I asked ChatGPT to come up with ten cat names. Here they are:
Whiskers
Luna
Oliver
Bella
Simba
Lily
Charlie
Chloe
Max
Lucy
I mean, Whiskers is probably the most obvious cat name, sort of the cat equivalent of Fido or Rover. The others are all just human names that don’t seem very cat-like to me, except for Simba, which is a little too on-the-nose.
I asked for ten more names, but didn’t apply any new conditions:
Leo
Cleo
Shadow
Ginger
Molly
Jasper
Willow
Felix
Nala
Oscar
Some of these are more cat-sounding, like Shadow and Ginger. Overall, the names are pretty unimaginative. Since ChatGPT is drawing answers from what it finds on the internet, you can draw your own conclusion on how clever most people are with naming their cats.
Finally, I asked for unconventional cat names:
Moxie
Ziggy
Nimbus
Pixel
Pippin
Sprinkles
Quirk
Whiskerdo
Zephyr
Glimmer
Whiskerdo just makes me laugh. Well done, ChatGPT. Ziggy is cute, and Sprinkles is about perfect for some kind of weird Calico.
Anyway, I’ll keep these in mind if we ever get a cat, and we decide not to go with Fuzzy McPurrPants.
Also, here is a cat I’ve posted before and continues to make me laugh every time I see it:
English is a weird language because it cribs shamelessly from every other language and constantly breaks its own rules, making it difficult to pick up for non-native speakers and, well, native speakers, too.
It is, like any living language, constantly evolving and adding new words, some of them kinda dumb (like finfluencer, which sounds like an Instagram for fish seeking to be more beautiful, but is actually just a portmanteau for “financial influencer” which is so boring that zzz….), some of them inevitable (metaverse), and some that feel like they’ve always been words (janky).
Repurposed words or catchy phrases rise up in popular usage much more rapidly now, with the internet all over the place messing things up. Where once it might have taken years for “give no fucks” to enter the popular lexicon (at least in impolite company), now it gets memed to death after a couple of weeks.
Which brings me to unpacking colourways.
What is a colourway? According to my browser’s dictionary pop-up tool: “Any of a range of combinations of colours in which a style or design is available.” That is 16 words to describe just one: colours. And yet people constantly use colourway now to sound hip and in the moment. “The new MacBook Air comes in four colourways.” No, it comes in four colours. There is no meaningful distinction between colourway and colour. Go ahead and find an instance of colourway and substitute colour. It will always work because colourway is used by dopes trying to sound cool. Or whatever word is being used for “cool” now.
Then we have unpacking, or to unpack. Once it meant “open and remove the contents of (a suitcase, bag, or package).” But now it also means to explain something. You can see how this evolved to get the new meaning. Having a lot of stuff to unpack requires time, patience and care (unless you hire a gorilla to unpack for you, in which case it is quick, chaotic and likely to involve a lot of shredding and damage). Unpacking something carefully and methodically can be used as a metaphor for doing the same with a non-tangible thing, like an ethical dilemma, or a big argument over colourways.
However logical this metaphorical extension of the word may seem, I’m still pretty sure you’ll still want to barf if you do a search to see how often the word is used everywhere and all the time. It went from zero to trite faster than you can say pumpkin spice latte.
So, final score:
Colourway: Don’t use this word, it makes you look like a guy from the 1980s wearing suspenders to be edgy and “with it”
Unpack: You can use this word if you want to fit in, since everyone else is using it. Or try to come up with the next “unpack” and make your own mark on the language!
A few weeks ago, we got a blast of hot, summer-like weather. With it, seemingly out of nowhere, came fruit flies. Did they come in off a piece of fruit brought in from the grocery store? Have a secret lair with eggs waiting quietly all winter to hatch? Come up from a sink drain like some subterranean horror? All of these things?
I don’t know.
All I do know is they arrived in numbers, and at first I was content to grumble and occasionally bat at them.
No more.
Today, war was declared. Surrender was not an option for the flies, only total defeat.
First, I consulted ChatGPT, which put together a bunch of sensible-sounding options. I later confirmed these elsewhere, then set about on my counter-attack. Below is how well each option faired.
Option 1: A bowl with a mix of dish soap and cider vinegar How it works: The flies are attracted to the vinegar, but when they make contact with the soapy combo, they have difficulty flying and will drown. Success rate: One fly caught. Close to a bust.
Option 2: Same as above, but the bowl is filled only with vinegar, then covered with plastic wrap, poked full of holes. How it works: Flies go in through the holes, but can’t easily get out. Success rate: No flies caught. A complete bust. UPDATE: This one just took time to work. After a few hours, it has now caught and killed 11 flies, with three more trapped.
Option 3: A small jam jar with some cider vinegar, with plastic wrap on the top, poked with holes and the wrap secured by a rubber band. How it works: Same as above, flies can get in, but not easily get out. Success rate: For some reason, the smaller jar worked much better, trapping a half dozen or so flies.
Option 4: Suck them up with a vacuum cleaner. How it works: Kind of self-explanatory. Success rate: Hard to say. The flies would disappear when the mighty hose of the Dyson was brought near, but I could never tell if they were pulled in or managed to dart off in time. I think I got a few, though.
Option 5: Spraying them with Dawn PowerWash (basically dish soap in foamy form) How it works: The soap either sticks the fly in place or makes it drop to the counter/floor where it can be dealt with. Success rate: This seemed to have success about half the time. Quite often, the fly would escape the spray entirely. But the kitchen and bathrooms ended up getting slightly cleaner.
Option 6: Whacking them with a damp cloth. How it works: Self-explanatory. Success rate: At one point, I was two for two. At others, I was not hitting any, so literally hit-and-miss.
Option 7: Accidental trap How it works: We have a plastic tray that the dish soap, scrubber and PowerWash bottle sit in, because they tend to leave soapy residue behind on the counter otherwise. Every week or so, I will clean this tray, which by then will have a small amount of soapy liquid in it. Success rate: Although this was not intended to attract fruit flies, it has somehow managed to catch and kill probably around 10 or so thus far, making it the most effective trap of all. Now I’m wondering if I should just set up another one of these trays on the kitchen counter.
Verdict: So far the small jam jar has been pretty successful, so I’ll keep using that. The soap tray is just kind of working on its own, so I will periodically clean it, then let it gather more. Mostly, I wish I could just clap my hands and make them disappear. But that only works when they happen to be between my hands.
NOTE: I updated Option #2, which has actually worked well after being given more time.
Now, this is a 10-day forecast, and predicting the weather multiple days in advance can be a daring proposition in this region. But still, I can’t remember the last time I saw June start with nothing but sunshine in the forecast. And no Heat Domes™. Yet!
Subject to change. I mean, come on, it’s the Lower Mainland.
I have recently begun digging through my old creative stuff–sketches and stories from back in the olden days when I had hair and dreams. Now I just dream of having had hair.
One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the old short stories, dating back to the early 90s or even earlier–so some 30+ years ago, written when I was in my mid-20s or so, is how vulgar they are. Everyone curses, the guys are all leering monsters you wouldn’t let within 20 metres of a woman, or perhaps any other human. Everyone drinks or is drunk. I’d say I was repressed and letting it all hang out in my fiction, except:
I never drank other than an occasional beer, and never wanted more
I rarely swear in the flesh, feeling I can draw on more colourful metaphors to express myself than common cuss words
I have never leered at a woman, nor have wanted to
Also, a lot of stories revolve around death, which is also weird, because ruminations on mortality usually start when you’re, well, older. But I apparently had it on my mind a lot when I was 24 or 25 (this might partly be explained by my father dying when I was only 27, but that goes beyond the time when most of the referenced stories were written).
Anyway, no grand point here, just one of those things I noticed. That, and a lot of the writing is very first draft. I “finished” a lot of short stories that were never really done.
Next: The software equivalent of “turn it off and on”, which is to say, I restarted iTunes.
This did not work.
I next logged into the web version of Apple Music. I needed to sign in there, but once I did, it played a song that I have only ever listened to through Apple Music (not purchased separately in the iTunes store). Yay, it works!
I tried iTunes again, thinking this may have sent a successful signal to the mothership.
It did not.
I thought about doing some searching on the interweb for other solutions or to see if other people are experiencing the same issue, then I remembered that I have several thousand songs I own–that I actually purchased on physical media and ripped (as we called it in the olden days), so instead of wasting my time hunting down something I probably couldn’t fix anyway, I just listened to my own music.
Using Windows Media Player.
Alas, iTunes, alas.
Bonus: When prompted to allow the Apple ID sign-in, it seems Apple places me “near Abbotsford”:
I mean, it’s right, if you consider 43 km away to be near.
It’s cloudy, with a high of only 19C forecast today. What is going on?
What’s going on is after two weeks of weirdly warm summer-like weather, we are now back to normal weather for mid-May. I’m still wearing my shorts, though.
And 19C and cloudy is still perfectly pleasant. To celebrate, here are a bunch of cats enjoying the sun:
It occurs to me that as banger enters the lexicon as a word to describe something good, great or otherwise appealing, that I do not like the word. It’s a bit too affected for my tastes, sort of this generation’s “groovy.”
And then I realize oh yeah, I’m old! This is one of those ways I know I’m getting older. A younger generation, one that came after mine, is now pushing new lingo into the general vocabulary and if I get cranky at their twenty-three skidoos, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds.
So be it.
(Don’t even get me started on baller.)
BONUS: Can we also already retire “lives rent-free in my (or someone else’s) head” as an expression? I think I’ve seen it about a billion times or so this year. NO EXAGGERATION.
For May 14, which is to say, a point where we are not yet halfway through May. The normal high is 20C. As I type this at a few minutes before 10 a.m. it is already 22C. The record for today is 27C.
It means coming back from the grocery store and realizing I forgot to get the main item I went there to buy. I get everything else, just that one more thing…
This is why it’s important to put everything on your shopping list and not assume your giant brain will remember anything not on it.
I knew I should have added dishwasher soap to the list. Do I really want to go back just to get it?
