Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

Rich parents are using the same technology Hollywood uses to map star’s faces to computer generated personalities, or avatars, to create characters in the latest killer application of 3-d technology: computerized parenting that sounds (and now looks) just like the actual parent.

Many times, a babysitter will be faced with a spoiled brat who uses the argument of, “My mother never makes me go to bed at nine” at which point the exasperated babysitter is forced to allow the child to say up late and eat far too many chips in a can.

No longer. !

Now, with the flick of a mouse, the babysitter can call up the image of the mother saying, “No!” or any of several thousand other negative expressions, such as, “It’s no wonder you don’t have any friends!” and my favorite, “Drop Dead!”

Of course, the father is still the stricter of the two parents, rarely seen on screen and instead hinted at by the mother, “Wait until your father gets back from Sudan where he’s making very important oil deals!”

The father is scanned mainly as entertainment for the babysitter, who is attracted to older men, and will, of course, eventually replace the mother in real and artificial life.

That’s why soon, we’ll all be scanned at key moments in our lives, so that our personal avatars can be given as gifts or curses or hostages to each other.

Been dumped by some lousy guy?

Use the latest hack!

“Hey Jenny, wanna see my ex beat the crap out of himself?”

We All Can’t Wait.

There’s three people on earth who would get the joke in the title with the words: plain, simple, unardorned.

Jonathan and Eric and myself. Maybe some audience members who saw the project.

I ramble.

I’m spotting some negatives from 1993 scanned with the Nikon Cooscan 5000ED.

One of them is below. The scanner has a high resolution, but seems to lose focus at the edges of the image. Any idea why? I don’t think it’s negative curl, but might be. If you’ve used that model of  scanner and seen that softness at the edges, drop me an e-mail: vickersps @ vcu.edu, as I’m curious if there’s something I can do to fix it. Meanwhile, I’ll keep searching for the answer online at the usual places. The edge softening is very noticeable, with the film grain disappearing into a smear of fog. It’s also depressing, as I was hoping this scanner was the best solution for me, and there’s no budget for another one. Maybe that’s why Freestyle sells that aftermarket kit for the next model up that uses the liquid film holder? Sigh. Technology is a pain.

But this cow cheers me up. It’s not going to show in this one, reduced for the web, but zoomed into the picture for spotting purposes I can see reflected in her eye the field, the tree line, the clouds and sky, and even myself, standing off to one side.  All as it was in 1993. The field is now a forest. And the cow? I don’t know.

Time travel through photography.

Uncle Stephen started playing Boggle after his second brain surgery.

He lost his first game.

But only a handful since.

I don’t have a chance, but like to play.

We all make up words.

When challenged, grandmother suggests hers are types of rare grasses.

Uncle Stephen’s, geographical or geological.

Mine, landmasses, small or large.

*

The dot.

The dot remains a dot.

The radiologist says it’s death waiting.

The neurosurgeon says the dot is scar tissue. Death’s mark in passing.

*

We play Boggle, and are given, perhaps, an impossible set of letters.

Here they are, if someone else sees a word in this set, please let me know.

Y Qu C A
G S Z K
L J L G
S O V N

By Boggle rules, of course.

*

In relation to the Dot, and portents, we discussed what an impossible Boggle might mean.

The we shook them up again.

Uncle Stephen won.
Grandmother was second.
I was third.

Grandmother got us both with the word ‘tare.’

The guy at the Harrison Cafe was nice enough to let me have their receipt slip. Their cash register was using a strip of paper rather than spooling out endless receipts that people throw away. Or something. Maybe the customers still get a receipt? All I know is that I saw the strip of paper and had to have it. So I asked the guy and after a bit of, “What, you some kind of weirdo?” talk, in which I convinced him that yes, I was some kind of weirdo and it would be best for all concerned if he handed over the receipt strip. He gave in. A short excerpt I’m posting below:

Cris Silvent and I worked on this movie idea.

An  interpretation of the Old Earth Creationists, slapped with the standard, “what if?”

God is displeased with the Earth and the humans. He’s pleased with us over all, and has destroyed the Earth completely before, and afterwards humans went right back to being the same bickering bunch as before.

He doesn’t want to destroy everything. But He thinks something is amiss. Somewhere in His creation, there is some detail that if only He could change, it would ripple through all of Creation and people would live, if not in peace and harmony, more peace and harmony than He sees now.

So. God destroys the world, changes some small thing, like the current most popular brand of running shoe. The highest mountain peak. Makes all snow flakes identical. Fish tastes like beef. Water becomes purple.

One change each time. And then He recreates the world.

Instantly.

From humanity’s perspective, nothing has happened. The change, whatever it has been, has always been, and so goes unnoticed.

God watches the world run for a while, then changes it again.

One person, for the sake of this post, a man, for whatever reason remembers all of the Earths. All of the changes. After a change, for a short time, his body, his clothes, the things in his pockets, these things stay as they were in the last Earth. He never knows what a food will taste like. He walks down the street, his hair and clothes the latest style, turns a corner, and he discovers that purple and yellow no longer are the height of fashion, while his long scraggly goatee, well, is a long scraggly goatee.

A possible opening sequence:

A woman sits on a bench in Washington D.C.

Cherry blossoms bloom and fall, swirling about her.

The wind lifts her hair off her face. She has brought a book to read.

“Do you like this sour smell?” a man says.

She’s been lost in her book.

“Yes,” she says, “I love it.”

He smiles at her and his teeth are very white.

But otherwise her glance keeps slipping off of him. Back to the park, the trees, the blooms.

“Smell this,” he’s holding out a small brown journal with a single cherry blossom pressed between its pages.

She hesitates and he closes the book.

“Please,” he says, and smiles.

She nods and he says, “Close your eyes.”

She does.

Her own books lies folded in her lap, her index finger marking her place.

She hears the leaves and blossoms move in the trees, and across the park a dog barks and somebody laughs.

The sounds filter through the wind.

And then the slight rustle of paper and a very sweet smell. It’s so sweet to be almost cloying.

She opens her eyes, and there is the faded cherry blossom from his journal, up against her nose.

He closes the book, and then wraps a plastic bag around it.

“So you could smell it?” He says.

Then she can see his eyes. His plain eyes in his plain face. At that moment, the blue of the sky and the blue of his eyes match.

He appears to have two spots on his head that go straight through.

“What kind of cherry is that?” She says.

“That was yesterday’s bloom.”