'Coyote V. Acme'

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, SOUTHWESTERN DISTRICT, TEMPE, ARIZONA

CASE NO. B19294, JUDGE JOAN KUJAVA, PRESIDING

WILE E. COYOTE, Plaintiff

-v.-

ACME COMPANY, Defendant

Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory. Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company, under Title 15 of the United States Code, Chapter 47, section 2072, subsection (a), relating to product liability.

Mr. Coyote states that on eighty-five separate occasions he has purchased of the Acme Company (hereinafter, “Defendant”), through that company’s mail-order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labelling. Sales slips made out to Mr. Coyote as proof of purchase are at present in the possession of the Court, marked Exhibit A. Such injuries sustained by Mr. Coyote have temporarily restricted his ability to make a living in his profession of predator. Mr. Coyote is self-employed and thus not eligible for Workmen’s Compensation.

Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote’s forelimbs to a length of fifty feet. Subsequently, the rest of Mr. Coyote’s body shot forward with a violent jolt, causing severe strain to his back and neck and placing him unexpectedly astride the Rocket Sled. Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled and a faulty or nonexistent braking system. Shortly thereafter, the unchecked progress of the Rocket Sled brought it and Mr. Coyote into collision with the side of a mesa.

Paragraph One of the Report of Attending Physician (Exhibit B), prepared by Dr. Ernest Grosscup, M.D., D.O., details the multiple fractures, contusions, and tissue damage suffered by Mr. Coyote as a result of this collision. Repair of the injuries required a full bandage around the head (excluding the ears), a neck brace, and full or partial casts on all four legs.

Hampered by these injuries, Mr. Coyote was nevertheless obliged to support himself. With this in mind, he purchased of Defendant as an aid to mobility one pair of Acme Rocket Skates. When he attempted to use this product, however, he became involved in an accident remarkably similar to that which occurred with the Rocket Sled. Again, Defendant sold over the counter, without caveat, a product which attached powerful jet engines (in this case, two) to inadequate vehicles, with little or no provision for passenger safety. Encumbered by his heavy casts, Mr. Coyote lost control of the Rocket Skates soon after strapping them on, and collided with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.

Mr. Coyote states that on occasions too numerous to list in this document he has suffered mishaps with explosives purchased of Defendant: the Acme “Little Giant” Firecracker, the Acme Self-Guided Aerial Bomb, etc. (For a full listing, see the Acme Mail Order Explosives Catalogue and attached deposition, entered in evidence as Exhibit C.) Indeed, it is safe to say that not once has an explosive purchased of Defendant by Mr. Coyote performed in an expected manner. To cite just one example: At the expense of much time and personal effort, Mr. Coyote constructed around the outer rim of a butte a wooden trough beginning at the top of the butte and spiralling downward around it to some few feet above a black X painted on the desert floor. The trough was designed in such a way that a spherical explosive of the type sold by Defendant would roll easily and swiftly down to the point of detonation indicated by the X. Mr. Coyote placed a generous pile of birdseed directly on the X, and then, carrying the spherical Acme Bomb (Catalogue # 78-832), climbed to the top of the butte. Mr. Coyote’s prey, seeing the birdseed, approached, and Mr. Coyote proceeded to light the fuse. In an instant, the fuse burned down to the stem, causing the bomb to detonate.

In addition to reducing all Mr. Coyote’s careful preparations to naught, the premature detonation of Defendant’s product resulted in the following disfigurements to Mr. Coyote:

1. Severe singeing of the hair on the head, neck, and muzzle.

2. Sooty discoloration.

3. Fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise.

4. Full or partial combustion of whiskers, producing kinking, frazzling, and ashy disintegration.

5. Radical widening of the eyes, due to brow and lid charring.

by Ian Frazier, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Luci Gutiérrez
[See also (new movie review): Toons Have Seldom Been Loonier Than in “Coyote vs. Acme” (New Yorker).]

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Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy
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“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

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by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

Evolutionary Quandaries

xkcd via: here/here

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

["We're working to make sure the images are as up-to-date and accurate as possible, with a minimum number of sponsored galaxies."]

via: xkcd

[ed. Why is God talking to himself?]

via: xkcd

Gary Larson

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Potential Slogans for J. D. Vance’s 2028 Presidential Campaign

J. D. Vance: Moderate Again

Playing the Long Game

Don’t Blame Me—I Was on Vacation the Whole Time

Trump’s V.P. in Name Only

America Deserves Someone Who Was Barely Involved

“Hillbilly Elegy”

I Kept My Head Down, for You

Just Following Orders, But Also I Wasn’t There

Better Me Than Eric

Better Me Than Don, Jr.

Better Me Than a Third Term

This Time I Mean It

Down to Be Memed

The Tariffs Weren’t as Bad as People Expected, and Also I Wasn’t Involved

Laura Loomer Won’t Get Access

Not in the Epstein Files, I Don’t Think

Protecting Democracy from the Inside, Kinda

The Adults Were Never in the Room, But, if They Were, I Wasn’t One of Them

I’m Just a Guy, Standing in Front of His Country, Asking It to Ignore the Past Decade of His Life

I Never Even Had the Nuclear Codes

Trump Routinely Forgets My Name

Trust Me, I Hated It, Too

Oh, Like Ron DeSantis Would Do a Better Job Than Me? Get Outta Here, Losers

I Really, Really, Really Need This

Hey! It’s Me, J. D. :)

by Ginny Hogan, New Yorker |  Read more:

Images: Jesse Shamon

[ed. No way, José (bet there's an actuarial table hidden inside his bible). If I were Trump, I'd avoid stairwells and have my burgers taste-tested. See also: Pope James David Vance the First (Atlantic).]

I'm Super, Thanks for Asking

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Wile E. Coyote
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On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via