Rigor Tortoise

The hullaballoo over whether Mitch McConnell still lives — and if so, in what condition? — has been macabre and fascinating and even darkly funny, but it raises an intriguing issue: Are we living in a gerontocracy? Yes we are, says Allegra Kirkland in Talking Points Memo:

“Elected official death and dementia watch” has become a game the Internet is playing far too frequently. In just the past few years, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) died in office at age 90 after losing her cognitive abilities and missing dozens of Senate votes. D.C.’s nonvoting representative for over three decades, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, finally agreed not to run for reelection at age 88 amid reports she was in the early stages of dementia. And reporters from the Dallas Express tracked then-Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) to a memory care facility where she’d been living for months after she was “found wandering, lost, and confused” in her former neighborhood. The 2024 presidential campaign was a slow-motion-trainwreck of bearing witness to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s mental decline, while Trump now frequently dozes off during Cabinet meetings and is more prone than ever to bizarre rambling and embarrassing gaffes. (“Islamic Republic of Japan,” etc. etc.)

All true. And tawdry. But it is so unfair to senior citizens such as myself. We are adorable and should be cherished and respected, if only for our eccentricities. Perhaps not elected to office, but definitely cherished. Examples:

• Last month, I noticed that I had not removed the transparent plastic coating on the vast front door of my refrigerator. I have had this refrigerator for a year and a half.

• Just yesterday, I noticed that the bathroom scale was getting a little harder to read. So I looked at it closely and discovered that I had not removed the transparent plastic coating on the dial. It had been slowly befogging itself during the nine months I have owned this scale.

• Not long ago, I discovered that my Honda Civic has a control to raise and lower the height of the seat. Not long before that, I discovered that there was also a way to vary the timing interval of the intermittent wipers. I bought this car new in 2008.

• Sometimes, when I am writing something, I think of something else, on a completely unrelated subject, that I want to write about later, and switch to another screen to jot the idea down. The arduous intervening task of hitting Control-T often wipes out the new subject from my mind, and I return to the original page, defeated.

• I sometimes call Lexi “Rachel.” I never call Rachel “Lexi.” So far.

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This is the Weekend Gene Pool, so I get to ask you for your anecdotes and observations. Tell us about funny symptoms of your aging. Include your age, if you dare. Send them here:

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And finally, The Gene Pool Gene Poll. It is going to take some explanation, but you will get to be literary critics at the end.

Yesterday, I asked Gemini, Google chatbot, if the Nationals-Yankees game was going to be played that night, inasmuch as the weather was inclement. Gemini responded that the game had been postponed and rescheduled for the following day, as part of a doubleheader.

This turned out to be wrong. The game was merely delayed, and wound up being played. I demanded that Gemini apologize to me and all fans it may have thus deceived, and do it in a double dactyl poem -- a type of sophisticated doggerel that has a difficult, restricting form. Gemini obliged.

I showed its poem to Tom Shroder, the AI connoisseur. Tom declared it excellent. I said it was pretty good, but also pretty flawed. Tom said, and I quote, “You couldn’t do as well.” Fighting words.

Gemini took two seconds to write its poem. I took four minutes.

Tom thinks the two poems were of quite comparable quality, and that readers would be quite divided in their assessments. So here they are, and you get to judge. I am not telling you which was by a person and which was by a machine. The order they are in is immaterial.

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Higgledy-piggledy,
Gemini Digital,
Blundered the sporting news,
Being so lame

That fans of both baseball teams,
Overly-trustingly,
Nodded and went to sleep,
Missing the game.

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Higgledy-piggledy,
Gemini Digital,
Blundered the baseball news,
Spreading dismay.

Extrapolating so
Unrealistically,
Dreaming of doubleheaders
Washed in the spray.

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That’s it for the day.

Yes, this actually is my livelihood. Sorry. Please consider:

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Analysis: Most of you are getting this right. Yes, I wrote the first poem. It solves several problems that the second had, in meter and meaning.

The line with “dreaming of doubleheaders” is not a dactylic line. A double dactylic line must go DUM-dum-dum, DUM-dum-dum. “Dreaming of doubleheaders” fumbles an extra syllable in there. Similarly, “Extrapolating” is not a single dactyl, even. It does not start with a stress.

The meaning of the narratives is the key, though: Ask yourself — who is doing the “dreaming”? It isn’t clear.

And lastly, the first poem ties up nicely, with a point. They missed the game! The real sin. The second poem just sort of trails off inconsequentially.