Siri Makes Another Video

We're having some dreary weather here, though perhaps not quite as dreary as in the video posted by the guy from Wales who found the monolith. We had light rain pretty much all morning yesterday and the plants are loving it. The temperatures have climbed a bit, too, with no overnights below 40º F forecast in the foreseeable future. I'm starting to think about moving the avocado back outside, but I'll probably wait until April at least.

It's really hard for me to type this post because the dog is on my lap -- I'm on the couch, holding the computer with my left arm and typing with my right hand. Cumbersome! Also I'm once again noticing that many of the keys on my keyboard have completely worn away. Instead of letters I'm seeing a keyboard full of round O's glowing like full moons, which is hard to deal with when I'm not typing in a normal position and working from QWERTY muscle memory. I probably need to think about a new computer.

OK, I've shifted the dog.

As you can see, I have nothing to talk about today, really. I did read a fun and poignant column yesterday about the 50th anniversary of "Free to Be, You and Me," the TV special produced by Marlo Thomas back in the early '70s that is seen as a cultural touchstone for people my age. I don't remember watching it when it first came out in 1974, but I remember listening to the record and singing the theme song in our elementary school music class. The message that we were free to become whatever we wanted, regardless of the gender roles society tried to force on us, felt liberating to me even then. Girls could have careers, men could cry, boys could play with dolls, girls should learn to fend for themselves.

Of course, being a gay kid, I'm sure I felt that message more than some other viewers. Those songs told me it was OK to be different -- and even though I was seven years old at the time and wasn't entirely sure how I was different, I knew I was. "Like many works from the early ’70s," wrote columnist James Poniewozik, the show "can seem simultaneously a dated product of a specific time and an artifact from an alternative future that never quite arrived."

I'll leave you with this:

My iPhone made another video of Olga images. It does this now and then, all by its lonesome -- the last one was in November 2022. Unfortunately, Siri tends to be a bit haphazard about cropping. I once again had to manually replace a couple of the videos so you could actually see the dog -- she'd been cropped out entirely -- and as you can see, she's at the margin of several of the photos. But it's an enjoyable little snippet nonetheless, so if you want an Olga fix, feel free to watch.

(Top photo: Reflections spotted on my walk home from work.)