Dear Amritsar,
Before I retired I was a diplomat - or, at least, I was occasionally diplomatic - so I was recently invited to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Plotz Ambassador's marriage to an AI known as Steve. Although the Plotzian music sounded like a piston engine in a blender and the food made the human guests hallucinate that they were 12th century Egyptian tulip farmers, all in attendance agreed that it was the most delightful party Ottawa had seen since Mackenzie King got it into his head that his dead mother was talking to him through a coat rack.Throughout the evening, I kept bumping into a young woman. Now, I'm not in bad shape for someone of my...roundness, but I'll be the second to admit - fifteenth if there are actually other people in the room - that I'm a bit past the age when I can turn a young woman's head. Nonetheless, she seemed to be winking at me.
The only truly distinguishing feature of the young woman was the odd-looking pair of glasses that she was wearing, but I just assumed she was from the Ukraine. Still, the first time she winked at me, I was flattered. The second time she winked at me, I was even more flattered. The third time she winked at me, my flattered state plateaued. The fourth time she winked at me, I started on the downward side of the flattery curve. By the seventeenth time she winked at me, I wondered if she wasn't subconsciously trying to tell me something...in Morse code.
"Excuse me, miss," I suavely asked, "but, are you having an episode?"
She just smiled Mona Lisally at me and walked away.
I would have thought nothing of it, that it was just some young lady's passing medical condition, but a couple of days later I happened to come across a news report on my Home Universe GeneratorTM about Google Gross. As your readers probably know, but I feel a compulsion to explain anyway, Google Gross is a Web connected set of glasses that, among other things, allows people to see things that aren't there seventeen times better than Mescalin, and with fewer than half the side effects. It can also take pictures of whatever the wearer is looking at; all they have to do is blink.
Blink?
Aha!
The weird glasses the woman at the party wore allowed her to take pictures. Of me! Should I be concerned that I am being investigated by some nation's security service? Possibly the Ukraine's?
Roberto Hemogloben
Hey, Babe,
Not necessarily. The woman who was taking your photograph could just be a face fetishist.Great! It's good to know that I'm not being - wait, what? Face fetishist? What's that?
Roberto Hemogloben
Hey, Babe,
Somebody who gets physical pleasure from explicit photographs of people's faces.HOW IS THAT BETTER?
Roberto Hemogloben
Hey, Babe,
I didn't say it was. If it is important to you that it is, though, I suppose you could take comfort in the fact that if the woman was a face fetishist, she's now a more likely candidate to be blackmailed by the Ukrainian secret service than you are.Somehow, I don't find that comforting. Not even a little bit. Is there any chance that the young woman could have had a different purpose in taking my photograph?
Roberto Hemogloben
Hey, Babe,
Weeeeellllll, as you probably know, an obscure author once wrote that The Street Finds its Own Uses for Mutant Technologies (and, as you've probably tried to forget and failed, I get a small finder's fee every time a copy of the book is sold). The good news is that, as more people wear Google Gross, they'll probably find all sorts of uses for it that we would never have expected; surely, a few of them won't be as problematic as those we have already discussed. One can always hope. The bad news is that, since there are only seven Google Grosses in the world at the moment, this proliferation of purposes hasn't happened yet.
If I were you, I'd hope the young woman was a spy.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: Parties thrown by people from the planet Plotz are so lavish you could just plu...die. You could just die. If you are fortunate enough to be invited to one, you must remember that fremnicks go on the left and mariachibobs go on the right. If you mix these utensils up, you are just asking for a transdimensional incident, and, honestly, who needs the paperwork?