Military Robots To Hasten Impending Dystopian Nightmare

This is terrifying: The military has contracted the Boston Dynamics robotics company to build a prototype Legged Squad Support System for infantry troops-a walking robot to carry supplies. In 30 months, for $32 million, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Tactical Technology Office and the U.S. Marine Corps will get a souped-up version of the “Big Dog,” the 165-pound quadraped robot Boston Dynamics has been refining since 2003. The Big Dog can walk through sand or snow, climb a pile of cinderblocks and right itself when it slips on ice. It looks like a Mummenchanz bit and it is amazing to watch:

The military contract stipulates that each Legged Squad Support System, or “LS3,” robot be able to carry 400 pounds for 20 miles without refueling. Of course, when the LS3 does need to refuel, it will locate and capture the nearest human being, and, while the powerful forelegs pin him or her to the ground, a three-foot-long hypodermic-needle proboscis will extend from the 40 horsepower engine to suck the twitching victim’s body dry of all carbon-based fluid.

Alexander McQueen, the long-notorious English fashion designer just now reaching both commercial success and fame, committed suicide this week, his office confirmed today.

Heath Ledger did not have a brother (as far as we know) and so I must jump to a semi-conclusion. Is… Heath Ledger alive? Because, you guys, this fellow sitting in the Henry Street Ale House last night, at a table in the window with a girl? I have never seen anyone ever who looked so disturbingly identical to someone else. He had kinda unfortunate blond Point Break/Prince Valiant hair, not unlike one of Heath Ledger’s many bad hair moments. His face seriously was identical. I know this is messed up but 1. I was not alone and the person with me was like, dude, why is Heath Ledger here? There was gasping. And 2. This was quite near the epicenter of previous Heath Ledger sightings, so it felt normal to see Fake Heath Ledger-so normal that it felt like seeing Real Heath Ledger. Have you seen this guy out and about in Brooklyn? Why hasn’t Google-Face-Buzz-Space invented the terrifying face identifier Internet searching software yet so I can find him? And… well, what if it’s vampire Heath Ledger? Do we have to stake him? UPDATE: Associate Editor Dave Bry saw him as well! On Grand Street, in Manhattan, yesterday-wearing a hoodie. What is going on???

How many young people, do you think, are kept locked in basements and bathrooms? Because it sure seems like a lot-and now there’s another one, a 14-year-old Arizona girl who’s been locked in her bathroom for two months. (In what seems a notable yet underdeveloped bit of news in the AP report, this bathroom did not have running water.)

Also, if you’d like to feel old, the girl’s stepmother was 31 and her father, Scott Bass, was 33. And: “when police arrived at the girl’s home to interview Scott Bass, he thought the girl was still in the bathroom and was ‘visibly surprised’ when he unlocked the door and she was gone.” And.

The girl had escaped through the attic and rode her bike to a nearby movie theater, where a concerned couple gave her $50, police said. She then rode about 13 miles to a Phoenix strip mall and bought water, food, a backpack and clothes because she hadn’t been allowed to change for weeks, Samudio said.

After that, the girl rode to a coffee shop in Scottsdale, where she asked an employee to call police.

Normally a contest like this offers some stiff competition, but it wasn’t even close: I am proud to award the title of Slipperiest Street I Walked Down Today to the south side of 10th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. I would also like to commend that block for finally teaching me the difference between my ass and my elbow, which, while both injured in the same fall, ache in entirely unique ways! Congratulations, shitty ice-covered sidewalk! You win! Be careful out there, everybody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AJxzTzWNBM

Thursday morning of the longest week so far this year? You bet your ass we’re going to start the day with some WACKY INTERNATIONAL VIDEO. We take you to the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, where staffers took part in their bi-annual safety drill. What a time to be alive! (C’mon, it was either this or the latest installment from Jim Kosek, AccuWeather’s Howard Beale.) Anyway, if I’m police from the Twin Cities airport, I’m booking a flight to Tokyo right now, just to follow up.

by Dan Kois

On a Sunday last fall, I was working downstairs with the space heater on and the office doors closed when the phone rang. The caller ID read DAN KOIS, which meant that it was my wife, upstairs, calling our home phone from my cell phone. As is often the case on weekends, we were trading carefully-negotiated Work Periods. I was writing while she looked after the children; later, I would take the kids while she worked. Later still, we would maybe eat dinner together and then put the kids in the bath.

I answered the phone. In the background I could hear crying. Alia said, “You have to come upstairs right now.”

“Okay, I’ll be right there,” I said.

“I am not facing this alone,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

In the dining room, our four-year-old, L., was sobbing.

“I don’t want to die!” she wailed.

Her sister H. was standing next to her, wearing a two-year-old’s idea of a concerned look, and patting her arm. “She’s crying,” she told me. Her job done, she tucked a sippy cup under her arm and wandered off to the living room.

“What happened?!” I asked.

“I don’t want to ever die!”

“Oh, honey,” I said, kneeling down next to her. “It’s not something you’ll have to worry about for so long! Not until you’re very, very old.” I could feel the heat from her cheeks. She wasn’t calming down. I didn’t know what to do. Why was she freaking out about dying? She is four! What could I say? I didn’t want to lie to her, but I realized immediately that I absolutely would lie to her if necessary.

“It’s something that happens to…” I stopped myself, hearing her questions spinning out from there: Will Kiki die? Will Mommy die? When will Mommy die? So many conversations with L. get derailed by us not thinking three steps ahead. “It’s not, you don’t — “

She interrupted me, thank goodness. “Where will I go?” she asked.

“Well,” Alia hazarded, “We don’t know exactly what happens when you die.”

“Why we don’t know what happens?”

“No one’s ever told us,” I said. “It’s a mystery. Some people think you just go to sleep and never wake up.”

“I don’t want to sleep and not wake up!”

I picked her up. She was bereft, betrayed. Her anger-hey, this was never part of our deal-was only exceeded by her panic. It was horrible.

Alia stepped in. “Well, some people believe that when you die you go to a wonderful place with all your family and friends.”

“What’s the wonderful place?” Other than a grandparent-instigated christening, our kids had never been inside a church.

“It’s called Heaven,” Alia said.

“Or, or,” I said, grasping, trying to head off her next question (“Why are my family and friends in Heaven?”) before it came. “Some people think that after you die you come back to earth as something else.”

“Like what?” she said, muffled, her face pressed against me. A glimmer of interest.

“Like a, like a ladybug — “

“I don’t want to be a ladybug!”

“Or a giraffe! Or an elephant! What if you came back as an elephant? Wouldn’t that be crazy?”

I felt her smile into my shoulder. “Or a monkey,” she said.

“That would be crazy too.”

“Ooh ooh, aah aah,” her sister said from the other room, helpfully imitating a monkey.

She straightened up in my arms and looked me square in the face. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I died and I came back as an elephant?” she asked.

Oh yes, I thought, looking into her eyes. Wouldn’t that be funny. I have had nightmares about something happening to you, kid, and in the nightmares the logical next step is to just fucking kill myself. When I wake up from these nightmares, the realization that you’re not dead makes me weep with gratitude, my fat awful tears dampening the pillow.

“Yeah,” I made myself say. She put her head back on my shoulder. My eyes met Alia’s. “If you died and came back as an elephant, it would be really funny.”

* * *

Later that night I turned down the lights in L.’s room to the level, somewhere just below full daylight, at which she will agree to sleep. She was scrubbed and washed and brushed and wearing new pajamas as she padded around, putting her babies to bed, each doll with its own blanket and pillow. “This baby wants a baby doll to sleep with,” she told me, and tucked a small action figure of Space Jam-era Michael Jordan under the doll’s arm.

We settled down together on the floor for books and songs. She’d chosen her book, the Richard Scarry collection she loves; I chose Little Fur Family, a book I’d been reading to her a lot. Margaret Wise Brown’s story of a little fur child and his adventures in the wild wood appeals to my appreciation for the anarchic and the enigmatic in children’s stories; it doesn’t exactly make sense, but it feels right. L. plopped down next to me on the floor and draped herself over my legs. Her closeness was both endearing and irritating. “Can you move a little bit, so I can read the story?” I asked.

The little fur child caught a fish and threw it back. He caught a bug and let it loose. He caught “a little tiny tiny fur animal”-himself in miniature-and kissed its little fur nose and set it down on the grass. The little fur child returned home to his family, and his big fur parents held his hand and sang him to sleep:

Sleep, sleep, our little fur child,
Out of the windiness,
Out of the wild.
Sleep warm in your fur
All night long,
In our little fur family.
This is a song.

I took the book with me, leaving L. humming herself to sleep in her well-lit room. She hadn’t mentioned dying since the freak-out this afternoon, and we hadn’t raised it. After dinner, Alia told me it all started when they’d been discussing fairy tales, and L.-remembering the story of Sleeping Beauty, who wakes up when she is kissed-asked what would have happened if no one had ever kissed her. And from there everything spun out of control.

While in theory we want to be as honest with our kids about the world and its trials, in practice we’ve shied away from any discussion of death at all. (The week of Michael Jackson’s overdose was a week of total news-radio blackout in our car.) The larkish nonchalance with which Alia and I, and all our friends, discuss anything grave-that generationally understood shorthand that connotes, “Yes, death and terrorism are terrifying, and I take them seriously, but que sera, right?”-doesn’t signify to a four-year-old. Four-year-olds are serious. Four-year-olds do not want your ironic worldview. Four-year-olds want to know how to feel, how you feel.

I opened the book and looked at the little fur family, the father and mother singing, the little fur child snug in his bed. It feels, sometimes, as though we lack even the framework within which to talk about real life with our little fur children. They never catch fish or run through the woods. They never decide whether to let the bug loose or to squash it underfoot. All we can give them are borrowed traditions-offering other people’s theories one after the other, hoping one interests them enough to push us gently to a new topic. We talk to L. about the sort of person we want her to be, and we do our best to be those sorts of people. But her world is full of little fur families who talk and act and look and believe-or don’t believe, or can’t believe-as we do.

This is right and this is wrong, we say. This is kindness. This is a song.

Other than that christening, and a handful of weddings and christenings and Christmases, I hadn’t attended church in 16 years, since high-school Methodist Youth Fellowship. A few weekends after that day in September, we put on our Sunday clothes and drove around the corner to Rock Spring Congregational. There were other reasons we returned to church besides that terrifying conversation with L., of course. But as we walked through the big wooden doors-the greeter shaking our hands warmly and leaning down to compliment L. and H. on their dresses-I was thinking about the little fur child as he lets the tiny, tiny fur animal loose on the grass and watches it run.

Dan Kois writes about movies and plays and books, too. Also, he has a new book out, about that Hawaiian guy with the ukulele. Why not buy it?

by Abe Sauer

There has been a lot of talk of snow on this blog of late. And while I know most New Yorkers don’t shovel a flake of snow, many in D.C. and other locales own are underwater on condos, houses and town-homes. Also, maybe some newly underemployed i-banker is now the super of your building and needs to know how to shovel fucking snow. Anyway, knowing how to shovel snow is a useful skill. I have shoveled literal shit-tons of snow in my life so here’s how.

First, chug a fucking glass of red wine.

Put on a hat and gloves. Next, throw on a light jacket. Not too heavy moron; you’re going to get sweaty. Also, it’s gotta be loose so nothing you bought at H&M. Armani? ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME? Next slam your feet into your boots. No, WITH PURPOSE. What, you don’t have boots?! (Rolls eyes). Okay, put on your Aldo dress shoes and put each foot into a few tall plastic bags, doubling or tripling up. Duct tape those fuckers on around your calves. You do have calves, don’t you? Yell to nobody in the house in particular, “I’m going out to shovel!”

Get your shovel.

You have one of those bent “ergonomic” shovels? (Sigh.) Fine. A plastic thing from Target? I suppose. Real shoveling is always and only done with aircraft-grade aluminum.

Open the door but do not step outside yet. Stepping on the snow just packs it onto the step and makes clearing it harder. Shovel the top step snow onto the second step. Shovel first and second step snow down onto the third. Repeat until you’re on a cleared spot on the landing. Turn around. Now scrape all the top step snow down to the second. Then to the third. Continue until all snow from the steps is on the landing then shovel that off to the side.

Go inside and chug another a fucking glass of red wine.

Now, starting on one side of the walk, take your shovel and drive that bastard low and straight into the heart of the drift. Getting the absolute maximum amount of snow on your shovel, lift it up and toss it to the side. Groan if you must. Better yet curse that fucking snow. “Fuck you, you motherfucking shitty snow!” Get angry, damn it!

Repeat this all the way down one side of the walk until your back is so tight it is absolutely killing you to stand up straight. Then go inside and chug another fucking glass of red wine. What? You’re taking off your boots to get the wine? Fuck that. Traipse that fucking snow through the living room all over the wood floor.

Got your shovel? Starting in the middle of the walk now, and facing, perpendicular to the still-snow-covered strip of the walk, slide the shovel beneath all the rest of the snow to the edge of the walk, lift it up and toss it. Each try should completely clear one shovel-width of the walk. Continue this way until your tightening back pain moves from the lower back to where your back muscles meet your scrotum. Congratulations. That, my good man, is a hernia.

Now, hobble back to where you started in the middle of the walk and, facing, perpendicular to the strip again but AWAY from the snow-covered side of the walk, slide the shovel behind you beneath all the rest of the snow to the edge of the walk, lift it up like lifting a suitcase and toss it backwards. Do this until your triceps and shoulder sear. Toggle between these forward and backward methods until the walk is clean.

Don’t put any salt on that shit, you fuck-up! You know how bad that is for dogs?

Now, go inside and finish the bottle of red (though really it should be gone as bottles contain exactly three glasses of wine) and cook yourself a fucking steak.

Abe Sauer knows how to shovel snow.

I don’t want to say it too loudly, because they are always listening, but that thing we were talking about yesterday? If you look way down at the bottom of your screen, you can turn it off and then forget about it forever. Pass it on, but if they take you alive please don’t tell them you heard it here.

God, snow days suck. Fun for the kids. For the parents of kids, who suddenly have to take care of those kids because the New York City public school system suddenly gets all Florida every time a few flakes, or a few inches worth of flakes, or maybe a foot of them, fall, not so much. Like today, I’m trying to watch rap videos. Like this one, from Tony Yayo, for “Back Against the Wall,” the third surprisingly strong song from his new internet-only album, The Gunpowder Guru. I say “surprisingly” because Tony Yayo is a member of 50 Cent’s G-Unit, and that crew has not been making a lot of good music over the past, umm, four years. Seems Yayo is better off working outside the big-budget auspices of Interscope Records, which used to put out all G-Unit material. Instead, going straight through 50’s website, Thisis50.com, he’s been reveling in the kind of grimy, ultraviolent horribleness that’s illustrated well by clips from the old Eric Bana gangster flick Chopper. Anyway, my kid’s in the other room now, watching Wall-E. So enjoy.