The All-Rounder Edition

Round and about with Doll! Esperanto - the all rounder of language that didn't unite the world! How Modern Humans are the ultimate All Rounders! AI All Around Us! Quote of the Week! Happy Snaps!

Around and About aka: Where’s Doll?

Short answer: With me.

Slightly longer answer: Who wants to know?

Longer Still: after catching up with her talented friend Gemma Luxton in Rockhampton last weekend:

Doll n I put in a solid week at work before jetting off to toe-curlingly cold Toowoomba for some R&R.

On Friday night we joined some mates and laughed til our armpits hurt at, ‘The Play that Goes Wrong!’ at The Imperial.

Today, we meander home, or maybe somewhere else…

Next weekend, our little All Rounder will hit the stage at the Gladstone Entertainment Centre for… The Eisteddfod!

Esperanto! The All Rounder of Languages

‘Saluton Homoj! Kiel vi fartas?’

(Hello Folks! How are you?)

Back in the distant days of 1979, we bright-eyed, bushy tailed, thirteen-year-olds, were informed by a teacher with a manic gleam in his eye, that by the time we were fifty, everyone in the world would be conversant in Esperanto, The Universal Language of Planet Earth.

Basically, it was the creation of a Russian/Jewish eye surgeon, Lezar Zamenhof, who, in the 1880’s, whipped up a hodge podge of the world’s languages and rolled them into a linguistic dictionary called, Esperanto.

He, and his followers (I’m guessing intially his wife and dog), hoped that an easy to learn language would be a friendly handshake between continents and bring about world peace through improved communication.

Ironically, most of today’s conflicts involve people who actually speak the same language. So, maybe our real problem isn’t people talking to each other, but not actually listening?

Anyway, to prepare us for the future, we were taught the Language of Tomorrow and not an actual (or useful) language like French, Japanese, Chinese, Latin, German or Cornish (ooh, arrr, properrr job!).

(Note: have you noticed schoolkids were usually trained to become fluent in the languages our enemies used?)

So, Esperanto became another irrelevant ability in my ‘Arsenal of Useless Skills and Information’ Like being able to name the year any song came out. Super useful that one…

Plus, hardly anyone wants me to demonstrate how to count to a hundred in Esperanto.

Who am I kidding?

Nobody has asked me to do that since my Esperanto teacher got me up to recite it in 1979.

And far from using it to communicate with folks from other nations, Esperanto became the ‘Treadmill of Languages’, i.e.: something that starts out as a good idea, is used a few times, then stuffed into the garage and ignored.

Which is a pity, because they went to a lot, some, a little trouble to come up with a flag too:

Ten years ago, when I actually pottered around Europe, where nearly 100,000 (some say up to two million), people are fluent in Esperanto, the actual Universal Language was English (British, American and a smattering of Australian).

Nearly everyone spoke it!

For the few who didn’t, all I had to do was point and utter the local lingo for Coffee, Beer and Where’s My Change! and Voila!

Some of my fellow tourists used the trusted and tried method of shouting very loudly at confused foreigners in order to get their point across. Although, how yelling slowly makes someone understand what you’re saying was beyond me?

Having said that, I occasionally used the words that start with ‘F’ and ‘O’ in a variety of tense situations and every person I addressed understood, precisely, the point I was trying to make.

Maybe swearing is the Esperanto of languages?!

And if it is, well, consider me flua (fluent)! Or maybe I’m just talking elfluo (effluent)?

Modern Humans - The Ultimate All Rounders

Modern All Round Skills We’re Supposed to Have (apparently):

1. Tech Juggling: Be able to swap seamlessly between Windows, Mac, Android, iOS on a variety of devices. Turn on, then change channels, on a television. Ditto for a digital radio. Programme an oven (in twenty-eight simple steps) to bake a pie.

   

2. DIY Tech Support: Diagnose why the Blue-Tooth printer isn’t talking to our PC, laptop, phone or tablets, then try to find the one cable in the ‘cable pile’ to connect it directly to our device of choice. Beg my phone to connect to the car’s radio, or earphones, without dropping out.

   

3. Tech Cop: Trying to stay afloat in a sea of online scammers by not clicking on emails, ads, or answering calls from unlisted, or unknown, numbers.

4. Digital Chameleon: Trying to navigate various social media apps without accidentally posting a raunchy photo meant for my wife onto Gladstone Open Discussion.

5. Online Admin Mastery: spending hours flicking through obstructive and bamboozling web pages to manage superannuation, invoices, taxes, small business apps and online accounts, book flights, hotels, medical appointments, electricity payments and/or car rego/insurance renewals. Before giving up and just sorting it out over the phone in minutes like some sort of 1980’s neanderthal.

6. Financial Wizardry: trying to solve the ongoing mystery of why our banking app keeps blocking us or demanding to know if we’re human?

7. Legal Literacy: Trying to decipher rental contracts, workplace agreements, and overly long ‘Terms and Conditions’, before giving up halfway (or less) through and signing anyway. Like we had a choice!

   

8. Culinary Versatility: Cook gluten-free, dairy-free, keto, paleo, vegan, and “whatever’s in the fridge” meals for family and friends. Or just stop inviting people over and eat whatever the hell you like, when you like.

9. Food Label Interpreter: Trying to make sense of all the ingredients and numbers of food additives on the sides of tins and packets of food to see how nutritious or poisonous they are; then just shovel it in anyway and hope for the best. BTW: is today’s SUPERFOOD! kale, kelp, hemp oil, shilajit, pure honey or echidna toenails?

10. Home Repairs: Try to find the exact part you need in one of the hundreds of mile long aisle’s of any big chain hardware store.

11. Car Dashboard Warning Interpreter: Allow me -

Basically:

AI All Rounder Claims Another Career

A local Gladdy Town business is no longer hiring secretaries, or front of house staff, to answer calls for appointments. They’re using a rather nice sounding AI female bot to do it instead.

That’s right, the machines have claimed another career, along with call centre operators in Developing Nations.

NOTE: the scammers from Africa calling us at 4p.m. (while we’re trying to enjoy our coffee and bikkies) are still human, but it’s only a matter of time.

Speaking of which, this week I missed an online digital chat about ‘How AI is Mining Our Culture’. I couldn’t log on, so, after the fourth attempt, turned to Roger, my AI buddy, to help me.

Rog, very kindly pointed out that the meeting was held the day before.

Yeah, that was a bit embarrassing.

Quote of the Week

“If you don’t go to the horses mouth, then you’re a horses arse!”

Doll (on gossip)

Happy Snaps!

More epic skies this week:

Boids:

More boids:

Joy:

Aussie Doll:

Mulgildie Bunyip meets Doll:

Stolen from Substack:

Sailing or mountain climbing? Mmm… I’ll get the rods:

Paradise… until someone steals your outboard:

When picking wildflowers in North America goes horribly wrong:

Busy beaver is never too busy to stop for a snapshot:

Back in a snip:

The Bee Gees go Medieval:

Hey, thanks for dropping by, feel free to join us again next week!

Cheers,

Greg