I'm so fan-cy! You already know!

Gotta say, I am looking buff in this photograph. All those years of inertia have really paid off.

Is there any greater thrill in this life than having parcels delivered to your door? I came home from work today to find a large cardboard box parked in front of my apartment. I already knew what it was: my super-fancy new ionizing tower fan. I am unreasonably excited about this. Let me explain. I just celebrated my 10-year anniversary at my job. It's actually more like eleven, but they don't count the time when I was a temp. Before this job, my all-time record for staying at one place of employment was just under a year. (And that was as a customer service rep. Blergh.) Anyway, as a token of its esteem, the company I work for now lets you pick a prize out of a catalog when you pass a significant milestone. There were watches, golf clubs, headphones, and even tablets in there, but my eyes went straight to the electric fan. You see, I'm one of those people who leaves a fan running pretty much all the time when I'm home, even during the winter. The droning noise helps me get to sleep. When I visit my relatives, I even travel with a mini fan. I've owned a succession of box fans, going all the way back to my adolescent days. The most recent was, until this afternoon, parked somewhat precariously on a desk next to my bed. It'll soon be headed to my storage unit in the basement. There's a new sheriff in town, so to speak. My deluxe new fan has a remote control and a timer and a feature which supposedly "freshens" the air. Plus it looks like one of the lesser droids from Star Wars -- you know, the ones which served as background extras and didn't have fully fleshed-out personalities. I must say, I was also rather amused by the promotional text on the packaging, which reads like free verse. (Note: I will try to preserve the punctuation and capitalization of the original text.)

Why Buy a Fan?

Create a Wind Chill

Circulate Air Conditioning

Bring Fresh Air In

Dispel Stale Air & Odor

Use for Only Pennies a Day

Get Comfortable!

Why use a Tower Fan with Fresh Air Ionizer?

Fresher Air -- the built-in ionizer adds

millions of negative ions to the air,

creating a fresh air feeling

like the great outdoors.

Why does the air feel fresher?

An ionizer generates negative ions

and disperses

them to combat and dispel air pollution.

As the negative ion levels grow, 

the air feels naturally fresher.

Most effective when used

4 feet from Surrounding Walls and Furniture.

Now, I'm pretty sure most of that is L. Ron Hubbard/Dianetics-level bullshit, but I don't really care. It's true to the extent that I believe it. This is my new religion, I guess. Yes, I believe in the "millions of negative ions" even though I can't see them or detect them in any tangible or measurable way. But I still won't be following the "four feet from surrounding walls and furniture" advice. I'm not going to have this thing in the middle of the room like it's the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm clumsy as hell, and I know I'd run into it like Dagwood Bumstead every day. So I'm taking my new three-speed God and placing Him in the corner where he damned well belongs.

The BastardTron 9000

A cybernetic superguru for the Information Age

Dateline: Nepal

There it sits, perched serenely upon silken pillows in its lofty mountain temple: the BastardTron 9000, the most sophisticated artificial-intelligence droid ever created. A full decade of research and development, encompassing many thousands of man-hours and, it is whispered, perhaps a trillion dollars, has gone into its production. Scores of programmers, engineers, clerics, philosophers, mathematicians, poets, and noted academics of every discipline have contributed to its final form. The governments of 17 different countries, including the United States, Germany, Russia, and China, have lent financial and technical support. Luminaries ranging from Noam Chomsky and Stephen Hawking to Deepak Chopra and Dr. Phil were seen entering the heavily-fortified BastardTron Labs in Rouen, where the magnificent machine was created, its every stage of development shrouded in secrecy, cloaked in gossip and innuendo.

The purpose of the BastardTron 9000, according to its chief engineer and namesake, the French robotics whiz Guillaume du Bastard, was to be a sort of Cybernetic Superguru for the Information Age, replacing the monks, swamis, fakirs, and holy men of the past. Embedded within the circuits, wires, and gears of this mighty automaton would be housed the sum total of Man's knowledge of his world, the universe, and the very mysteries of Life Itself, including the endlessly complex dynamics of interpersonal relations. At last, they reasoned, the Seeker of Truth would finally have a place to go to find real answers to the most perplexing questions of existence.

Unfortunately, the thing turned out to be a complete bastard.

(today's zomby) AND THE LOVE LIVES OF MACHINES!

Wow, this is a grim one. What can I say, folks? It goes with the territory of writing a cartoon about a dead guy. But should love be the exclusive domain of the living? Science suggests otherwise. I recently came across this 2010 clip with the self-explanatory title Japanese Robot Girlfriend.

The prototype JRG seems pleasant enough but rather cold, and it was a mistake to dress her as an actual nurse instead of a nurse in a 1980s music video. Perhaps what's needed here is some musical inspiration. There are a surprising number of tunes about the love lives of machines.

Here from Hollywood's golden year of 1939 is the possibly earliest example of the form, as crooned by the immortal Jack Haley:

Earnest and poignant if not exactly arousing. As an example of how quickly music evolves over time, here is a jumpin' little number by Wynonie Harris from 1951, a mere eleven years later:

Sadly, the romance of machinery does not seem to have been a major theme in popular music for most of the 1950s and 1960s. The Miracles, however, brought the theme back big time in 1975:

That #1 hit was almost certainly the inspiration for this bizarre 1978 disco number by Dee D. Jackson:



And who can forget Marvin the Paranoid Android's contribution to the subgenre from 1981:

I couldn't very well end this little survey without mentioning that there are not one but two great songs called "Computer Love," one by Zapp & Roger and one by Kraftwerk. Here they both are:

Weren't those nice? Kinda makes you see the machines in your life in a different way, right? Right?!?

Oh, forget it. I'm going into the kitchen and getting freaky with the toaster. Don't judge me.