Irish Music at Alt Brew and AI Poetry

 

Today I worked from home, and I went down to the dock at every break, but the ducks were not around. The weather was very pleasant, but the system we use to pay invoices was driving me crazy because I had submitted one yesterday, but today there was no sign of it. I submitted it again, figuring if it was stuck in the system, at least the fact that it was the same invoice number would trigger it to stop payment on the second one. However, I submitted it and stayed on the page, and I saw it wasn't in submitted status. I found a history log, and it said the attachment was too large. You'd think I would have gotten an error message, but no - it just goes off into the void. So I compressed the PDF of the event poster and tried again, and this time it seemed to work. It's always an adventure using these systems...

In the evening Travalon and I went to Alt Brew to see The Currach, a local band that plays Irish music, led by Daithi the Fiddler. None of my buddies came today - not my Irish teacher, not the woman with the Irish name and the curly red hair, and not my Shamrock Club buddy - although they had all been there last month, along with a bunch of other Shamrock Club people, when we couldn't go because we went to a jazz concert. I did see some people who go to the Lutheran church where I used to sing. The college Irish dancers came again, and they wanted people to get up and learn a jig, so Daithi pointed at me, since I have done other, less physical dances with them. And guess what? Irish jigs are as hard as they look! I can't really leap in the air or lift my knee up that high anymore. I wore my new argyle beret and the Waterford crystal harp pin, which got a tiny bit chipped. I felt so bad, but now it has character. Really, you can barely see it. And after all, do I want to put it away and keep it pristine forever, or do I want to wear it? If it gets too chipped up, that's just an excuse to go back to Ireland and visit the Waterford crystal factory.

Looking at my beret sitting in front of me made me wonder what the funny little wormlike thing on the top is called, and it does have a name: the cabillou. When I was living in the Basque country the summer I was twenty, the men wore black berets on regular days and red berets on festival days. When we went to Pamplona to see the Running of the Bulls, some of the younger guys had red berets on with cabillous that were so tall and thick that they looked positively phallic. (Couldn't find any photos of this by doing a Google search.) I love crazy words like that, like the guajeo is the piano line in salsa music. I told Travalon I should write a story where the main characters are named Cabillou and Guajeo.

I'm continuing to play around with Chat GPT. I asked it to write a haiku about argyle:

Diamond patterns dance,

Woolen warmth in crispest air—

Argyle holds the chill.

I came into Night Prayer late this evening, and Rich said I should show everyone how Chat GPT works, so Anna Banana II suggested we ask it to write a haiku about Daylight Saving Time:

Clocks leap while we sleep,
morning sun hides once again—
time plays tricks on us.

I showed them how you can give it a prompt, like, "Draw a cockatoo drinking a margarita while sitting on a pagoda," and it will give you this:

So Jilly Moose asked if it could draw Mr. Swanky. I asked it to draw a swanky moose, and I guessed it would be wearing a tux and tails, but I didn't predict that it would have glasses.

What's up with that? Rich says it's to make the moose seem more intellectual and therefore more sophisticated. To me, this moose looks like a waiter, like he should be serving you drinks at a nightclub with an Up North theme. Or maybe he's a groom at an all-deer wedding, waiting for his lovely caribou bride to come down the aisle. Why don't we have Chat GPT write a limerick about him?

There once was a moose dressed in style,
With a tux and a confident smile.
He sipped vintage wine,
Said, “This life is fine—
Being dapper is always in style!”

Famous Hat