Thursday, March 8, 2018

“Zsa Zsa? EEEEEEE HEEE HEEE HEEE HEEEE!”


Ours is an Alexa house.

Two in the basement.

One on the main floor.

Three upstairs.

I’m often upset at her because of her small repertoire of novelty songs – she does have the Allan Sherman “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” song, which is a blessing – and her nit-pickiness over how to select classical music. (If you don’t know the specific album or the list of movements and such, just forget it. Alexa allows for NO classical music shorthand.)

But we haven’t heard any Alexa random larffs.

The only disembodied voice we hear is when I wake at 4:30 to go to work and have to wander into our youngest son’s room to tell Alexa to stop playing ESPN radio. He swears up and down he sets a timer. Sometimes, clearly, he either forgets or the timer doesn’t take.

If our Alexa where to laugh randomly, I’d like it to be like Witch Hazel, from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, viz:


Hearing Witch Hazel laugh randomly at me from the darkness of my own home would be something to wet my pants about.

And here’s the funny thing – there’s a lot of paranoia out there about Alexa and other such services “listening in” on what we’re doing, recording it all, and then sending it all to some nefarious organization that’ll USE WHAT WE SAY against us.

I don’t feel the paranoia. At all. Which is weird, since in our family, paranoia is kind of a hobby.
My brain already acts in the nefarious ways we’re attributing to Alexa. Wednesday night, I drove past a building and my brain dredged up something very stupid I did there, more than twelve years ago. I’m not sure Alexa could do anything to add to that pain.

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