Last night was difficult.
First was the cricket.
Then the owl.
Actually, I’m unclear as to which came first. The cricket or the owl. But then there was the Cockney Rhyming Slang AI.
I dreamt that Heather and I had discovered that many of the events of 2020 were hinted at by strange nonsensical phrases. We somehow traced THESE back to some sort of strange globe recreating all the continents of the world in paper and wire and tape in a dusty school room. We were examining this precisely-made model and I remember specifically peering at an island chain carefully cut out of tagboard and held in place by a delicate tracery of Scotch tape and saying to Heather “it looks like something Erica Smith would make”…
At which point Heather holds up the accompanying paper and the author is none other than Erica Smith!
(bom bom bom bom!)
The globe turns out to be a complicated data set designed to help recreate the world’s minutiae as a way to train up an AI to translate Cockney rhyming slang, which is what all the nonsense phrases are revealed to be! We track down Erica to help us shut down the AI that’s causing all the fires and social unrest and pandemic n stuff and it turns out that the AI had gone rogue many years ago… and she’d like to help us, but since the AI turned evil she had no way of translating Cockney rhyming slang and cannot.
I woke up.
Huh.
Last night – before the cricket, before the owl, before the Cockney Rhyming Slang AI, there was the Takoma Park Folk Festival (Alternative, part 2).
And it was good.
Gordon Nimmo-Smith and I have been working HARD on this for months, right up to the wire in some cases (me adding elements of the script about Ruth Bader Ginsberg an hour in advance and Gordon suddenly suffering throttled internet issues that meant that he was loading the last segment of the show to me during the SECOND to last segment of the show!)
Most of the night went smoothly minus one Existence Failure from the host and me pressing the wrong button twice causing some loss of stream continuity. All-in-all it was a pretty amazing show that displayed a lot of the strange beauty of the Takoma Park Folk Festival, but I’m glad it’s done and I believe for me at least, done for good. Every year I allow this event to explode into being a HUGE stressor for me and I think everyone else in my Life is quite sick of hearing me bitch about it.
Though whose hands I’m consigning it perhaps are undecided, I’m decided on the festival passing out of MY paws and I hope that someone LOCAL to Takoma Park will step forward to embrace it. I think it’s time for the festival to be held dear to those who Live near to it. I personally, am exhausted, and am less a people-person than most seem to think that I am.
Go forth and conquer little festival!
