Great Caesar’s Ghost!

Long ago, there was a tv show called the Adventures of Superman. Perry White, was played by the well-known character actor John Hamilton. And in one episode, after all of his reporters run out of the room before he can tell them what he wants them to do, he sits there staring into the space in front of him and says, “I know people say you’re crazy when you talk to yourself, but by Great Caesar’s Ghost, there’s no one else around here sane enough to talk to!”

Well, now I’m in the same situation. I’m talking to myself in order to use this program that Microsoft has on Windows called Voice Typing.  It works quite well. But what I notice is that it’s difficult for me to get used to the fact that I’m talking to myself.  I mean, when I type typically, I guess I’m silently talking to myself but this is a completely different thing. Uh, you have to think on the fly. Because I can speak a lot more quickly than I can type. So, I don’t have enough time to think of what I want to say.  If you see what I mean.

So, look at those last few sentences.  They’re pretty stilted.  That was me trying to dictate to the computer.  It’s not pretty.  And so, I’ll have to see if this works for me.  I’m guessing I’ll have to practice with it until I can think comfortably at the speed of my speech instead of at the speed of my typing.

But one interesting thing has come out of this experiment.  I can see now how some of the mistakes I’ve seen on other people’s blogs happen. They’re using a dictation program. That seems apparent.  The machine is mistaking certain similarly sounding words for others that have a completely different meaning.  And then afterwards, when the human edited it, he’s missed some of these problems.

So here we have a technological change.  Dictation replacing typing.  I remember reading that the ancients when they read something, they read it aloud.  I think it was something about Julius Caesar I remember, that he was able to read silently and at the time this was considered a radical departure from normal behavior.  Great Caesar’s Ghost!  Maybe I’m too old and inflexible to change how I produce text.  Maybe my brain is too canalized to change.  Well, it’ll be an experiment.

This has been an interesting week.  All the coverage of the Trump verdicts and the fines has further revealed the clear divide in the United States.  Once again there is no middle ground.  The Left has abandoned all pretense at objectivity.  Any and every attack on Trump is justified and reasonable in their eyes.  Even when the result of this thinking frightens even their allies.  The enormous fine against Trump’s commercial interests and the obvious fictitious nature of the “crime” has frightened other businessmen in New York.  The realization that prosecutors and judges can easily fabricate charges that will basically allow confiscation of all their wealth has panicked many of these ultra-wealthy individuals.  And Governor Hochul reacted by trying to soothe the nerves of the rich.

But if there’s one thing billionaires hate is the threat of confiscation of their wealth.  Recently Elon Musk was denied a huge payment from Tesla because the State of Delaware stepped in and forbade it.  Almost immediately Musk had the incorporation of Tesla moved out of Delaware.  I fully expect to see similar moves by many public and private corporations to preempt any possible chicanery by Letitia James or any of the other bloodsucking ghouls in New York State.

And this is on top of an already desperate fiscal situation in both New York City and New York State.  Things like the feeding and housing of illegal aliens is starting to put a real hole in their budgets.  So, could the lawfare against Trump hasten the unravelling of the Empire State?  Great Caesar’s Ghost!