This just in … AI developing targeted spam for authors is a goddam nightmare.
You can develop an ear for it pretty quickly — the language it employs has its own unique blandness to it. But, because I am often slow on the uptake, I thought these flattering e-mails were legit. (And it was a heady feeling to suddenly discover mysterious critics praising some very specific aspects of my writing from more than a decade ago.)
Now the problem is the frequency of these e-mails themselves. Maybe it’s just and end-of-the-year thing, but I got two in the last two hours, and they have a knack for fooling spam filters.
We never got the Westworld hotbots or Ron Moore’s chic, uber-cool cylons, but technology gave us this shit? We got robbed.
Why does everything have to be awful? Sorry. I’m in a mood.
No, I obviously don’t remember “The Lone Ranger” during its initial run between 1949 and 1957. (At least I hope that’s obvious — I’m a couple of full decades younger than that.) But I absolutely do remember this show’s reruns from when I was a baby … maybe around 1976, if I had to guess? I would have been about four years old. (I was five when my family moved out of that house in Queens, New York, to rural Long Island.)
I know that people who claim early childhood memories are often viewed with skepticism — I get it. (And I think many of us are more prone to confabulation than we’d like to admit.) But I’ve actually got a few memories from when I was a toddler — and this is one of them.
I can remember my Dad putting “The Lone Ranger” on in the tiny … den or living room or whatever, to the left of our house’s front door and hallway. You see the part in the intro below where the horse rears up at the .31 mark — and again at the 1:53 mark? That was a verrrrrry big deal to me as a tot.
Go ahead, tell me I’m nuts. I can take it. You and I live in an age in which conspiracy theories have gone completely mainstream. If I share something online that seems implausible to others, I figure I’m in a lot of company.
Anyway, I pretty much forgot about The Lone Ranger after that. There was a 1981 television movie, “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” that was remarkably well done — especially for a TV movie at the time. I remember being pretty impressed with that — its plot-driving scene where the good guys get fatally ambushed was unexpectedly dour.
But I never bothered with the infamous 2013 film. I occasionally enjoy movies that everybody else hates — something that earns me a lot of ribbing on Facebook — so maybe I should give it a shot. Hell, the trailer makes it look decent. And HBO’s “Westworld” has really whetted my appetite for westerns … which is weird, because “Westworld” is decidedly NOT a western — that’s sort of the point of its central plot device. But still.
So I just saw an eagle. I believe it’s only the second one that I’ve seen in my life. (I went through an embarrassing phase upon arriving in Virginia in which I thought all those vultures were eagles, but I got over that.)
It looked truly enormous, even from a distance — much larger, I think, than the eagles I’ve seen in Youtube videos; I’m not sure what the story there is.
This comes a day after a veritably massive heron took me off guard, too. (It was like a pterodactyl. It buzzed me like Maverick buzzes the tower in Top Gun.)
I keep trying to get pictures for you guys; I’d love to run photos here. But I’m always too clumsy in grabbing, pointing and shoot my camera. (I need to practice drawing and shooting really quickly, like maybe one of those Westworld robots.)
After my vain attempt to get a shot of tonight’s eagle, it occurred to me that if I knew where it nested, I could at least keep my eye out. So started eyeballing the treelines in my neighborhood. I might have looked funny, because I had to squint, because my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and I’ve been told that I look “grudgy” when I squint, like I’m “looking for revenge or something.” So I probably look like a lunatic walking around now, vengefully squinting upward, like a dude just waiting for the Martians to attack again so he can finally fight back.
My neighbors think I’m weird enough. I can tell by the questions they ask me.
Today’s Throwback Thursday is something that I don’t actually remember — the trailer for 1973’s “Westworld” was a bit before my time. But this was too good not to share. (I’ve been on a weird “Westworld” kick lately — probably because I recently happened across this quite promising trailer for the brilliant HBO remake’s third season.)
It’s funny seeing the same plot setup and motifs for the campy-looking original film (which was, surprisingly, written and directed by Michael Crichton). I must say that Yul Brynner looks like he made a pretty decent bad guy, though.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 