Christ on a bike!

Recommended listening: 'Not Fair' - Niklas Dee, Old Jim, Enny-Mae

Today, my thoughts have mostly been about Jesus Christ. Don't get excited, Christian zealots and space-ghost believers everywhere, I've not had a religious epiphany - it was a reaction to a Neil Gaiman post on Bluesky that sparked an old, nostalgic reflection on language across generations. Let's have an unreasonable discussion...

The phrase behind title of this post makes me smile, even chuckle in a slightly crazed fashion, whenever I hear it or even think it; there is some previously unknown deep-seated direct access to my humour centres which took me by surprise during my slack-jawed trawl of social media this morning. I was still chuckling occasionally as I shuffled into the shower where, let's be honest, all the best thoughts happen. So, I decided to interrogate the origins of this mirth-maker, phrase, re-emerged after a long absence.

It's fair to say that the humour encyclopaedia that I have constructed over my lifetime is oh so very British - Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Dave Allen, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, Eddie Izzard, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The Young Ones, Two Pints Of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Bottom to name but a few. Red Dwarf and Eddie Izzard in particular in my late teens could be quoted back and forth ad nauseam within my friends group (I still cause confusion in colleagues to this day by comparing ill-fated ideas to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, slowly collapsing like a flan in a cupboard. Thanks Eddie). While some of these comedians were inherited from watching the same programmes as my parents, there is a clear distinction between the language of humour that my parents enjoyed compared to my beloved 90's output. I think it is fair to say swearing was not on the table for the TV shows of my parent's generation - casual racism, yes, saying shit, not so much. When you live a fairly sheltered life, which I believe my parents and I share as our origin stories to a certain point, TV culture has a huge influence. The replacement of TV with Social Media and AI, and its effectrs, will be interesting to document.

'Christ on a bike!' is, I think, the first exclamation of surprise I can attribute to my parents. There comes that glorious, exciting age when you first swear in front of your parents without admonishment - that period when it's exiting to use 'fuck' as punctuation that usually loses its appeal after a time (though for some it's a cultural necessity) but 'Christ on a bike!' was the first time I remember my Dad being so surprised and flummoxed by something he had to comedy blaspheme. My Dad was raised Irish Catholic, though he has a practicality born of many who lived around Castletownbere who needed to casually flip between anglicisation/Irish, Protestant/Catholic, peace and revolution depending on what fed your family. Invoking the name of 'The Big Man' in anything other than praise and adoration would have been about as rebellious as he could get. Even if the discovery of women and Coventry City football club while growing up in 60's England soon resigned prayer hands and religious observation to a weird distant memory, that upbringing meant I was raised in a strictly non-religious, feminist household but with a distinct lack of swearing.

The phrase makes me laugh as the combined images of my startled dad and a white robed, sandal wearing hippy hurtling down a slope on an out of control bike spring to mind (I'm afraid my Christ imagery is very Presbyterian Scottish - white dude with finely coiffed flowing locks and beard.. in Palestine... yeah, right..) It's hard-wired to make me laugh and takes me back to that childlike wonder of a moment in time when your expectations of how things operate are briefly and quickly subverted. I doubt my parents have ever realised the impact that moment of consternation has had. I didn't realise myself how much of a mood lifter and anchor to something safe, warm and funny that memory is; how much language and memory can combine to alter my own state of mind decades later.

This discussion might be a "stating the bloody obvious" moment, for which I apologise, but I've been contemplating the power of memory a lot this year. Both Mrs. Carrumba and I are dealing with parents getting older and, in some cases, watching the progress of Alzheimer's disease. To be honest, there is some comedy to be found in the slowly eroding effect on the power of loved ones to distinguish which memories go together and just how long ago they had already asked you about going to visit Uncle Billy. "What's your bet on the time to be asked about the trip this time? Fifteen minutes? I'm going to say twenty. Do you think Billy will have been in the cave on Mount Kenya with him again, despite never having left Aberdeenshire? I'm guessing he's going to mention his memory getting bad six times this time - higher or lower?". Moving into management and having to manage the mood, motivations and health of a team of people (manage or manipulate? The distinction can be so fine to be non-existent) has also pushed me to contemplate what makes me happy and how I protect and create happy memories for when I am older. It's a tricky square to circle, which everyone faces to some extent or another, when trying to make sure there is enough money to go round for you and your loved ones. I think a lot of it has to do with being organised in managing your own expectations, which, as a dreamer, I am not amazingly good at. I'll let you know if I crack it... a lottery win might help.

On a slightly related note (hold on, slight handbrake turn here, ghosties!) I've had a couple of occasions this week to demonstrate to me how AI is going to affect our collective memories. The first one was a flippant question to Google Bard on what Taylor Swift's voting intentions might be if she was faced with a vote on Scottish Independence, because apparently politics can't be discussed without the influence of Swiftenomics. AI developers are trying so hard to ensure their bots aren't seen to be trying to overthrow humanity, that all answers have to provide an equal number of pros and cons. This meant Bard (or Gemini as it is now) postulated that Swift would be motivated to vote for Scottish Independence because she has soooo much money and would be attracted by the SNP's proposed wealth tax in an independent Scotland. Yeah, ok Gemini... step away from the Kool Aid.

The second was during my working week, where I have 'put myself outside my comfort zone' (insert eye roll here) and spaffed $26k of Google money on developing an AI tool to help my staff trawl the vast amount of data available to them as part of their job. There was that moment when I had to furtively check the expressions of the tech experts helping me understand exactly what I was project managing for any flicker of worry when the developer confirmed during the progress call that the AI would have 'no guard rails'. Pre-AI development, these were the things that you sneered at people for using when ten-pin bowling, but I now know this means there is nothing in place to stop my beloved wee bot hallucinating - basically making shit up from the data it has ingested and indexed. Amazing. In my quest to be all thrusting, tech-savvy and thinking outside the box, I am in danger of creating something that will happily tell my staff that clients should sell a kidney or sacrifice a child in order to better themselves. I really cannot be fucked with the paperwork that would generate. Like any politician, I am furiously plotting how I spin the positives of this experiment and quietly encourage it to be absorbed into something better organised like it never happened while running off with a fistful of contacts and new systems access to leverage.

I find I am using AI more and more, mostly using Gemini and occasionally ChatGPT when Google refuses to be as blasé as their rival - "I'm sorry I am not designed to create a movie about cats taking over Glenrothes and sacrificing labradoodles on the myriad roundabouts to please their nefarious chaos gods" [opens ChatGPT]. Mostly they are brain bandwidth replacement tools when I'm tired and cannot navigate the logic of a nested IF statement or trying to get BigQuery to give me what I want. But the ability of AI to make shit up is an interesting development for the TikTok generation to navigate in the search for what is 'real'. I firmly believe that, as humans, we are each born as a god, in charge of creating our world and the interactions of these billions of worlds make up our collective universe. So, to a certain extent, if a generation wants to base their reality on bonkers shit, that's their business - just as long as Soylent Green doesn't become a real alternative to caring for the elderly based on some fuckers attention-seeking TikTok interpretation of an 'ancient film they just discovered [pog face]'.

I guess, now more than ever, critical thinking is an important tool in anyone's arsenal, but I have little doubt that AI is going to play an increasingly important role in our future - whatever that might be. Though I can guarantee to you my Ghosties that I won't be using AI to generate my articles (all misconceptions and bullshit is firmly of my own, proud creation) it pays to regard any news with a highly critical eye, particularly from cash-strapped national broadcasters. AI generated images are a whole other discussion, with a new tool arriving to create video from plain text prompts - the power of some of these tools is truly mind-boggling. Which brings us back to Taylor Swift and social media sites banning searches for their name due to the sheer volume of deep-fake porn that has been created to burn the souls of sensitive Swifties everywhere. Christ on a bike, the lass is fecking everyhwere!

Till next week - make memories... but real ones. AI responsibly all. 👻