I was playing in a night club, and getting few requests and small tips. Towards the end of the night, a man walked up with a wad of bills in his hand and asked me to play a jazz chord. I played an Amaj7. He said, "No, no. A jazz chord." I did a little improvisational thing, but he didn't like that either. "No, no, no! A jazz chord. You know, 'A jazz chord, to say, ah love you.'"
While waiting for the final voter recount in Florida, media services questioned the two major presidential candidates today. Both agreed that Americans are seeing too much inappropriate material in popular entertainment. However, they disagreed on the details. The Republican candidate, George W. Bush, stated that there is too much bloody violence in the movies and on television. Vice President Al Gore, his Democratic opponent, stated that the media presents Americans with too much sex and frontal nudity. In other words, Bush says there is too much gore and Gore says there is too much bush.
This is supposedly a true story from a recent Defence Science Lectures Series, as related by the head of the Australian DSTO's Land Operations / Simulation division. They've been working on some really nifty virtual reality simulators, the case in point being to incorporate Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters into exercises (from the data fusion point of view). Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex- (or future) computer game programmers. Anyway, as part of the reality parameters, they include things like trees and animals. For the Australian simulation they included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model kangaroo movements and reactions to helicopters (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a helicopter's position). Being good programmers, they just stole some code (which was originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli), and changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. The first time they went to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots have decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. So, they buzz them, and watch them scatter. The visiting Americans nod appreciatively...then gape as the kangaroos duck around a hill, and launch about two dozen Stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. Programmers look rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove that part of the infantry coding...and Americans leave muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife! As an addendum, simulator pilots from that point onwards avoided kangaroos like the plague, just like they were meant to do in the first place.
