Cat Strategy
Hey, Jazz Pickles. How was your week? Lately, mine have all been doozies and I’m starting to lose track of how many times my mind has been blown.
First off, I have a wife who is an intuitive genius of seekage, which is my own parlance for a person who is always seeking the answers to the Big Questions (BQ). The concepts she shares with me about existence and reality blow my mind with how simultaneously crazy they are and how right they seem. Am I a person who readily buys into non-Newtonian thinking? Not even. But lately, some of the stuff she says dovetails alarmingly well with other stuff I’ve been reading and thinking and realizing from the worlds of physics, philosophy, psychology, and history, so what should I make of that? A few choice facts from the world of quantum physics will rattle your lifelong definitions of reality, and that’s just the beginning.
I find that the older I get, the more I contemplate the BQ: What are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? Do we go anywhere after this? Is there a point to being alive? Is anyone keeping score? If so, what the hell are the rules? Can beings in other dimensions watch me on the toilet?
Maybe contemplating the BQ is just what happens to people when their body is old enough to stop thinking about getting laid all the time.
Another mind-blower is that I recently learned about bitcoin. Kaboom. I’m not going to go into a whole thing about it but it completely changed the way I think about money and financial security. We invested a sizeable portion of my retirement money into it. The overwhelming majority of people reading that sentence will think I’m crazy and they could be right. But before buckling my straight jacket, you might first want to google who Michael Saylor is and what he has to say about bitcoin. (Make sure you spell “Saylor” correctly or you’ll just get a bunch of gay soft-porn.)
Not that I’d fully recovered from previous mind blowage, but my mind was blown again yesterday morning by an article about the future of artificial intelligence. One big takeaway that my mind is chewing on is that no one knows how soon we will reach the singularity or what will happen after that. No one. No one can even guess, because, at that point, we’ll be living in a new world, one in which computers are likely to be as much more intelligent than we are, as we are than any random insect in your garden. I’m not talking about thinking faster—your smartphone can already do that—I’m talking about being able to out-think us as easily as you can out-think a ladybug. And what are the odds we can keep that kind of intelligence controlled for the use of good and not evil? Yeah, I know.
Sure, Dan, but what about the people-fighting-like-cats cartoon above?
Okay, good point. Let’s get back to something we can grasp. That’s a cartoon about how cats play-fight, but with people playing the roles of cats. Olive Oyl and I have two cats that wrestle much of each day and it is quite amusing. Watching cats wrestle is the sort of mindless activity that we’ll be doing while computers are teaching themselves things we could never understand or even imagine. We’ll be napping toddlers while computers reorganize our entire world and then the rest of the universe. When we wake up, we’re in for a surprise.
And that could be a very good thing or a very bad thing. Like throwing dice with the intention of gambling until you’re either rich or broke—there’s no way to know which way it will go until you get there.
Yes, it is a little scary, so I’m dealing with it by realizing I don’t control these things and my part to play in all this is to write stories and draw pictures. My Bizarro cartoons are tiny stories, usually with only one picture, and my graphic novel is a very long story with thousands of pictures. I’m convinced that’s what I’m supposed to do during my time in this primitive meat bag. Do what you think you’re supposed to do and we’ll get through this together! (Hint: worrying is not what you’re supposed to do.)
If you’re interested: The bitcoin article. The artificial intelligence article. Sleep well.
Now let’s find out what alarming truths Wayno was divulging in his Bizarro cartoons last week!…
Wayno often does fun stuff with our Bizarro Alien. I love this Frankenstein alien!
(Ahem, I hate to be that guy, but it’s a “Frankenstein’s monster alien”.)
That’s the Australian mini-keg that he’s drinking from, by the way. Barely enough to wet your whistle.
I usually stay in room 2B, but not 2B is fine, too.
And effortless weight loss is only a pocketknife away!
It was a coin toss between a peanut butter & banana sandwich and a bowlful of prescription drugs.
Has it been a while since you’ve visited Wayno’s weekly blog post? Well, slack no longer, and go see what smiles await in this week’s batch. I particularly recommend the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band video at the end.
That concludes this week’s humor test. Pencils down and pass your test forward. If you like that we provide this content free of charge, please consider supporting us via one of the links below. We will think of you each time we use the art supplies your generosity has provided!
Until next time, if that was you who left the sandwich on my porch last night, thanks! It was delicious!
BIZARRO SHOP We have new stuff in the shop that’s fun and cheap!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels
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