Are You Chicken?

Hello. Welcome to The Weekend Gene Pool, in which I solicit you for personal stories that I can react to next week; in return, as always, I will provide entertainment right here.

This week’s question involves you and technology. We will begin with a pertinent Gene Pool Gene Poll.

As is clear from this story, the FDA has given its approval to the eventual sale of chicken meat that has been lab-grown from cultivated chicken cells — seen as a breakthrough in a decades-long campaign by environmentalists and anti-animal cruelty activists. The meat will actually be chicken, not faux chicken, because it will be cultured from real chicken cells, then molded into familiar shapes. It should taste exactly like chicken. For a while, the meat is going to be prohibitively expensive, but that is likely to change.

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Now for today’s question: Tell us about some funny / interesting / compelling experience you may have had with new technology. Ever. Send your stories / anecdotes / observations right here to this elegant orange button:

I’ve had more than a few such moments. Some 40 years ago, when I was an editor at a legal newspaper in New York, one of my writers came to me with a story he was working on about a new technology that he felt could endanger human health, worldwide, possibly a threat to the continuation of the species. His story was pretty alarmist, but he made a reasonable case. He was a persuasive writer. I ran the story. The technology was … microwave ovens.

Here’s another anecdote illustrating my awkward and suspicious relationship with technology. It is much more recent. Just the other day, right before starting the last Gene Pool, my computer began writing in what seemed to be gibberish — the characters on the screen looked as weird as wingdings: odd shaped, unfamiliar-looking letters, strange diacritical marks. I eventually realized it was Thai.

Everything I wrote came out in Thai. I tried rebooting. Nope. I tried calling the Empress, who is better than I am at this stuff. Nope. It seemed horrifying and funny and immediately irresolvable, all at the same time. I realized I’d have to cancel the Gene Pool, or find some wildly cumbersome workaround, probably involving the forbearance of the Empress, but I was running out of time.

Then I decided it had to be sabotage. I’d clicked on something sketchy, fairly recently, and just knew someone, somewhere, was playing me.

Rachel sensed my ignorant panic and sat beside me. It took her about five minutes. She researched it online — this was possible because even though the Thai remained on the screen, if you typed a command or a url in English, it would print in Thai but bring you where want to go, in English. In this laborious manner she discovered that the Thai glitch was a thing, and it happens sometimes, for reasons not instantly determinable, and the way to fix it is to hit Caps Lock, once. I did. English.

What causes this? Unclear to me — remember, this is about my tech ineptitude — but it has since happened several times, and caps lock undoes it. Someone out there will know exactly what this is, and tell me, and I will fix it, and laud you by name.

So send in your tech stories / observations here. (That link goes to the same place as the elegant orange button above.)

And last, re alms in our palms:

The Gene Pool has many thousands of people who read us for free — at least three posts a week, with reader participation — and many hundreds who pay a little bit. (It’s just $4.15 a month.) Might you consider leaping from the first group to the second? I’d be wretchedly grateful. It takes only seconds to do, and is a cleansing experience. Here comes the appropriate orange button: