“Two one-eyed dogs they’re
Looking at stereos
Hi-Fi gods try so hard
To make their cars low
To the ground
These vibrations oil its teeth
Primer gray is the color
When you’re done dying.”
-- Modest Mouse

In "Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity," Preston B. Nichols reports that the most visible of all Illuminati, Aleister Crowley, who was a British intelligence agent and Winston Churchill’s astrologer, said that God was The Joker, referring, of course, to the jester in the Tarot.

God, according to Crowley, was a whimsical, carefree creator.

Logically then it is mandatory that one employ one’s God-given sense of humor religiously.

Otherwise the joke’s on you!

Today the joke should have been on the computer but ended up on me. In this position, White blunders and plays BxP, which I thought would be followed by … QxB, QxP, QxQ, RxQ, leaving white with a centralized rook and a plan to double up. With two rooks on the open file, White might then try to take the seventh rank and then, like a boa, squeeze me to death, picking off pawns from behind and constantly threatening some form of a back rank mate.

White then makes a move only a computer would make. It drops the queen back. This must be the sort of blunder Marie was programmed to make.

Having just eaten a huge lunch of pasta and beans, my belly was full and thus my killer instinct quelched. I blew my advantage and Marie forced a draw through threefold repetition of position.

As usual, the computer personality played above its rating when at a disadvantage. I’ve come to expect this. Computers take themselves very seriously. That’s how they are programmed to be. And that is why no matter how high tech the future may be, there will always be a place for humans, who by design know how to laugh at themselves. Without a sense of humor, computers are doomed to ultimately be the punch line of God’s comedy routine.