Greetings Brilliant and Beautiful Readers –

Here in the wine country, much to-do is made of “pairings,” as in the ubiquitous mash-up of wine and cheese. Other noted pairings include Romulus and Remus (or their modern counterparts Bert and Ernie), Superman and kryptonite as well as laser light shows and blotter acid. Here’s a pairing I’ve engineered this past week – booze and robots. Yeah, it’s come to that. Of course, I paid heed to Isaac Asimov’s little known Fourth Law of Robotics (essentially, “Never get a robot drunk”) and imbibed the hootch myself – though robots figured heavily into the premise. Here’s what happened – my kid brother sent me a mannequin hand, its plaster wrist stuffed with wires, with a note that read “This is what’s left of the android you sent to kill me, a–hole.” The gag fell somewhere between concept art and one of the best nods to sibling rivalry I’ve yet experienced. My rebuttal to the latter was to concentrate half of this week’s work to notions robotic and the rest, as usual, to drinking.

Best
DH