Zoom!
Well, I bet Zoom are having a wonderful time at the moment. A pandemic turns up and suddenly everyone wants to chat with multiple people at the same time and the world is heading their way. Whoops for FaceTime and Whatsapp and Skype. They are going to regret not chasing up that idea! Everybody seems to be zooming.
Last night, one of the cast of Zorro set up a Quiz night for us all and hosted it on Zoom. Now where I am doesn’t have fibre so I was expecting my computer to have a bit of a tantrum at some point. My mind thought, I know what will happen, just as I will be ready to offer the winning answer and gain worldwide adulation , sod’s law would see the screen freeze and the red team would sneak through and pip us to the post. But I ended up watching 22 videos with sound and not a problem. So that was a rather surprising bonus. Congratulations to them. I’m sure they will be bigger than Apple in the next few weeks. Zoom will soon have another meaning as a verb. Like to google, we will all soon be zooming between ourselves. Wait for the their adverts to start. All created in isolation by simply screenshoting their own product.
(Please note: no payment was given from Zoom for this post. I tried contacting them offering my services as an advertising legend or as a micro celebraty (coz my Mum reads at least the first paragraph of every other blog I write) but the connection seemed to go fuzzy at that point).
I would like to say that the blue team that I was on, came second just 2 points behind the black team. We demanded a recount but the Quizmaster muted our objections. We would launch an official dispute with the International Quizmasters Association but it does require a handwritten letter to be personally delivered to their headquarters in Stockholm and I think it unlikely that I will be able to use my one piece of daily exercise to get there as my calves are still dead from walking up all those flipping stairs, mentioned in CONIANWO 1.
So I will just say, ‘we was robbed!’ But Zoe, Max, Matt, Seren and Steve Patel were the brilliant, bubbling, sometimes babbling, beaming, bodacious (what a gorgeous word to swill around one’s mouth), occasionally bonkers but never brackish Blues.
Just to go off on a tangent for once in a lifetime – do you think someone actually intentionally created and wrote out a page on the internet that gives you the ‘20 top adjectives beginning with a b’ or that somehow the internet has become AI and just answers your googled questions by its own thinking? Of course, if the internet has become a cognisant being in its own right, I’m sure it would occasionally, when answering one of our questions, take the micky out of us poor humans who now can’t do arithmetic without a calculator, rely on spellcheck and can’t go 10 minutes on line without the need to see a cute cat do nothing at all. Perhaps it has such dry humour, we actually haven’t noticed. Also would a cognisant being spend it’s whole existence just answering other people’s questions without a) getting paid, b) exercising it’s right to have tea and meal breaks at appropriately spaced times and c) at least at one point, blowing a raspberry down our copper cables just to see who laughs, who blames the dog asleep next to them or who worries that they may have followed through. Perhaps the internet is not yet AI. But then as I am posting this online, perhaps the internet would let me know if it has become aware of its own presence. I will let you all know if I hear back.
It appears that today is St Rupert’s Day. He was the bishop of Worms. I leave people to make their own comments on that one.
Happy St Ruperting!
