For reasons unknown to me, June 8th is Name Your Poison Day. While making the rounds of the usual “did you know about this holiday?” websites I discovered that no one seems to know the actual origin of the day. That’s odd. How do we know it’s really a holiday if no one can document its origins? Perhaps it’s even a hoax. How would we know? The poison du jour is AI, which is making it harder and harder to do online research or to tell truth from fiction. Examples: Facebook is now flooding my feed with accounts and posts from “Howard County” and “Columbia” but from other states entirely. When I search YouTube for current local stories these days, I routinely get substantial amounts of unrelated junk - - even if I put my search term in quotes. My realtor’s newsletter just recommended this house to me. See the problem? What AI has meant in my daily life is less accuracy, more difficulty finding what I’m looking for, and an overall degradation in the quality of information. (See ...
I always seem to be in my car at mealtime these days. These past few months have been an exercise in trying not to eat the worst sort of food while driving either to or from during lunch and/or dinner. I know it’s not good for me but often I don’t have the energy to do better. The one bright light in the vast wasteland of grab-and-go eating has been Bon Fresco. Their food soothes me and calms my stomach no matter how crummy I feel. It’s slight out of my way but it is absolutely worth it. The quality of the food is excellent, the prices are fair, and the customer service is outstanding. I regret many things these days but I don’t regret one cent I’ve spent at Bon Fresco. One of the employees now recognizes me and calls me by name. I will forever be indebted to them for complimenting me on my favorite summer pants - - which are honestly on their last legs - - on a day when I felt about one hundred years old. My favorite menu items are the London Broil sandwich (no...