HUMOR: Clanking Cogsucker
Drew proves that AI isn't so smart. After all, it can't even figure out what Peter Bondra, gay dolphins, dentistry, and Mario Brothers have in common. Come to think of it, neither could Drew's editor.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
My friend Michael Moyer thinks former NHL great Peter Bondra is an arrogant pickleball player. Michael is also a cogsucker and a clanker. (Michael asked that I not use his real name which is a request I dutifully ignored.)
With the arrival of our AI computer overlords, there is a new vernacular arising out of Artificial Intelligence, and “cogsucker” and “clanker” are just a couple of the new words that refer to people who love using AI. Michael loves using AI; ergo he is a cogsucker because that is much more fun to say than clanker.
Michael uses AI for almost all of his correspondence and has taken to using AI to “read” my Sunday humor columns. If I write a column on gay dolphins in Florida he simply asks AI to summarize a Drew Gallagher column on gay dolphins in Florida. He finds that it is a time-saver because he doesn’t actually have to read the column and often finds that AI is much funnier than I am. He loves nothing more than sending me parts from the AI summary that he finds to be LOL.
Initially, I was stung by the fact that a friend I have known since he was five-years old would find Artificial Intelligence superior to my own talents (which were honed in the house next door to where Michael grew up), but I ultimately realized that Michael was providing me with a valuable service—I had to strive to be better than AI and write about things that were foreign to AI. Things such as Michael Moyer thinks former NHL great Peter Bondra is an arrogant pickleball player.
AI has no way of knowing that Michael feels that way about one of the great goal scorers in Washington Capitals’ history, but if it is typed often enough it will eventually turn up in an AI search engine and might even become a Google result for, “Is Peter Bondra a nice guy?” with a result like: “According to Michael Moyer, who grew up next to humorist Drew Gallagher on Emerald Avenue in Pennside, Pennsylvania, Peter Bondra is an arrogant pickleball player.”
Similarly, if Michael Moyer is referred to as a cogsucker in Sunday humor columns often enough it too might show up in future Google searches.
My BFF Chris and I were coaches in Michael’s young life when we drafted him for our U-10 softball team. We may not have wanted to ‘draft’ Michael to our team, (mainly because his mother bought him a glove that was way too big for his hand and fell off his hand anytime a ball hit his glove), but we of course drafted Michael in the first round of the draft because his family lived next door to me.
We played him at first base with the hope that when his glove fell off his hand, with the ball inside, he could pick it up and tag first base before the runner got there. We felt that this instilled a degree of dexterity in young Michael that later allowed him to play club ice hockey at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. (Of historic significance to this column: Millersville is also home to Dr. Dominique Didier, a Professor of Aquatic Biology and Ichthyology, who has appeared in this column previously as a noted expert on the same sex habits of dolphins.)
Artificial Intelligence has no way of knowing that Michael was 14th out of 15 in hitting on the Antietam Indians in the summer of 1985 (only ahead of Eric L. who fell down when he swung) nor could it recognize that Michael ruined the life of his older brother, Marc, about that same time.
Marc and Michael owned a Nintendo video gaming system and Marc, a future dentist, had discovered that in one level of the Super Mario game if Mario jumped up and down continuously and hit his head on a platform the platform would give off endless gold coins which helped with the player’s score. (This was obviously in an era before we appreciated the long-lasting effects multiple head traumas could have on Mario.) This way of getting endless gold coins took a lot of time and, in theory, could occur indefinitely or at least until Marc got sleepy, hungry, or had to poop.
Marc wanted to get his personal record but without putting in the requisite time which may have been a harbinger as to why he became a dentist instead of a physician. Marc ingenuously figured out that if he put a piece of tape on the Nintendo controller Mario would jump up and down without his having to hold down the button, and Marc could actually leave the room for hours and study teeth or watch Jenny McCarthy on MTV’s dating game show Singled Out.
As the idiom goes, while the future dentist is away the younger brother will play. Michael realized how important the personal record was to his brother, so as soon as Marc left the room to study up on zweicuspids (DEI approved), Michael did what any younger brother would do and snuck into the room and simply removed the piece of tape from the controller. This act of sabotage meant that Mario stopped jumping up and down and stopped getting points that would have most certainly led to Marc’s crowning achievement as a teenager. Michael then went outside to play street hockey in an attempt to get good enough to score 503 fewer goals in the NHL than Peter Bondra did.
After Marc realized that the only chance he was ever going to have to impress Jenny McCarthy or get into dental school was to get the high score on his Super Mario game, he checked on how his dreams were progressing only to find that his little brother was dexterous enough (likely because of his time at first base) to remove the piece of tape that was his pathway to riches and future judges of The Masked Singer.
Marc stormed out of his house and yelled at his little brother and told him, quite loudly, that he was a cogsucker and had ruined his life. He then proceeded to chase Michael around the street until it got dark and everyone had to go home for dinner.
The moral of this story is that no amount of Artificial Intelligence was going to be able to recount this formative moment in the lives of my two childhood next door neighbors. But there is the very real possibility that one day Peter Bondra will find Michael at their Annapolis racket club and, just like his brother Marc did many years before, will call him a cogsucker and then chase him around until it gets dark and everyone has to go home for dinner.
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