Not wanting to let that Happy New Year feeling go, I decided to jump in boots first and catch up on some films I’d missed in recent months. Fourteen hours later, I am bleary but grateful. Virtual humanity, immortality, computer psychosis and fibre optic love dominated story lines. In every case, good things went wrong fast, and humanity, with all its foibles, was left to clean up the mess. Trying to parse out the meaning of all of this, and aided in no small part by Kobe, The Occasional Cat, I grabbed for a very excellent bottle of J. Lohr cab sav. The message was clear: Artificial Intelligence fails every time and hoomans aren’t meant to live forever. The cat agreed—no one does his work for him and he has only one life, not nine. Still, I couldn’t synth the message. Transcendence is so darned compelling. Like New Year, it promises BIG THINGS that we can’t yet see, certainly don’t feel, but hope like hell is on the way anyway. So what if I don’t live forever? I have FB, Twitter, a website, and plenty of fine people I’ve never met, connecting to me in ways I could have never imagined as a pimply teenager three decades ago. I might not be gaining intelligence (lol), but I’m reaching beyond my own backyard. While the films I watched suggest that pushing away from the screen is the better way, I cannot help but embrace it all the more. We are writing, using dictionaries, consulting thesaurus, and communicating person to person as never before. If this isn’t life beyond the pall, I don’t know what is. Bests.