Posted on 01/02/2024 7:46:18 AM PST by bitt
It was a year of reckoning, a year in which humanity finally began to understand that it faces an existential threat, a threat unlike any we have ever faced before, a threat that will wreak havoc on our fragile planet if we fail to stop it—and it may already be too late.
We are referring, of course, to pickleball.
Nobody knows where it started. Some scientists believe it escaped from a laboratory in China. But whatever its origin, it has been spreading like rancid mayonnaise ever since, to the point where pickleball courts now cover 43 percent of the continental U.S. land mass, subjecting millions of Americans to the inescapable, annoying POP of the plastic ball and the even more annoying sound of Boomers in knee braces relentlessly telling you how much fun it is and demanding that you try it.
Unfortunately, pickleball wasn't the only existential threat to emerge in 2023. There was also Artificial Intelligence, or AI. What is AI? To put it in simple layperson terms, it is a computer thing that laypersons cannot possibly understand. (Other examples are “bitcoin” and “algorithm.”)
AI does provide some unambiguous benefits to humanity. It enables college students to produce grammatically correct essays about books they have not personally read. But according to some experts—and if we can’t believe some experts, who can we believe?—there is a possibility that AI will wipe out all human life. This is what computer professionals call a "bug."
Will AI, in fact, kill us all? Why would it want to? To answer that question, we took the unusual step (for us) of doing some actual research. We asked an AI program called ChatGPT to "briefly summarize the benefits of wiping out all human life." This is the response it gave:
(Excerpt) Read more at azdailysun.com ...
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i gave my wife a paddle for Christmas... and i got her a pickle ball set as well.
This is spot on. I have friends and clients that play and they can’t stop talking about how much fun it is and that I MUST play. It’s like I don’t have a choice.
I have played, and I was surrounded by sweaty, overweight Pickel Ballers in their 70’s who pretended they were 30 again. “Come on! Let’s play another game!” I’m sure that later in the day they were soaking their feet, moaning, in Epsom salts and getting their backs rubbed down with Ben Gay.
Pickel Ball players remind me of HS. “Come on...take a toke!”
im game
can i play from my barca lounger?
Always funny and spot on.
Super - I haven’t seen anything written by him in ages. Thanks.
A co-worker gave me a pickleball set for Christmas because he and his wife play. I regifted it.
He’s the author of a children’s book entitled Pater and the Starcatchers. My daughter is a children’s literature expert. A few years ago she managed the children’s section of a bookstore.
Management asked employees to set a goal to sell a certain number of their favorite book in a year. Her colleagues all picked the big best-seller. She chose Barry’s relatively well known but obscure book to sell 100 copies.
When she hit her goal, I sent Dave Barry am email and asked him to congratulate her. He sent her a nice hand written card to thank her.
Pickel Ball players remind me of HS....
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it kinda reminds me of badmitton....with more expensive equipment and played on a hard court???
Pickleball is tennis for invalids with little hand/eye coordination, strength, stamina and ability.
If you read the whole article, he takes some pretty nasty shots at Trump and Republicans.
The Rats too, but not as bad.
Well.....did you like it??
It’s tennis for wimps and ping pong for the slow minded.
Badminton redux.
Yeah, Dave has always been a lib, but I think he's more of a classic lib than a leftist. His sense of humor hasn't been cut out yet, after all.
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