I don’t take the newspaper anymore. I don’t have time to read it. The Sunday paper is usually more ads than news. I cancelled my subscription about two years ago. My neighbor, down the sidewalk here on the cove, does take the paper and graciously brings it to my back porch, sometimes with a couple of bananas or a candy bar, every Sunday morning. It is a pleasant comfort to have it in the afternoons after church.

I flipped through yesterday, and saw this horrifying and ridiculous picture on the front of the business section.

Several thoughts simultaneously rushed into the mushy matter between my ears.

1. Why didn’t they make this creepy little robot average human height. They built a hobbit robot, not a human robot. Notice how both the humans in this picture have to look down at the little guy. They are breeding a robot that will have a built-in Napoleon complex before it ever gets started. Is hard white plastic that hard to get that you didn’t have any extra to make it a little longer?
2. You can’t fool me. This is not really a robot. Look at it closely. It seems to be a plastic doll on a Rhoomba that has an iPad taped to it. Reminds me of Phil Dunphy’s homemade Skypebot. For reals, I saw something like it at the hospital a couple of months ago. A doctor on FaceTime was taped to a remote controlled mannequin and making rounds. No lie.
3.  Never in a million years would I buy something like this. Never. Have the people who make such things never seen the movies? It is just a few years between that cute plastic walking emoji and The Terminator. They’ll be back.
4. This robot’s name is Pepper, and according to the caption under the picture (because I am not about to read the whole article) it is designed to assist seniors. I assume that means senior adults rather than seniors in high school or college. If so, then NEWSFLASH–senior adults don’t adapt real well to technology. This thing would be a very creepy and expensive statue in the corner. Seriously, you should see my mother work the Dish Network screen. I can only imagine her with this thing.
5. Check out the link to the article here. If you do, you’ll see the picture of the robot looks just like the crazy robots form the Asimov-inspired Will Smith thriller I, Robot. They could be twinsies.   To save you time, I put the side-by-side here.
   

   
6. What’s with all the power cords this thing is plugged into. I don’t get it. An electric car can drive from here to Dallas nonstop. Why does this thing need to be plugged in to go across the carpet and harass the woman who looks like she wants to kick it?

Sorry to take up so much of your time ranting, but I had to tell someone, and no one else is in the office right now.