Welcome once again, Dear Reader. It is I, your Interlocutor, The Happy Pessimist, bringing you news of a recent advance in telecommunications.(Full disclosure: I took the title of this post from a song with the non-PC title “Indian Love Call,” from a 1924 Broadway musical and the soundtrack of a 1936 movie, both entitled “Rose Marie.”)

A week or so ago, I noticed that a religious establishment in my neck of the woods had erected a Telephone Booth on its property. If you are under the age of fifty, you probably have no clue what a telephone booth is. It is a small structure about the size of a coffin standing on one end, equipped with a door, windows and a telephone instrument. This telephone instrument performs the same basic function as a cell phone, except that it will not fit in your pocket. In olden times (i.e., before the iPhone invasion), if you were out and about and wanted to call someone, you would enter the booth, close the door, insert some change into the phone, dial the phone number, and proceed. The booth was connected to the telephone network, a maze of wires, switches, and nubile young ladies who would get you connected to your intended victim.However, the new telephone booth was connected to NOTHING.This strange contraption is called a windphone. It was invented by Itaru Sasaki in Ōtsuchi, Japan in 2010, to cope with the loss of his cousin. Sasakisan believed that, when he spoke into the windphone, his words would be carried by the wind (hence the name) to his cousin’s residence on the astral plane.

In 2011, when the Fukushima earthquake, tidal wave and nuclear reactor meltdown occurred (good things come in threes, right?), thousands of people with departed relatives flocked to his garden to have a whack at contacting their dead family members.The idea caught on and has metastasized, and there are now about 1500 windphones scattered about the globe, including some 500 right here in the good old US of A. Thus, windphones were added to the contributions to civilization from The Land of the Rising Sun such as hara-kiri, the Kamikaze, and fugu fish.

Now Sasakisan is not the first person to come up with the idea of a telephone that talks to the dead. In 1964, Richard Matheson wrote a short story addressing the concept. (If you are familiar with Mr. Matheson’s work, you can guess what is coming.) A decrepit old woman starts receiving eerie, static-filled midnight phone calls. She complains to the telephone company which, surprise, surprise, is of no use. She goes out and traces the source line, and discovers that the line has fallen across the grave of her long-deceased fiancé.

Returning to the title of this post, I can give you the answer the question raised there:

“When I’m calling you, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh

Will you answer too, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh?”

With regard to the windphone, probably not.

Hello once again, dear reader it is I, your interlocutor, The Happy Pessimist, returning after yet another extended absence. My absence has not been due to any physiological defect, such as death. Rather, it has been occasioned by my concentration on what is termed “getting my affairs in order,” since it is possible that the truism “nobody lives forever” might actually apply to me. Accordingly, I have been spending almost all my time in the company of lawyers and accountants, in the interests of my spouse and my numerous progeny.

The folksongs which were inflicted on me as a young child are recurring to me ever more frequently. And I have noticed that I, too, am of the folk. And as I review these tunes, it appears to me that most of them are sorely wanting. So I have come up with improvements.

For example, consider “On Top of Old Smoky.” This puerile tale recites the lamentations of some backwoods hick who has lost his girlfriend to a substantially more efficient wooer. It appears to your interlocutor, who has done his share of wooing, that the hick deserved what he got. In the ancient era in which the song arose, wooing consisted primarily of singing the praises of the loved one, in the hope (in this case vain) that she would be moved to put out. Today, of course, wooing consists of jumping in the sack as the preliminary, not the ultimate, objective.

This modern, more aggressive approach does have some risks. As an example, consider this modernized version

On top of Old Baldy,

All covered with hair,

I lost my first girlfriend,

Cause she was a bear.

Now a bear it will eat you

And turn you to poop,

I decided to shoot her

And then make some bear soup,

Her pelt was left over

And made a fine rug.

When my new girlfriend saw it

She just gave me a hug.

So stick with your species

When choosing a mate

Or you’ll wake up one morning

And find you’ve been ate.

Isn’t that better?

Back in the day, when Women’s Liberation was just beginning to bite, a popular T-shirt bore the motto “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Now, on its face, implementation of this idea would have negative implications for human reproduction. However, advocates of this principle were wont to cite the phenomenon of parthenogenesis, through which the females of some species could induce their own pregnancy sans a male partner.

But Science trumps Social Revolution. Scientists from the Land of the Rising Sun and Divine Wind (kamikaze to you), led by Katsuhiko Hayashi of Osaka University, have created mouse embryos without using female eggs. Instead, they used tail scraping from two boy mice. Employing CRISPR, CAT-9, and most likely invocations of The Evil One, they converted the scrapings into pluripotent stem cells, and thence into 630 mouse embryos which they implanted into lady mice. Seven (7) of these embryos developed into happy, healthy little vermin. Well, a success rate of 1% is not overly impressive, but great oaks from little acorns grow.

Now, to some extent, this seems like cheating. But in order to get females entirely out of the picture, we don’t even need to wait for the denizens of the country that created sushi and the Walkman to produce an artificial womb. Jun Wu of the University of Texas has already developed a bio-reactor which has successfully supported early mouse embryo development.

So we can now update the old slogan to read “Men need women, and women need men, like a fish needs a bicycle.” While this slogan will even further suppress underwater bicycle sales, it is highly unlikely to crash the economy.

So we have now figured out how to eliminate both men and women from the process of reproduction. And you thought AI was dangerous! HAH!

Terminator, eat your heart out!

Rejoice, Dear Reader! You no longer need worry about the lack of adequate power storage interfering with the transition to renewable, completely unreliable energy. A team of brilliant scientists from the land of spaghetti and other health foods have created the first edible rechargeable battery. Yes, really. I, the Happy Pessimist, would never lie to you. Just look up the scientific paper “An Edible Chargeable Battery” in the March edition of the refereed journal “Advanced Materials” https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202211400. (N.B. When I began to write the current missive, spell check corrected “refereed” to “refried.” Perhaps I should have accepted the emendation.)
No longer do we need to wait for Elon Musk to fill the Arizona desert with gigantic installations of conventional batteries filled with toxic chemicals. We can simply shove a cable into our personal orifice of choice, and connect the other end to our EV. Think of it! No more searching for non-existent recharging stations!
It gets better! The article also informs us that “Edible electronic devices will have major implications for gastrointestinal tract monitoring, therapeutics, as well as rapid food quality monitoring.” I particularly like the “food quality monitoring.” Instead of waiting for your mother, wife, other significant other, physician, or other obnoxious party to chide you for going off your diet, the monitoring device will automatically induce you to barf. No more pizza for you, Tubby!
Enjoy the red pill.

It is I, your interlocuter, The Happy Pessimist, returning after an extended period of silence. There has been a reason for my prolonged absence. The world is sufficiently out of control that I have been unable to identify anything more outrageous than the ordinary news. So, today, I wax poetic.
All musical comedies are the same. An unbelievably stupid young dolt moons after a raving beauty, and croons a revolting ballad memorializing his confusion. One of my favorites is from “Call Me Madam,” lyrics and music by Irving Berlin. The hit song from this satire on the diplomatic service is “You’re Just in Love.” It is a duet between the innocent young idiot protagonist and the jaded, corrupt older lady Ambassador. As Irving Berlin wrote it:

You’re Just In Love (Irving Berlin)

Dolt:

I hear singing and there’s no one there.

I smell blossoms and the trees are bare.

All day long I seem to walk on air.

I wonder why. I wonder why.

I keep tossing in my sleep at night.

And, what’s more, I’ve lost my appetite.

Stars that used to twinkle in the skies now twinkle in my eyes.

I wonder why.

Ambassador:

You don’t need analyzin’

It is not so surprisin’

That you feel very strange but nice.

Your heart goes pitter-patter.

I know just what’s the matter

Because I’ve been there once or twice.

Put your head on my shoulder.

You need someone who’s older.

A rubdown with a velvet glove.

There is nothing you can take

To relieve that pleasant ache.

You’re not sick, you’re just in love.

Pathetic.

Now, assume with me for a moment that, instead of begging the Ambassador for advice, the Dolt poured out his heart to a Board-Certified neurosurgeon. Then the response would undoubtedly be:

Neurologist:

It is more than just a rumor.

You have got a great big tumor.,

Which is quickly eating up your brain.

You have a lousy future.

Your future needs a suture.

You are circling all around the drain.

Put your body on the table

(As long as you’re still able),

While I tell you all about your head.

There is nothing we can do

To preserve the life of you.

Pretty soon you’ll just be dead.

Better, no?