When I was cleaning up my mother’s house a couple of years ago I held on to these two nifty-looking glass bowls. I remember them sometimes being used in our house when I was a kid. On a hunch I asked a couple of the guys who were working on the renovations at my place if they knew what they were. They were both young fellows, in their early 20s. The looked them over and guessed they were candy dishes. Which I suppose is something they could be used for, but it’s not their obvious function.

Their supervisor, who was 40-something, also pulled a blank.

The correct answer will be found in the comments section!

I ended up 2025 with a trip to the hospital for an MRI.

It was quite an odd experience. The hospital is usually a place that’s packed with people and crazy busy. But the combination of it being the holidays and 4:30 in the morning meant it was eerily quiet. That may also be why I managed to get an appointment for an MRI within a week. Usually you have to wait a lot longer than that.

No cars on the road for the drive to the hospital. I got to the main entrance and there was no one in sight. Only one person in the cavernous main lobby, and she was hidden in the information booth. I didn’t even see her at first. Went to the elevators. Nobody there. Rode them up to the third floor. Nobody. Nobody anywhere.

One person at the desk in the MRI room, who directed me to the waiting room. Empty. I just hung around until somebody came out and told me where to get changed and put my clothes. Then she left. So I got changed (messed up putting on the hospital gown because I don’t wear one of those every day, OK?), then went into the MRI room. Haven’t had one of those before but it turned out to be a pleasant experience. Really nice technicians. Then left. One person was just coming into the waiting room as I was heading out. Back on the main floor there was one janitor pushing a scrubber.

So inside and outside the hospital I saw a total of six people. Two at information desks. Two running the MRI machine. One patient and one janitor. All women. They say healthcare is a predominantly female occupation now but this still struck me as surprising. Though more surprising was just how empty the place was. I mean practically deserted. If I hadn’t been looking for people I wouldn’t have found any. And it’s a big hospital!

This was a great visit. Much nicer than the last time I was in a hospital! Best moment was this sign of a bear reminding me to wash my hands. I really loved this. And I did wash my hands!

Happy New Year! Take care of yourselves and stay out of the hospital if you can!

This never happened.

For decades now (has it been that long? it has) it’s been remarked that funny/cute pet videos are what drive the Internet. Cats behaving badly. Dogs being lovable. Such moments were what short-form videos seemed made for even before TikTok and Instagram.

Because people were spending so much time filming their pets there was no end to this content: pets interacting with toddlers, pets being shamed for destroying apartments, pets defending their owners from real and imagined threats, pets giving their owners the side eye, pets upset at going to the vet, or pets just soaking up the love and making goofy faces when people say their favourite word. And to this list we could add animal videos in general, because animals are great and there seems to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of such content.

But today an inexhaustible supply is no longer enough. The algorithm demands even more cute pet videos, and that they be even cuter. What to do?

Well, never fear because AI has come to the rescue. And yes I mean that ironically. About a week ago I noticed that a number of short pet/animal videos were showing up in my feeds that didn’t seem quite right. And a few that were not right at all. A pair of dogs stopping a grizzly bear from mauling a woman on her front porch? A gorilla defending a zookeeper from a jaguar? How was that even possible?

It isn’t, and it never happened. Just after I started noticing this as a trend a friend of mine who knows how fond I am of Newfoundland dogs sent me a cute YouTube short that had a little girl scolding a Newf for eating her cookies. It was even tagged as a “Heartwarming & Cute Moment!” But while it looked pretty realistic I figured it wasn’t real from a couple of tells. And that was before seeing that the “creator” was something called “Infinity Viral 7.”

The floodgates have truly opened for such AI slop, which isn’t surprising. Our content is being scraped and fed into the AI harvester in order to train it, but what’s even more disturbing is the way the algorithms are training us. It knows what we want to see and so it gives it to us, only in an exaggerated, more sugary form that will give us an even bigger dopamine hit and leave us clicking for more.

As for authentic cute-pet videos, I’m sorry but they’re not going to be able to compete.

To which you might say: so what? The Internet is a firehose of misinformation and we’re all just swimming in it now. But even acknowledging that I still find these animal and pet videos upsetting. Moments that are truly magical and unique, that meant something to people, are just being turned into chum that deadens us to what is natural and real. What these slop videos are doing is taking what is a healthy human response and using it to jerk us around. I find it sad, and more than sad, to read the comments on obviously fake “Heartwarming & Cute!” videos from people saying how moved they were by them. How damaging is it to them to realize that they haven’t been moved but been used?

But then, how many of those comments were written by bots? Just as AI now writes college papers and marks them too, AI makes YouTube videos and writes its own comment threads.

Of course AI has an even worse social impact when it takes the form of political slop and porn slop, but the psychological effect of the end of authentic cute cat videos might actually be something worse. And please don’t be one of those people who think you can’t be manipulated by this trash. I assure you, you can. You can and you are. We all are. Even when the videos are marked as being generated by AI we’re still clicking on them. They’re still pushing our buttons. They’re still training us, and leading us into a deeper epistemological crisis. What will happen when what’s authentic is no longer “real” enough to warm our hearts?

This green fellow reminds me of someone whose name I can’t think of now. Not “the Grump” but something else. Pretty sure it begins with a G.

Just a pic from my front porch today to show those of you who don’t have snow yet what’s coming! (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Leave the grocery cart! Run for your lives!

Luckily the wind was at my back while I was walking home through this.  Nasty to have it blowing in your face. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

A couple of reminders that things are only getting worse.

(1) Recovery time for any aches, pains, or injury just keeps getting longer.

I’ve always had a bit of a bad back. As in it’s OK most of the time but roughly every 18 months it just goes on me for no real reason. I don’t overwork it or do anything to put it out, but it just goes. And by that I mean I can’t get out of bed, or stand up straight if I do get out of bed.

Now in the past, and this has been recurring since I was a kid, these flare-ups have usually only lasted 24 hours. After that I’m on the mend. In just a couple of days I’m pretty much full strength. But my most recent attack lasted a full week. I’m still not 100%.

It’s the same for anything that goes wrong. Any pain you used to go bed with, knowing that it would be fine when you woke up the next morning, now takes days or weeks to get better. I pulled a muscle in my rib area last year and it took three months before I could lift anything.

(2) You can’t see or hear as well.

I’ve always watched movies with subtitles on. I don’t know if that’s so much because my hearing is going though or because of poor sound recording. Only recently, however, I noticed for the first time I was having trouble reading a book with some really small print. Or maybe I just thought it was small.

Because I’m shortsighted I’ve never worn glasses to read, But I find with this book I have to hold it at just the right distance to be able to read it comfortably. This is a bit worrying, as I do have a lot of books with small print (all those Penguin Classics Dickens novels!) and I’m wondering how big an issue this is going to be moving forward. I suppose at some point I’ll be having to get large print editions out of the library to manage.

Saw these neat clouds on my morning walk. Looks like a map of the coast. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

I remember before the COVID-19 pandemic a bag of Doritos never cost above $3. On sale you could get them for $1.50 or $1.88. But I’m glad to see Wal-Mart is rolling back their prices. Way, way back if this sign is any indication.

Index

Those living in this country know well that Canada’s roads have two seasons: Winter and Under Construction. This doesn’t affect me very much, but as a hardcore flâneur I do get put out by signs like these, all encountered in a single walk downtown I took this week. They put a cramp in my style!