing about your birthday in the future. 

 
​Panic time starts this month as a million young adults feel the sting of being ejected into the real world. Yes, we’re entering graduation season and 99.9% of the post-millennials who shake hands with the principal/dean have no idea what happens next.
 
It’s a failure of parenting, if you ask me. The time to prepare your kids for the future is when they’re in diapers.  Even if you bribed the dean to get your kid into school, or went the old-fashioned route of endowing a chair at your selected institution, and even if you hired dopplegangers to sit in on their classes and take all their tests, you’re still a failure if you didn’t begin paving the way for them in utero.

Proper parenting requires optimal curation of the music that’s piped into the womb, detailed consideration of the best native language for their nannies and precise dietary choices. Most important, success-driven parenting must focus on the ultimate prize: the best possible job for our scions.  Beware, though, because predictions about the best jobs are often wildly off target.

Every so often, I’ll read an article about preparing our kids for the jobs of the future, and precisely as often, I get a good laugh. Coding is the rage right now, with special coding camps and toys that teach preschoolers the basics of writing ifXthenY and  ifJdoK.

There’s no harm to it, of course, but the future has a tendency to turn out differently than we planned. The earlier we set our direction, the more off course we’ll be ten years from now.  When I was in high school, we learned Fortran, which, as everyone knows, is the dominant software language today.

Absolutely nothing could move Fortran from the top of the list. Ditto for the punch cards we used to enter data into our computer. Such a great tool, absolutely irreplaceable.

Similarly, we were encouraged to plan for careers in space travel and we would have levitating cars and trains to ride in. Also, as predicted, we’ve been moving around for the past 40 years on jet packs strapped to our backs.

Ah, good times.

When our girls were younger, we were encouraged to teach them Japanese, since Japan’s economy was ascending and Japanese businesses were obliterating American industries. I never got around to enrolling the girls in Japanese studies, but it didn’t make a difference in the end. It turns out they should have been learning Mandarin.

Yogi Berra said it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future, and that is a very wise bit of wisdom. One thing we can assume about almost every prediction is that it will not come to pass, and the odds of failure increase with the length of the timeline.

Still, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t err on the side of hubris, so I have identified with 110% accuracy the top five jobs of the future. Train your children now, and you can thank me later.
​

1. Robot masseuse. After a hard day of ruling the world, what robot doesn’t need a good massage to reduce the tension in its springs? (Bonus: Our robot masters might actually keep you around for a while, or at least until they develop a better masseuse.)
2. Self-driving-taxi cleaner. It goes without saying that passengers will continue to leave a mess in the car and that garbage isn’t going to clean itself.
3. Permanent record terminator. Suddenly, all those college instatweetosnaps are going to become an embarrassment for a certain someone who is seeking a specific role at that special place. Scrubbing all the embarrassing items from the internet will require special skills and an incredible nausea threshold.
4. Beep translator. For some reason, product developers have decided everything needs to beep, pop, whoosh or jingle. Was that the pasta machine or do I need a new battery for my pacemaker? Beep translators can be lifesavers.
5. Door re-sizer. Let’s face it. With all of us working at home and having everything delivered to our doors, our obesity epidemic will only accelerate. In twenty years or so, millions of us will be too big to fit through a standard door. Door re-sizers will be like first responders, but without cool uniforms.

​Remember to thank me when your children have grown up and can afford to move out, thanks to these incredibly surefire job predictions. And, as a bonus, here is one more career that is certain to be a winner decades from now: Job of the Future Predictor. It’s a no-brainer.

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