Lesson Learned. Maybe.

July 1, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
View all responses

The most recent thing I learned is that you can’t transplant flowers when it’s 103 degrees and expect them to live.

A month ago, I planted petunias in my raised garden (center of the photo), but the area is being taken over by the marigolds that planted themselves.

I’d been transplanting a few marigolds at a time, mostly to plant in my what I laughingly call my farmer’s garden, which consists of a single pumpkin plant, a single tomato plant, a single cantaloupe plant, and single watermelon plant. Fortunately (or unfortunately — I don’t know which), the marigolds remaining in the raised garden are doing so well I had a choice to let them do what they want, thin them, or transplant them.

Obviously, I went the transplanting route, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about learning that you can’t transplant flowers in the heat.

I suppose, in a roundabout way, I merely thinned them since I don’t know if I can keep the transplants alive, though I just took a quick break to water them again in a half-hearted attempt to give them a bit better chance at surviving.

If it were only the temperature I had to concerned about, I might not worry so much, but it’s windy, the sun out here on the plains is incredibly intense, and the humidity is only 11%. Eek. Doesn’t sound like a temperature anything or anyone would like. I sure didn’t! I gave those poor plants a quick squirt and scurried back inside.

So that’s the lesson I learned. Maybe.

Did this lesson shift my perspective any? I doubt it. When/if the marigolds I transplanted don’t make it, I’ll probably try again or else run the risk of having them overshadow the petunias and moss rose that need to share space with those marigolds. (In the photo below, the marigold plants are those with the slightly bluish-green palm-like foliage.)

Although this lesson might not have shifted my perspective, for sure it reminded me to stay in out of the sun. And that’s a lesson I intend to take to heart.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in gardening, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Not Burning Down My House

June 29, 2026 — Pat Bertram

A few weeks ago, I burned a pan. It was the whole circus — smoke everywhere, screaming smoke alarms, me running around pulling the pan off the stove, opening windows, turning on fans. So fun! Well, no. I’m being facetious. It was the opposite of fun. One of the worst things for me is that because of Colorado laws regulating placements of smoke alarms, I have four within a few feet of each other — one outside the kitchen, one in the hall, one in each bedroom. All those alarms would make sense if my house was bigger but considering that all the rooms open into a very short hallway, it makes no sense at all. Especially since my overly sensitive nose detected the smoke before the alarms. But sheesh! The noise that all four of those alarms make at the same time is enough to deafen any post that wasn’t already deaf.

I had to toss the pan. There was just no way to clean it. I blamed myself for the mess, of course, because there’s no one here but me, but I didn’t think I was that negligent. That made the situation worse — thinking that perhaps I was losing it, whatever “it” is. My mind? My focus? My reactions?

Anyway, I bought a replacement pan, the same brand because I liked that pan. And what do you know — the first time I used it, the same thing happened. Smoke. Alarms. Running around opening windows and turning on fans. And again, I had to toss the pan. So, when it came time to buy a new one, I got a different brand. I don’t like the pan as well, but at least, I wasn’t burning it, though it did seem to heat up mighty fast and cook quickly, so I had to stand over it to make sure everything was okay.

A couple days ago, I briefly heated the pan with a touch of butter, poured in beaten eggs, and those eggs cooked immediately. I mean, ready to eat in seconds.

Then it finally dawned on me: the problem wasn’t the pans. Nor was the problem me. The problem was the stove. The element heated up and kept heating up, and I realized then that it had lost its ability to regulate the temperature.

I called my appliance insurance people. I didn’t expect anything because the last time I called them about an appliance, they told me they didn’t cover that sort of appliance anymore. I’d argued, mentioning that my insurance was up to date and that I’d never got a notification of any cancellation, but to no avail. As it turned out, they’d discontinued it just the week before. Yeah, typical.

So I was surprised when they came out the very next day, agreed with me that the rheostat was shot, said they’d order one and would be back the next day. And they were. Yay! Now I have to get used to the stove all over again because it heats up a lot slower than it had been.

I’m sure I paid way more in insurance than the bill would have been, but I got the insurance for someone to call, sort of like having someone on a retainer. The closest repair people are in the next town over, and they’ve never returned any of my calls — hence the insurance.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this or why I’m chronicling this episode. There’s certainly no moral to be gleaned, no real point to the story, but it is part of the “day in the life of” series of posts I used to do before I got sidetracked into paying attention to what’s going on in the world.

Luckily, my stove story had a happy ending. It’s the sort of thing that could have ended with a burning house and me out cold from smoke inhalation. I’m grateful that it wasn’t my mind giving up on me that caused the problem. Grateful to know my response time is still good. Grateful to know that my insurance wasn’t cancelled the week before. Grateful for a lot of things. Which, perhaps, is the point of this essay after all.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, dealing with old age, home, house, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Changing a Book Ending

June 28, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you could change the ending of any book, which one would it be?
View all responses

If you’ve been with me any length of time, you know the answer to this one: I would change the ending of The Wheel of Time. Of all the books I have ever read, this is the only ending that gags me. If The Wheel of Time were a single book, it wouldn’t matter. I’d do the same thing I always do with books that have unforgivable endings — forget them and never read them again.

The Wheel of Time is different. A lot of it is utterly brilliant. As with any novel of four million words, most of those words are banal — some are unimportant, some are fill, and some are storylines that could easily be edited out. But it’s the brilliance that keeps me coming back.

If you don’t know, The Wheel of Time is a series of fourteen books that comprise what is, in effect, a single novel. The first eleven books were written by Robert Jordan, the last three by a substitute author who is so bad I can’t even mention his name. Oddly, a huge percentage of fans prefer those last three books. But then, I’m not a fan. As with everything in my life, I am a student, a truth seeker, a pattern recognizer, and The Wheel of Time happens to be the literary focus of those traits and has been for a long time. I first read the books about ten years ago and have read them several times since. In fact, on this very day, in 2020, I did another blog about these books.

Although I’ve figured out in my own mind what the ending should be, it no longer matters. To me, since I’ve mentally erased the last three books from the series, it’s a series without an ending. Which is as it should be since Robert Jordan’s writing ended when he did.

It’s funny when I think about it — the only two series of books I ever study are both unended. One because the author died and I refuse to acknowledge the ending by the substitute, and the other because he . . . I don’t know what happened, but he (Patrick Rothfuss) never managed to finish the third book of his trilogy.

Still, it’s the written words that count, and an ending (or not) doesn’t change their legacy.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in books, fiction, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Success

June 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s your top tip to be successful in life?
View all responses

There are two ways to be successful in life. The first is to decide what being successful means to you, then focus on what will get you there. If being successful means being in a loving relationship, then prioritize that, don’t be distracted by what others think being successful means. If being successful means raising healthy and happy children, don’t give up time with them for other pursuits that might interfere, though sometimes, admittedly, what interferes is the need to make enough money to support those children. If being successful means making a ton of money, then go after it, but don’t be surprised when you find that other parts of your life aren’t as satisfying. If being successful means being a good person, following one’s faith, or doing simple acts of kindness, then that’s what you focus on.

Of course, just because you go after something doesn’t mean you will succeed at it, so this brings me to the second way of being successful — being grateful for what you have and what you have accomplished. Enjoying the moment. Celebrating your good fortune and accepting that you did what you could. And not comparing yourself to others. What you might see as their success, they might not. In fact, they might be comparing themselves to you, thinking you are the successful one.

When I became a writer, I hoped for success, which at the time meant being a self-supporting writer, selling enough books to make a living wage so I could write more books. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed at being self-supporting, but I did succeed at writing. I wrote nine books, all of which were published. That I was not successful at promoting those books does not mitigate the success of having written all those words, told those stories, offered a helping hand to people who have lost a spouse or a child.

Just the other day, a woman came up to me to tell me she’d bought two copies of Grief: The Inside Story, one for her sister who had lost her husband and one for herself so she could understand what her sister was going through. It was due to the comfort offered in my book as well as the explanation of the mechanics of grief, that helped the sister finally sleep through the night, which, if you don’t know, is a big step for grievers. Also, the woman who bought the books was able to support her sister, letting her sister grieve as she needed to, without urging her to “get over it.” She had tears in her eyes as she thanked me for what I had given them.

So . . . . success. Yes? No? Well, the book did not solve my financial woes as I’d hoped, but oh, my, having truly helped someone who needed it? That is success. Maybe it’s even a more profound success than making money — to those two women, it certainly was.

So, in short, decide what success means to you, focus on what you need to do to achieve that success, and then celebrate whatever success comes your way, even if it comes in a way you never envisioned.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in culture, How to, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Literary Irony

June 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been leafing through The Wheel of Time books and reading the parts that catch my interest. I’m quickly bypassing all the utterly boring sections, especially when it comes to the teenage girls and their individual grabs for power. These sections could have all been done through gossip or news being passed hand to hand or any number of ways to show their rise to power without readers being crushed beneath the banality. Some readers like those sections, the same people who think those two are the real heroes of the story, though I can see nothing of value to their stories other than that they became forces to oppose and perhaps help the hero.

Mostly I’m interested in the parts of the story that we aren’t bludgeoned with by a plethora of words, parts that slip through the cracks of “backstory” to become something else.

For example, one of the “bad guy” characters showed up in the army of male power-wielders that the hero had been gathering to help him fight the Last Battle. By chance, this particular bad guy was chosen from the ranks to be one of the hero’s personal helpers. Although the bad guy claimed to be a farmer, he seemed rather inept, could barely ride a horse, acted mentally slow, and was often found staring in consternation at the simplest things. He became part of a rebellion that tried to kill the hero, and in turn was himself killed by a “dark friend,” one of those sworn to the Dark Lord because the dark friend assumed he was nothing but the low-level soldier he pretended to be.

But if we turn that story around, piece together what we’ve learned about this bad guy throughout the story, and see it from his point of view, it’s a completely different and ironic tale.

In the first book, the hero kills a bad guy who was trying to kill him. Later, as we find out, this same bad guy is given a new body and sent to be one of the hero’s power wielding soldiers. It was pure happenstance that our bad guy ended up actually being in contact with and in service to the hero. Ouch. Having to serve the very person who killed you? So not fun! At least not for him.

Then we find out this same bad guy, some 3,000 years ago, had been a genius, a genetic researcher who created all the horrible monsters that currently plague the “good guys.” When the Dark Lord had been sealed up after a long-protracted war, this bad guy, along with a bunch of his fellow bad guys had been sealed up, too.

Back when he was sealed up, the world was way more advanced than we today can even dream of being, and so this poor guy wakes up into a backward world he cannot fathom, has no tools and no way to do anything he knows how to do, and so seems to be less than ordinary. And the final irony — this one-time genius, though being one of the premier bad guys, ends up getting killed by another baddie because he’s . . . ordinary.

Gotta love irony!

Another striking irony to me is that some of the characters hated by readers were not written as such by Robert Jordan but by the substitute. One character is a woman who helps the hero as she can, but seems a hard taskmistress since she demands to be treated with courtesy. I don’t think people would have hated her so much if Robert Jordan had been able to finish his books. Most of her worst characteristics ended up in the last three books that had been written by a decidedly inferior writer. So, since those three books don’t exist as far as I’m concerned, she turns out to be a woman who starts out demanding respect and ends up earning it. (I was one who didn’t like her, but she’s a good character up until those final three books, so I’ve come to like her.)

Another such character is a prince who was sworn to protect his sister, the daughter-heir, but she’s disappeared, no one will tell him where she is, and so he’s lost. He doesn’t know what to do and ends up — maybe — making bad decisions based solely on the chance of finding his sister. He’s also in love with a woman who is off doing self-important things, who says she loves him but doesn’t want his protection (even though that’s all he’s been trained to do). His bad luck was to be tied to both the power-hungry teenagers mentioned above.

To me his storyline is sad, and he only becomes an incompetent fool in the last three books under the pen of the substitute.

So, here’s another irony — readers love the substitute author, think he’s better than the original author, but blame Jordan for the characters they hate even though it was the substitute that mangled the characters. Yep! Gotta love irony.

I have those last three books, but as I’m leafing through Jordan’s books this time, I can see more and more mistakes the substitute made, and so I know for a fact I will never want to reread them. I just don’t know what to do with them. If I need the room on my bookshelf, I suppose I’ll take them to one of the little libraries around town since I still can’t force myself to go to the city library. Meantime, there they sit.

Because this post is about irony, I’m trying to find the irony in that previous paragraph, but it seems straightforward to me. Unless the irony isn’t in the paragraph so much as in the books. Although a lot of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is utterly brilliant, an equal amount is plebian at best.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in books, fiction, writing. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Talking to My Twenty-year-old Self

June 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
View all responses

Hypothetical questions like this make me think — not about the question I’m supposed to blog about, but the mechanics of it.

Truly, assuming there was something I wished I could tell my twenty-year old self, how would that work?

At first, I thought of leaving a message somewhere for me to find when I reached this age, but then I realized that’s the reverse of the question. Besides, there’s nothing my twenty-year old self could say to me today that would make any difference. If there was something that was important enough for that younger version of me to want forwarded into the future, it’s already been done. First, there is a little thing called a memory. Second, even if I don’t recall the important thing itself, it would be written in my very life — everything that ever happened to me stemmed from the thoughts of that year (and every year) so any message would be redundant.

As for the logistics of getting a message back to that younger self — reverse email? But email hadn’t been invented back then. That twenty-year old self would have to wait several more decades to receive the message, and by then, she’d be almost as old as I am now. If not that, then what? Time travel? Okay, so assume I went back in time, how would I ever convince that person I was her? I’m sure she’d think I was a relation, perhaps a great-aunt or some such because I did at one time bear a distinct resemblance to my mother.

I remember when I was young not ever actually thinking that old people were forever old, but I somehow presumed it. I knew people grew older, but it just seemed to me, in that accepting way of youth, that they were old, and had always been, just as I was young, and would always be. It makes sense, I suppose — when you’re young, you can see the changes in yourself as you graduate to a new grade every year, but the older folks always looked the same. I don’t know when it struck me that old folks had once been young, that they’d lived a whole life before getting old, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen until later in my twenties or even in my thirties. (I knew people aged, of course, but old age seemed so alien to my young self that I never made the connection.)

So there my young self would be, seeing this old woman, and no way would my twenty-year old self ever believe that I was this old. Oddly, I doubt that my current self would even recognize that young self. Odder still, now that I’m old, I feel as if I’ve always been old, as if I’d never been young. I mean, I know I was, but . . . who can remember that far back? Or care? It is easier just to accept what I am today and go with that feeling rather than give credence to a past.

Which means, I suppose, that even if I could go back and tell my twenty-year old self something, there’s nothing I would wish to tell her.

As for the photo accompanying this article, I realize it’s not my twenty-year old self, but nowadays, one young age is as remote as the other.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Miniscule

June 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve always prided myself on my vocabulary, a vocabulary gleaned from my vast reading over the years. This vocabulary doesn’t translate to speaking because many words I know and know how to use I don’t know how to pronounce, and I’m leery of using such words ever since I was made fun of at a young age for mispronouncing “macabre.” At the time, I was being driven home by the father of the children I’d been babysitting, and for some reason I used the word, pronouncing it as “mackaber.” I still remember his laughter. So, since I’ve never been able to handle being made fun of, I only use words that everyone else does, though I don’t hesitate to use any word I wish in my writing, confident that my spelling is correct.

Well, I was confident until yesterday. I was writing something, I don’t even remember where or what, and I used the word “miniscule,” which is how I’ve always seen the word written. Whatever spell check that particular site was using flagged it as wrong, and said the word was “minuscule.”

Not believing the program since I’d never seen that spelling and since neither MSWord nor my blog has ever flagged the word, I looked it up online, and sure enough, the word is “minuscule.” How is it that I have lived all these decades and not known that? It’s also pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable. I did not know that either.

Further reading tells the story. “Minuscule” used to refer to lower case letters (the minus coming from Latin meaning less) as opposed to “majuscule,” referring to uppercase letters. It seems to me that since “minuscule” refers to something being simply lesser, rather than something very tiny, “miniscule” (pronounced with its emphasis on the first syllable) should be a word in its own right.

And it’s getting there. Although “miniscule” is still considered a typo by purists (which I thought I was but apparently am not), the correct spelling is “minuscule.”

Except when it’s not. “Miniscule” has been used since 1871, though it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became an accepted variation that wasn’t always flagged as a typo. My print dictionary includes “miniscule,” and mentioned that it’s a variation of “minuscule.” So whew! Maybe I’m not as far off as I thought I was.

So even though it may or may not be a full-fledged word, I will continue using “miniscule.” It sounds like what it should mean: something vanishingly small.

It is funny, though, that a word such as minuscule/miniscule is only slowly evolving, but other words are almost instantaneously accepted, like my most unfavorite word, “veggie.”

Oh, well. I learned something, which is always a good thing, even if it did deflate my already under-inflated ego.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in writing, life, history/myth, being me. Tags: , , , , . 10 Comments »

Dotting Eyes

June 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So, artificial intelligence is supposed to run the world in the future? Good luck with that!

This comment wasn’t planned, but it just hit me as I am writing — if AI, or at least Generative AI (or as I once accidentally called it: degenerative AI) learns from people, and half the population is, by definition of average intelligence or below, then how will it ever get smarter than humans? And oh, yes, while I’m on this topic, people say that you can tell what AI has written by the M-dashes. Those are the long dashes I use in my articles all the time — eight in this piece alone, by last count — and I guarantee nothing I write is touched by anything artificial. Well, the computer — my fingers do touch that — but as for help with writing? No. Absolutely not. The point of writing is . . . well, to write. Having a voice in a machine do my writing for me would completely defeat the purpose of connecting with my own inner voice and ultimately with other human voices — not vocal voices since obviously I can’t hear people who read my work, but voice as in a person’s unique way of phrasing, unique tone, unique point of view.

But “voice” brings me back to what I came here to say.

I was listening to a clip yesterday from one of the black conservatives I occasionally pay attention to. I started doing so in order to find out what they think about being used to shore up the left’s anti-voter ID stance, and they don’t like it. They know it’s not Jim Crow-2, since their parents went through the real thing and so they know the truth of it. And they don’t like being patronized as if they were too stupid to figure out how to get an ID or how to prove their citizenship. (To be honest, I think the people I listen to are more educated, more coherent, and richer than those treating them as if they needed their hands held.)

Anyway, somewhere along the line during this two-minute clip, I lost track of what the speaker was saying because I was stunned into immobility. I simply couldn’t believe how AI translated his speech to text. He used the phrase “dot your Is and cross your Ts,” and what appeared on the screen was “Dot your eyes and cross your teeth.”

Um. Yeah. It might be artificial but it sure isn’t intelligent!

“Dotting eyes” wouldn’t necessarily be an erroneous transcription if he were talking about art, since that tiny dot in the eye of a painted face is what makes the depicted creature — animal or human — seem alive. And some people are born with teeth that come in crooked, so I suppose in some cases, it’s possible for teeth to be crossed, though I can’t really picture it. (No surprise since I am not able to visualize anything — all I ever see when I close my eyes and mentally try to call up an image is . . . black.)

But still — dotting eyes and crossing teeth? I sure hope the AI systems that run weaponry are a lot smarter than that or we are all doomed.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Loyal Subscribers

June 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you build loyal subscribers?
View all responses

I find it interesting that most of these blog prompts have nothing to do with me, such as today’s prompt about building loyal subscribers. I have no idea how to build loyalty, have no idea if anyone has even subscribed to my blog. I do know a few friends get my blog by email, which isn’t really fair — they get to keep up with me on a daily basis, and I don’t know what’s going on with them. You’d think they’d be kind enough to reciprocate with their own blog, wouldn’t you? (I’m being facetious. If I want to know what’s going on with them, I could simply call, and I don’t, so who’s the one who isn’t being fair?)

Actually, according to WordPress, I do have some subscribers, and a few more have subscribed in the past few days, so thank you for subscribing!

As for building loyalty — apparently, somewhere along the line I have done so since I see many of the same names in comments and “likes,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea why anyone reads what I write, though I do appreciate everyone who does. It makes blogging seem so much less like throwing a tiny penlight out into the great darkness of the unknown and more like connecting with friends.

There are some people who have been with me almost from the beginning — starting from the time I wrote about writing, then tumbling into the whole morass of grief with me, and still showing up now that my posts range from stream of consciousness to gardening. Truly, hands across the nations! (Did I mention how grateful I am for you? Well, it bears repeating.)

I might not know how to purposely build a following, but I know how not to build subscribers by the millions — don’t be controversial. Almost all people who garner those sorts of numbers and that sort of loyalty do so by talking about things that gets people emotional, and I don’t want to do that. I know how a lot of my readers think, and I’d just as soon not get into discussions that either get my ire up or theirs. (And I don’t like to have to think of tactful ways of saying I disagree, so I don’t.)

Another way not to build loyal subscribers is to not show a bias because bias automatically gives people a connection to you. It’s almost impossible not to show a bias, and I’m sure mine shows occasionally, though my bias tends to be for irony and intelligence and truth-seeking rather than for any movement or ideology. And I have a definite bias against hypocrisy, emotion that passes as fact, and regimentation of thought. I spent most of my life around people who loved to force people to think their way, so I became adept at changing midstream partly to keep the peace and partly because I didn’t care enough either way to argue the point.

But then, can anyone tell if they are really bias-free? I’m not sure. It seems ingrained so that a biased person acts as if their bias is the truth rather than simply their way of seeing the truth. Case in point: one popular quasi news show has been bleeding viewers because a lot of people don’t like its far-left liberal slant, and all the journalists on the show profess to have no idea there is a slant — they thought they were being impartial.

Seems like a good idea for me to keep keeping away from controversial topics — that way I can keep my bias to myself. And I can keep the readers I have rather than trying to grow a larger subscriber’s list, which I don’t know how to do anyway.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Recommended Tags

June 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about gardening being A Strange Avocation, and I explained the difference in the behavior of flowers between this year and previous years. The tags I used for the post are gardening, home, life, bees and flowers, bees in a garden, larkspur, lily trees, purple echinacea, purple echinacea turned pink, yarrow. All garden related and directly related to the article I posted.

WordPress, the platform that hosts this blog, has an AI tool that suggests various tags for posts. In case you don’t know, tags are words or phrases that bloggers use to help people find their articles. For example, broad tags such as “gardening,” don’t do much to drive people to a blog post since they are too general. If someone were to Google “gardening,” they’d get millions upon millions of hits, and the chance of their finding any particular article are close to nil. Specific tags are best, or so they say, because the chances of someone stumbling upon your immortal words are a lot better. (I was being facetious about the “immortal words,” making fun of the fact that so few of our blog posts say anything of importance, and yet, in the electronic age, everyone’s words, no matter how puerile, truly are immortal.)

You will never in a million years guess the words that the all-seeing, all-knowing AI suggested for that gardening post, so I’ll just list them for you: “Auto immune disease, breastfeeding, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, IBD.” How is that even possible? I’ve gone over and over what I wrote yesterday, and I cannot see anything that could possibly have generated such a wildly inappropriate group of words.

I know artificial intelligence is supposed to be a great thing, and it might be for other people, but I’m not that impressed. From what I have seen, generative AI in particular is not any more intelligent than most humans seem to be. (I slipped and called it degenerative AI before I corrected myself, but I like that term!) It also has huge biases, especially political ones, which makes sense, I suppose, since the vast majority of news sources and sites like Wikipedia are liberal, and generative AI is only as smart as its input. It would be nice to be able to use Google’s AI generated summaries for a quick perusal of any given topic, but I can’t rely on its answers because it makes mistakes that I know are mistakes. It doesn’t always understand the question, either. I wanted to check out “immortal words” to make sure I wasn’t making up the phrase, and all the AI would tell me is what immortal meant. I also wanted a quick definition for “tags,” and what I got was a whole lot of information about where to buy paper tags with strings. (I’ve noticed more often that search engines seem to be geared to products first, so if I want to know the definition of something, and it happens to be the name of a musical group or a brand name or whatever, that is what shows up, not the more generic term that I was looking for.)

I suppose, in Pollyanna-style, I should be glad that I didn’t need the suggested tags. Glad I don’t know enough about those medical issues from a personal angle to write about them. But still . . . utterly bizarre.

Actually, I’m not one to talk about intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Earlier, I was doing a puzzle, and I needed an eight-letter word beginning with L for a flower. And all I could think of was lavender. Lavender? Really? When I’d spent hours in the morning clearing away larkspur? When I’ve written post after post mentioning larkspur?

Oh, well, such is life. My life, anyway.

PS: The recommended tags for this post are Project Life, Heidi Swapp, San Diego Comic Con, Becky Higgins, Studio Calico. I don’t even know what most of that is!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »
« Older posts