“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

[NOTE – This is a “draft” post from 14 years ago that I just now stumbled across as I was searching for things I have written about movies. I can’t provide any more context than that for this post, and I don’t know why I never hit “publish” back in 2012 when I first wrote it. I got distracted? I wanted to polish it up a little more before putting it out into the world? Who knows! But here it is at last, for what it’s worth, in the raw and better late than never.]

Or, ignorance is bliss.

The title of today’s post, of course, comes from one of the final scenes in The Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy and her friends have returned to Oz with the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.  In exchange, the Wizard is supposed to grant them their wishes, but in their audience with him, The Great and Powerful Oz is stalling, telling them to come back tomorrow.  Toto, cute little rat terrier that he is, trots over to a curtain at the side of the room and draws it back to expose a man energetically working the levers of the concealed control booth.  (Actually Toto is officially a Cairn Terrier, but dogs of this breed are “ratters,” and don’t you just love the idea of Toto being the only character who “smells a rat” in this scene?)

Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal the real Wizard of Oz

Yesterday’s Google Doodle indirectly got me thinking about the way we (well, I, anyway) always want to know the inner workings of a piece of art.

Yes, I can simply experience and enjoy art for what it is, on its own and without analysis.  In fact, my first encounter with any work of art is always one of sheer, aesthetic bliss.  When I see a movie in the theater, I’m as close to the screen as my companion will tolerate, munching on popcorn and gazing up in wonder at the marvelous, larger-than-life motion picture.

But at some point, if a film or photo or sculpture has “lingered” with me, I start to feel a little restless, to get a little “itch” to go deeper. Why has this particular artwork stayed with me? What makes it “tick”?

The Birth of a Nation is considered enormously important in the development of feature-length narrative cinema, a film in which story and characters are fully developed and the footage edited to craft a compelling, long-form story. Most discussion of this film today centers on its racist assumptions and images, which are repugnant to modern American viewers.

The film premiered in 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War in 1865, and it did, indeed, present a highly consequential—and profoundly racist—interpretation of the postwar era of Reconstruction.

But what did it mean for an audience to encounter that particular representation of history at that particular historical moment?

The Birth of a Nation toured the United States like any other traveling “show” of the day.  It was booked into civic center auditoriums – again, to mark that 50th anniversary of the Civil War’s end – and viewing this film in that context was a communal theatrical experience, complete with an intermission.

I try to imagine how going to see the “show” might have been considered an observance somewhat akin to putting flowers on Civil War veterans’ graves. The film also contains a facsimile reproduction of Lincoln’s assassination, an event within living memory of many people still alive in 1915 – but at a time long before YouTube, network television, or newsreels could have captured and indelibly preserved it. What must it have been like for those audiences to vicariously participate in the first Presidential assassination, a monumental event in America’s history?

This is the way my mind starts to wander (and wonder) the intial exposure to a work of art has passed.

Searching for meaning is a basic human impulse, and an artwork’s meaning can be found in many places. You can look to a work’s creator. You can analyze its structure or form (formal analysis). You can examine the cultural context of the society or historical period from which it emerged.

After the terrible movie-theater massacre in Colorado a few weeks ago, the cause-and-effect relationship between onscreen and offscreen violence was the subject of much discussion. As with the chicken-egg conundrum, it doesn’t really matter which comes first . . . and, actually, it’s impossible to determine anyway. The question of whether violent images can influence violent behavior has produced decades of research and controversy, particularly concerning children.

The more compelling version of this question may be: What happens when art crosses the boundary between representation and reality?

Ignorance may be bliss, but as the poem from which that line is taken makes clear, only children can and should be shielded from reality as long as possible. At its deepest, most meaningful level, art is about reality. Delving beyond the surface beauty (or ugliness) of any artwork allows you to move beyond the material itself to connect with something else . . . eternal, unfettered, transcendent.

[FURTHER NOTE – Maybe I was too traumatized by the movie-theater killings in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight screening of  The Dark Knight Rises. It’s possible I was trying to process the horror by thinking about it in terms of art and senseless violence. In reading through this blog post today, I was very confused by the Google Doodle reference, but with the help of ChatGPT and the version-control time stamps on the draft, I figured out that I started writing this post on July 14, 2012, referring to this Google Doodle celebrating 150 years of Gustav Klimt. Then for some reason, I added in the reference to the July 20, 2012, movie theater killings several weeks later, on August 6 and 8. I must have intuited a strong connection at the time, but I have a feeling that I found the whole thing too excruciating to grapple with in writing. Sometimes words are completely inadequate.]

Posted in Life, Movies and film, Popular culture | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

(Somer) Sault Ste. Marie

Posted on August 7, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Our dog is never happier than when she’s outside on a sunny day, soaking up the rays in her backyard.

On the other hand, she is terrified of thunderstorms, to the point where she needs medication (trazodone) to get through the thunder and lightning. Even a light drizzle is traumatic. She’ll freeze at the sound of raindrops splashing against the windows, and on overcast days, she glances nervously up at the sky as if anticipating a cloudburst at any moment.

I maintain near-constant monitoring of the weather forecast, as a result. Multiple weather forecasts, in fact:

  • Apple’s weather app
  • Google’s featured 10-day forecast for Milwaukee
  • Every Milwaukee television station’s website weather page

One local station includes continually-updating weather radar, so this website has become my “go to.” To be fair, Apple’s weather app also has updating radar. But the map itself on Apple’s app is completely white except for place names in black text and gray lines showing state borders, etc. Channel 6, on the other hand, uses satellite images showing actual physical features of the landscape.

Plus, although the weather system colors on Apple are aesthetically pleasing, in a range of pinks and purples, they are quite bland and limited compared with the sweeping palette offered on Channel 6: green for ordinary rain; yellow and red for heavier rain with thunder and lightning; and magenta/purple for a storm’s really scary, intense areas (like heavy rain, hail, and tornados).

VERY dramatic. Like: Uh oh, time for the trazodone.

Radar showing storm approaching Milwaukee metro area

But wait. What was the title of this blog post again?

Yes, I’m coming around to that 🙂

The best time to give our dog her trazodone is about 45 minutes ahead of a storm. That way she has a chance to get stupefied relaxed before the first thunder rolls and raindrops hit.

Timing her meds is kind of an art.

We hate giving her the drug for no reason, like if a storm fizzles out before reaching us, which sometimes happens. Or if, as happens other times, I kid you not, a giant storm splits as it approaches our section of Milwaukee, sending its two halves eastward around us like the Red Sea parting for Moses. You know how they talk about urban areas having microclimates? Sometimes I wonder if there’s some unseen temperature or air pressure phenomenon popping up that intercepts approaching storms and diverts them around the metro area.

But anyway, recently I was looking at the radar, checking out the progression of a storm system across the state of Wisconsin in an attempt to decide the odds of the red/yellow storms hitting Milwaukee. To get a feel for the overall rotation range of the entire system’s “low,” I zoomed out, away from Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, to take in the entire state, including Michigan’s upper peninsula and the area surrounding Lake Superior.

Which is when I happened to notice that there are two cities of Sault St. Marie up there on the far eastern end of Michigan’s UP. One on the USA  side of the border and one on the Canada side. The Soo Locks are right there on the St. Mary River between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, so of course, it makes sense that the city would grow outward in a circle from that spot instead of being concentrated entirely on the U.S. side, with nothing across the border.

Then I thought about how Kansas City similarly straddles a border (between Kansas and Missouri), and I wondered if there was a special term for a city like that. The answer is yes, of course. Multiple terms, in fact, depending on whether the boundary/border lies between states or countries:

  • Divided cities – one city divided by a border
  • Transborder Agglomeration / Conurbation – large urban region or metro area spanning two or more states or countries
  • Twin cities – two separate cities sitting right across the border from each other

Some well-known examples across state boundaries in the U.S., (taken straight from Google’s AI overview) include the following:

  • Texarkana (Texas and Arkansas) – Famous for State Line Avenue, which splits the community, and a federal courthouse that physically straddles both states.
  • Bristol (Virginia and Tennessee) – Shares a main street (State Street) dividing the two distinct municipal governments.
  • Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas) – Often confused as a single entity, these are two completely separate neighboring cities divided by State Line Road within a shared metropolitan area.
  • Union City (Indiana and Ohio) – adjoined municipalities split down the state boundary.

So that was interesting to learn!

And ChatGPT informs me that the term “twin cities” (or “sister” cities in some contexts) refers to two adjacent cities on opposite sides of a border that function closely together but remain separate municipalities. Examples include:

  • El Paso and Ciudad Juárez
  • Sault Ste. Marie and Sault Ste. Marie

Well, I got the answer to my question, and that would have been the end of that little trip down the rabbit hole—except then I thought about the name of Sault Ste. Marie and wondered why it is pronounced the way it is. It looks (and is) French, thanks to the original French explorers and fur traders, but the spelling of the “Soo Locks” reinforces the “Soo” sound instead of a more French-sounding “Sohl” (long “o” with just a barest hint of that “l” at the end) pronunciation.

I didn’t find the answer to that pronunciation question, but in looking up the word “sault” in French, I discovered that (again thanks to Google’s AI-enhanced summary), ”In older and colonial French, sault (modern spelling: saut) means a leap, jump, or waterfall/rapids (from the idea of water “leaping” over rocks).

I loved that image of water leaping and tumbling over the rapids that pre-existed the Soo Locks.

Which—finally!—brings me to the point of today’s post, as hinted at by its title. That image of “tumbling” made me wonder about the origin of “somersault.”

The word “somersault” (again courtesy of Google’s AI summary, relying on Reddit and a Saturday Evening Post article) comes from “the Old Provençal word sobresaut and Middle French sombresault, meaning ‘to jump over.’ The ‘somer’ part traces back to the Latin supra or super (meaning ‘over’ or ‘above’), which shifted phonetically through Old French into sobre– and was later corrupted or folk-etymologized into ‘somer.’”

I always thought of somersaults as adorable little floor rolls performed by children, but the Wikipedia article I checked out had several photos of gymnasts performing various forward and backward aerial “somersaults.” As I stared at the photos, trying to wrap my head around the connection between toddlers’ clumsy tumbles and gymnasts whirling through the air, it suddenly occurred to me that somewhere along the way I had apparently stopped monitoring thunderstorms and begun conducting an etymological investigation into gymnastics instead.

Which is exactly, my friends, how one goes from “Will the storm hit Milwaukee?” to “Why are there two Sault Ste. Maries?” to “What does sault mean anyway?” to “Wait—somersault?”

The weather forecast may have been predicting a storm, but I was the one who got swept away.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Vertical

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

The building in the center is Art Deco, but its classic heavenward stretch is nicely amplified by all the rest of those vertical lines, presenting an unexpectedly elegant, even stately composition. Photographed in downtown Milwaukee around 11:15 AM today, heading east on Wisconsin Avenue at 11th Street.

Photo of downtown Milwaukee, taken at street level, showing lots of vertical lines stretching upward

Posted in architecture, design, Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

“And she stepped on the BALL” (RIP, Kelly Lee Curtis)

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

I saw the notification from Jamie Lee Curtis several days ago that her sister, Kelly, had died Saturday. The first thing I thought of—after (of course) thinking, “that’s too bad”—was the line quoted in today’s post title and spoken by Kelly Lee Curtis in the 1983 film, Trading Places, starring Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, and Kelly’s sister, Jamie Lee Curtis.

Here’s the scene Kelly appears in. You may remember it. Dan Ackroyd’s down-and-out character shows up at his tennis club, desperately hoping his friends will lend assistance after a catastrophic series of events—orchestrated entirely by the ultra-wealthy Duke brothers around a $1 wager in the name of science—has stripped him of his job, his home, his finances, and his self-worth. The “stepped on the ball” line comes at the very end of this YouTube clip.

Kelly Curtis nailed it! Her delivery of the line is exquisitely vapid and banal, with precisely the level of intelligence one expects from a movie character named “Muffy.”

I laughed during my original viewing of the film, noted the line and remembered it, then rarely ever thought of it again apart from periodic December rewatches (because Trading Places is a stealth Christmas movie in the vein of Die Hard and Catch Me if You Can 🙂 ).

Until . . . fast forward 25+ years. I was sitting at the dining room table doing some grading one afternoon while my kids watched High School Musical 2 in the living room—when suddenly my consciousness registered hearing the words “and she stepped on the ball.”

What???

The quality of this video is not great, and you can barely catch the line, but “stepped on the ball” shows up around the 23-second mark, in the small space between the cut away from the piano playing and the “I did not” finger-pointing denial. What a fun little Easter egg for whoever made that movie to have hidden for movie buffs like me! Such a great use of homage and cinematic shorthand to establish: Look, it’s those empty-headed, country-club snobs again!

After hearing that Trading Places line again in such an unexpected place, I felt compelled look it up, just to see if it was a “thing.”

And, indeed, it certainly is a thing.

Here’s the original line (with one additional word), from the musical Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell (1958), delivered by a WASP-y, debutante-type young woman whose idea of “ghastly” is hilariously, nonplussingly overblown. Just perfect 🙂

Apparently this line also can be found in an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a show I was not familiar with, although now that I’ve checked it out in connection with writing this post, I have to say looks really good! A (very) brief clip of that show’s incorporation of the line is below.

And she stepped on the ball.

Obviously the significance of Kelly Lee Curtis’s professional and personal life extends far beyond her blip of a performance in Trading Places, so my post today is pretty trivial.

Still, I thought it was worth noting how beautifully her delivery of that line amplified the original and imortalized a new trope. She was the thread connecting past and present. Without her, the Auntie Mame moment would surely have been forgotten, and this fun throughline in cinematic storytelling would not exist.

Posted in Creativity, Media studies, Movies and film, Popular culture, Television | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Miller Valley, Milwaukee

Posted on May 7, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

So, I have barely posted so far in 2026. Being interim chair of my department at Milwaukee School of Engineering has been TIME CONSUMING, to say the least. June 30 is my last day as chair; our regular chair returns on July 1 from her stint as interim VP of Academics. (YAY!!!!!)

But even though I haven’t posted, I have still been taking photos here and there when something captures my attention, usually not sharing them anywhere but sometimes posting to Facebook, which is quick and easy. In fact, at a reception for grant awardees late yesterday afternoon, one of my colleagues mentioned that he likes the photos I post there. Which is no doubt why last night, while driving home through Miller Valley (quite literally a valley, where Miller Beer is produced), I was primed to grab this picture.

Sunset, Miller Valley, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A manufacturing building's roofline is limned with setting sunlight, along an empty road, with a railroad bridge overpass and a sky filled with gray fluffy clouds mixed with orange sunlight

Although I had immediately noticed the bright line of orange sunlight streaking along the roofline, I probably just would have continued my drive home, thinking about the things I had to do in the morning. Except, Chuck’s comments from the reception still loomed large. Because what a nice surprise—what an incredible lift, actually!—for someone to have noticed my photos, liked them, and then gone out of their way to tell me. After that gift, how could I not pull over and capture the image I’d seen!

Luckily, it was pretty late, so there was no rush hour traffic and no one to be irritated by me pulling over to the side and then backing up down the street (a rather illogical phrasing, there, backing “up” “down” 🙂 ) until I was roughly back in the same spot as where the image had first caught my eye. There I employed my fancy photography technique of picking up my phone from the console, opening the camera app, and snapping the picture. Looked in my side and rearview mirrors to make sure no one was coming, then pulled back into the traffic lane. Done 🙂

(Aside, lol: “Seeing” the picture is the hard part; after that, documenting the image in a way that presents its best “framed” aspect is relatively straightforward once I understand what I’m after; and I rarely edit beyond cropping.)

Sadly, such an easy capture was not the situation with my current “White Whale,” a lost photo opportunity that presented itself several weeks ago.

Not even “lost,” really. “Squandered” more accurately describes my split-second decision to forego a literally “golden” opportunity to get a really beautiful photo—a choice I greatly regret now, of course.

It was a Sunday afternoon, when the sun was setting with exactly this same intensely saturated shade of orange as last night, and at just about the same low angle in the sky, when I was driving east on Highland Boulevard past Harley-Davidson’s factory—located just up the hill and across the street from Miller Brewing, as a matter of fact.

OMG, that lost photo opportunity was GORGEOUS!

The Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s Juneau Avenue facility has several buildings on a campus that has added tourist-type amenities recently, like a park/amphitheatre type garden area, for example. The building I’m talking about is one of the farthest west, an older structure that looks like every traditional, early-to-mid-20th-century factory you’ve ever seen in photographs and movies. Dark red brick building, three or four stories tall, lots of windows all around.

On that late Sunday afternoon, the windows on that west-facing brick wall were a brilliant, intensely rich, deep copper-gold array that glowed with reflection of that setting sun. And because the eastern sky was getting dark already, there was a nice contrast that way between the waning day’s vibrant orange and the approaching night’s dark blue/gray. And then, to cap it all off beautifully, just above those amazing windows sat the Harley-Davidson rooftop water tower.

I thought about stopping. But I had somewhere I had to be. So I told myself I’d try to be there another day to get a photo then, under similar lighting conditions. However, just like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (“Oh, I kept the first for another day! / Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”), that may never happen.

Because guess what? Perfect conditions don’t come around very often.

Last night the conditions were perfect, which they hadn’t been since that Sunday afternoon weeks ago. After I took the photo down in Miller Valley, I could have whipped around the corner at the western end and up the hill, circling back over to Highland Boulevard to see about the Harley-Davidson photo.

But I didn’t. Once again, I let my opportunity take a back seat to expediency. It was already pretty late, and I’d already put in 12+ hours at work, and I’d already taken the time to get one photo on the way home from work. I just wanted to get HOME!

School will be ending soon, though. I’ll have the entire summer to try for the Harley-Davidson photo again. Maybe the stars (or, rather, the setting sun) will align with my driving schedule again.

Or maybe not.

As you can see in this Google Maps “Street View” from May 2025, summer won’t be a good time to capture sunset reflecting off of the windows of this building. I’ll have to wait until next year to have leafless trees and the sun at the correct angle.

Sigh. This is what happens when you reject a gift from the Muse. Twice.

Maybe it was enough that I had the chance to notice and recognize that “photo” in my mind as the image it (potentially) was. I can pull that memory out and experience it as vividly today as it appeared to me on that particular late March or early April evening.

But then again, it would be so much nicer if I could share it with you 🙂

Maybe my next opportunity will work out. Third time’s the charm, as they say. If I let go of it yet again, then either it was never meant to be or it was but I didn’t deserve it.

Posted in Creativity, Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Scary-looking April sky

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Saw this scary-looking sky as I drove westward yesterday on my way home from downtown Milwaukee. I wasn’t able to find another good, open spot to take another picture with my phone turned sideways to get a landscape orientation, for that might have better shown the incredible width of this cloud formation. At least you can get a sense of the scale and the height! Those upward sweeps nearest the ground spread outward left and right to form sort of a circular base for the entire mass of “bloom” resembling multiple smoke plumes.

The entire sky looked like a giant mushroom cloud to me. Very spooky!

Threatening, violent looking cloud formation filling the sky

I haven’t posted much in the past couple of months, and not much more than photos at that because I’m filling in as interim department chair at my university until June 30. Very, very busy! I feel so eager and impatient to get back to writing again this summer!

Posted in Milwaukee, Nature, Photography | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fog rolling in from Lake, Michigan

Posted on March 5, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Fog rolling in from Lake Michigan yesterday morning. Took this photo while stopped at a traffic light on Wells Street heading east on my way to work. Downtown Milwaukee. 

Posted in Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Moon and Roofline

Posted on March 3, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Had an errand to run last night and noticed how striking this roofline looked beneath the moon. I especially liked the strong, stark, “color blocking” effect. Such a plain but forceful image. Just these large, sharply-defined blocks of solid color separated from the night sky by that bright, horizontal line of the white metal cap.

Posted in Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Milwaukee skyline, spotlighted by sunshine

Posted on February 18, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

I was visiting someone at Froedtert Hospital last week, a week ago today, actually, and had to park on the very top of the parking structure. Like, the very farthest corner away from the buildings on the very top floor. Got my 10,000 steps in that day, for sure.

But on the plus side, or should I say further plus side, since I also got some additional walking time in, when returning to my car after the visit, I was greeted with this rather arresting view as I got off the elevator.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 1

Because I was parked in the farthest southeast corner of the roof (only a little “motorcycle parking” square space between my car and the wall), I had an unfettered view when I reached my vehicle.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 2

Although it was overcast, the sun was breaking through and illuminating several of the downtown buildings.

Milwaukee skyline, from the roof of Froedtert Hospital's ER/specialty clinics parking structure - 3

See the light brown building topped with the red and white sign in the left third of the photo? That’s Miller Brewing, which is over 25-45 city blocks away from those tall downtown buildings (25+ from the nearest at around 10th Street and 45-ish from the tall buildings on the right side of downtown proper, which is about 18 blocks east of 10th and about 7 blocks south.)

I’m not sure what the building at the far right of the photo above is. It’s possible  that it’s Bay View Terrace, a lonely high-rise apartment building (now condos, actually) just south across the Hoan Bridge (crossing the Milwaukee Harbor and associated land) from downtown. But it looks more like the Potawatomi Hotel Casino, which is located less far south of downtown and is also in the 1700 block west (on Canal Street, in the Menomonee Valley, once aka the “Industrial Valley,” although its industrial heyday is long past and efforts are underway to restore the natural marshland environment.

These photos really demonstrate the way a telephoto lens compresses distance. I was standing at approximately 87th Street. Miller Brewing is around 37th or so. Downtown runs from about 10th Street on the west, then 10 blocks to the Milwaukee River, which is the dividing line between east and west, and then about 9 or 10 additional blocks east from the river to Lake Michigan. The U. S. Bank building (tallest building in the photo, white, with its name in blue and red across the top, and also the tallest building in Wisconsin) is at 777 E. Wisconsin, and the buidling to its right is the Couture (tallest apartment building in the state, according to Wikipedia), located at 909 E. Michigan.

So my photos cover about 107 city blocks. Not bad for snapshots taken with my iPhone 16!

One last photo, not of downtown but of Miller Park, newly named (as of 2020) American Family Field. Apparently it’s the only ballpark with a fan-shaped retractable roof, according to Wikipedia anyway. That feature is clearly distinct in the photo, and you can see that the roof was closed that day. Miller Park (as I still think of it) is due west of Potawatomi, around 44th Street, so approximately 45-40 blocks southeast from where I was standing.

American Family Field, foof closed, view from the west

It was fun seeing the sights from this unusual perspective. Although I groaned with each level I was forced to ascend in the parking structure (busy day at Froedtert, I guess), it was a real treat in the end that my far-flung, last available parking space on the roof turned out to be the best seat in the house!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to tell if a video is AI: Some clues

Posted on February 7, 2026 by Katherine Wikoff

Some fun “time lapse” videos of landscaping, patio/courtyard, and balcony makeovers have been coming through my Facebook feed lately. The other day I shared one with a note saying:

This is such a fun use of AI; these videos provide not only a nice, short, uplifting break from the slog of workday tasks but also a rejuvenating “refresh” of ideas and inspiration.

One of my friends left a comment that asked, “Why AI?”

Now, I assumed she meant: How do you know it’s AI? She may have only meant: Why did they make an AI video when they could have filmed a real project? So my bad if she meant the second, because I posted a lengthy reply to the first question, with screenshots and analysis and just really got into explaining how you could tell it was AI.

Sorry, Margaret, if I misinterpreted the intent of your question and went down the wrong rabbit hole!

However, havng once gone down that rabbit hole, I was now left with several screenshots of that video in my phone’s camera roll, and I figured, hey, why not do a THIRD blog post in as many days and share my possibly unwanted  and largely unread Facebook-reply blast with the rest of the world?

So here it is. I can’t find this “Moroccan Courtyard” video on YouTube, so I can’t embed it here for viewing right on this page. The video creator seems to post only on Instagram and Facebook.

Link to the video on Instagram HERE.

Link to the video on Facebook HERE.

So first we have the empty courtyard, and if you look at this screenshot, you can see the area in the corners and how much room there is, which is not a lot. By the end of the video there are two ginormous trees that can’t possibly be growing from that small corner on each side. The smaller trees could be, but not the two giant trees that pop up on either side at the very end of the video. Those trees would have to be planted outside the fence of the courtyard. But it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room between the buildings closer to us and that building that’s across the back of the courtyard.

Now we are sort of in the middle of the build, starting to put in the plantings, including the smaller trees along the outer edges of the courtyard.

And here, toward the end of the daytime hours, we suddenly have the giant trees in the rear corners and clearly between the buildings closer to us and the building farther from us. It seems unlikely that 1) they could plant such tall trees and 2) that those two tall trees would fit in the space provided.

 

Another weird thing from this point in the video is that the clouds in the sky suddenly stop, just freeze like a photograph. If you look at the sky throughout the video, at first it is overcast, and then we have rather large clouds moving quickly across the sky from left to right. Then the clouds reverse direction, which CAN happen during a day, but usually does not. Usually the wind is moving in one direction pretty much all day. But then, the thing I find a little strange is that as the workers are setting the furniture into place, the sky just completely stops, holds completely still like a photo, and then it starts up again with clouds moving.

So I guess what makes me think it’s AI is the combination of those two really large trees that apparently are getting planted as part of the landscaping and the strange things happening in the sky.

It’s still a fun video to watch, though! I would love to have a little garden area like this

(Later . . .) I’m thinking even harder about why my impression of this video was that it was AI. I went back to one of my screenshots and looked closer, only to find that some of the trees are weirdly blurred, but only in spots, parts of those rear (small) trees are not blurry, while other details, like the palm tree looking things, are in sharp, sharp detail.

Also, the man in the front left has no head.

The other men’s heads are blurred out in a manner similar to the weird, spotty blurring of those trees in the back. This is from the middle of the build, before the ginormous trees are put into place.

A close-up view from this image is below. What I find “suspect” is that the blurring seems selective. The man’s head and the tree surrounding it. Yet detail at the top of the tree behind the man and detail of that tree/plant with the spiky fronds is fairly crisp.

Nobody is going to go to these lengths in daily life to see whether a video is AI or not. But I think we can and should, all of us, work to train our sixth sense to be more aware of the AI “tells.”

Because one thing is for sure: The AI video tsunmai is coming. The tide is way, way out, and the water is starting to foam. We need to recognize the signs and do what’s necessary to avoid ending up as flotsam!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 4 Comments