Another Week: Number 139

There’s a wonderful feeling of peace and relief when an aggravation withdraws. Our summer of stifling humidity and choking wildfire smoke is rolling away at last, and cooler, drier, cleaner air is taking its place. At the same time, construction on the school across the street is wrapping up, curtailing 15 months of noisy equipment, dust, and truck traffic.

This week began rainy and muggy. Although school construction has quieted, a VisuSewer operation occupied my intersection from Monday until Tuesday evening, with equipment running all night in the rain.

On Wednesday, I was finally able to open my windows for the first time in quite a while, and I heard crows heralding autumn. Mornings are becoming dimmer when I roll out of bed at 6 a.m.

Hummingbirds have been carbo-loading at my feeder and my salvias ahead of their trip south — usually one at a time, but occasionally two in contention. One even perched overhead on my power line and observed me for several minutes as I sat outside reading for maybe the fourth time this summer.

By Thursday, the sky had taken on the Mediterranean purple-and-pink look that tells me there’s a hurricane near our continent.  This one was the enormous Hurricane Erin, which thankfully did not make landfall in the U.S.

Friday afternoon, an obese old woman lugged two cumbersome boxes from her Toyota to my neighbor’s front step, then documented that still life on her smartphone. Meanwhile, on TV, FBI agents in khaki cargo tights brought boxes into former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland, home for evidence collection.

If there were any justice in this world, Donald Trump would be a struggling Amazon driver.

On Saturday morning, northwest winds blew in, and I walked to a nearby restaurant where a friend very kindly treated me to breakfast. On my way home, I ran into my next-door neighbor walking her dogs in the beautiful weather.

In addition to that excursion, I strode 6.07 miles this week.

This blog, as reviewed by NotebookLM phantoms

Google News has fed me plenty of articles regarding NotebookLM, Google’s “virtual research assistant,” which uses artificial intelligence to … well, I still don’t quite understand what it does.

You plug some information sources — web pages, files, videos — into it, and then it summarizes them, or answers questions using those sources, saving you brain power, I guess? Some say this is more reliable than at-large AI because you get to choose the exact sources. I say I’m still doing the research work of supplying reliable sources.

I have only played around with NotebookLM a little — to see if it could, say, digest a bunch of gardening articles and make plant selection easier. That mission is still pending.

As a side experiment, however, I fed it just one source — the front page of this blog — to see what it might make of 138 weeks of my life.

One of the ways you can output NotebookLM’s results is as a podcast, so I clicked that option, and it churned away for about three minutes before presenting this: “Digital_Sovereignty: Navigating Grief, Politics, and a Chaotic World Through One Man’s Unfiltered Blog.”

It blew my mind. Listen here:

First, of course, there’s the narcissistic, “mirror, mirror, on the wall” thrill of hearing two analytical, well-spoken reviewers dissect my writings about my life. It’s quite an honor — and hopefully, my long-awaited big break.

But beyond my Truman Show neurosis, there’s the way these bots grasped my rebellion in launching this project. They were uneasy about my unabashed political opinions, registered the profound loss I have suffered, and acknowledged the mundane cadence of daily life. They get it — as you can tell from their vocal inflections and hesitations. They even know they must tiptoe around America’s new fascist dictator. It’s astonishing and terrifying at the same time, like witnessing that first nuclear explosion.

My mom noticed that both bots tried varying pronunciations of my last name. She felt the female voice did better. It’s fascinating to me that there would be a difference.

As for whether NotebookLM will be a useful tool for me, I’m still processing.

Dow closes at record high!

On Friday, CNN and many others broke out the champagne and confetti in announcing that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had rocketed up 846 points and closed at an all-time record high!

Wow — happy days are here again!

One of the interesting notes CNN added, though, was that this was the Dow’s “first record high of the year.”

That’s interesting because, over time, the Dow has steadily gone up. We should expect it to hit a new “all-time record high” every single day, a few points higher than the day before.

But it hasn’t.

The fact that the “first record high of the year” came on August 22nd tells us this has not been a very good year for the Dow.

If we look at the Dow from this past January 21 — Donald J. Trump’s first full day back in office — to last Friday, we find it has risen 1,605.93, or 3.65 percent.

Going back to the same period one year previous — January 21 to August 22, 2024, under Joe Biden — we find that the Dow rose 2,848.98 points, or 7.52 percent, which is more than twice as much. In those seven months under Biden, the Dow closed at a record high not just once, but 19 times.

But hey — who doesn’t love champagne and confetti? Or maybe some chocolate?

Charade (1963)

Saturday night at my mom’s, she chose Charade from the list of movie options in my Notes app. It’s a romantic screwball comedy murder mystery set in Paris, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. We streamed it for free on Prime with “limited” commercials — although I don’t recall any except a handful before the movie.

The movie’s conceit is that Grant and Hepburn are so suave and unflappable as to be barely ruffled by a murder, or several murders, or the gain or loss of $250,000.

The wacky plot is sweetened with notable co-stars — Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy — and it twists through the City of Lights, including a boat cruise down the Seine with some daring matched background photography. The title song is played ad nauseam.

Cary Grant was 59 years old at this point, and physically creaking ever so slightly. But Audrey Hepburn is breathtaking.

My mom really enjoyed the movie, and I appreciated the style of its two stars.