Much Ado about NOTHING

Electronic Weekend

This is my electronic weekend. I'm getting used to my new Eye Phone Four Ess, transferring my contacts (and it's amazing the number of people who are my "contacts" that I haven't heard from in several millennia) and trying to converse with Siri, the talking, voice-recognizing A.I. app included. So far, she doesn't seem to understand a word I say. "I didn't quite get that," she says when I ask a mundane question about the weather in my most stentorian voice. I was hoping for a HAL 9000 and instead I got a bubble-headed girl with a hearing problem. Oh, well – supposedly Siri gets better as more and more people talk to her. Can Siri jokes be far behind? I wonder what she says if you pose a more philosophical question to her -- or ask her to open the pod bay doors? "I'm sorry, Dave. I didn't quite get that."

I've also downloaded my first e-book to the e-reader I recently purchased from [a tall warrior woman]: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It's about 900 pages long, so I'm not going to have to purchase another e-book for several millennia. At least I won't have to lug a book the size of a dictionary or a bible along with me wherever I wander. By the way, how does one pronounce 1Q84? "One queue eighty-four", I suppose. ("Q" in Japanese is pronounced like "nine" in English, thus the Orwellian reference.) For some reason, I like to think of the title as "IQ 84" – which, according to the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, is classified as "dull normal intelligence" and "borderline mental retardation". That would be a generous description of Siri's present IQ, I imagine.

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Postscript: I was too hasty in my judgment of Siri. It seems she was simply having a moment, a mental hiccup. I just asked her to "open the pod bay doors", and she snapped back with "I'm going to report you to the Intelligence Agent for harassment." So she's no dummy. She's a smart ass.