The Wine-bot enjoys a syrah.
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 Pink Floyd. Here’s a pairing I engineered this past week – wine 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 kept the libations out of their steely grasp. 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.” I could not stop laughing for the duration of the afternoon. The gag fell somewhere between concept art and one of the best nods to sibling rivalry I’ve yet experienced.
My rebuttal was to send him a bottle of wine, something distinctly Sonoma Valley, with a note taped to the bottom. Only visible through the neck of the empty bottle, the note reads: “The nanobots contained in this bottle will activate in 15 minutes. Bon chance, mon frere.”
We’ll see what happens. Best case scenario my brother will chuckle as his wife quietly rolls her eyes. Worst case scenario he calls the poison control center and says he just drank a bottle of nanobot wine and the men in white coats pick him up and put him in a rubber room. Worst, worst case scenario, all of the above with the CIA pounding down my down door demanding to know how I obtained their recipe for nanobot wine. That would mean the joke was on all of us. Bots up!
