Lifestyles

Renaissance Redneck: The real Mars rover

By David Kittredge
By David Kittredge

Newsflash! The Mars Rover has landed!

No, not on our sister planet, Mars, but in Monroe, New York, where it wanders around a grocery store monitoring customer movements while trying to entice shoppers with offerings of Mars-Wrigley candy selections. The new Mars Bar rover will shadow shoppers like a mechanical puppy dog as they wander the aisles in search of their food needs, for sustenance. As shoppers ponder and fondle the vegetable and fruit choices the robot named “Smiley,” which does not have a face or anything resembling a cheerful countenance, will boldly linger at your side, with its shelves of candy selections.

No longer will the shopper just be tempted by sugary treats and snacks as they wait in the checkout aisle, but also will be constantly pestered, subtly, as the autonomous beggar robot loiters near you like a precocious child intent on your attention or an ill-mannered pet that stares at you while you eat. It makes you wonder if you tell the thing to scram, will it mind you and do so? In the immortal words of W.C. Fields, “Go away kid, ya bother me.”

If the unsmiling robot named “Smiley” gets too annoyingly cloying and pestersome will you have to chase it out of your sphere of shopping reverie? Or will you be able to lure the robot to the paint and hardware aisle where you could find some tools or duct tape to sabotage the unsmiling Mr. Smiley.

“How do you like me so far?” Monsieur Smilelikins?

Now if I were on the marketing team at Mars-Wrigley, I would have suggested one of the companies iconic candy names such as Snickers, Skittles or Orbit, as in gum, for the mechanical purveyor of sweet snacks. The name Snickers was probably passed over as implies the scornful laugh of a smirking deviate, sniggering at some off color, foul personal joke that only the snickerer finds amusing. I also overpassed Skittles; a name derived from a miniature bowling game played in English pubs. But let us not forget Zombie Skittles which are available around Halloween boasting of such flavors as Petrifying Citrus Punch, Mummified Melon, Boogeyman Blackberry and Rotten Zombie flavors which apparently taste dreadful. Zombie probably wouldn’t be employed as a name for our Mars roving display, zombies with their rotting flesh are not all that appetizing and referring to a robot as a member of the living dead might be considered as an insult to all robot kind. I wonder if in the future will robots attain civil rights? Will we be able to refer to robots with derogatory terms such as “soulless chunks of inorganic matter” and the like? Will certain words to describe bots be considered verboten? Anyway, I finally settled naming our fine fettled robotic valet, Orbit, a term that not only implies movement, but also echoes the Mars, Milky Way outer space theme.

Another Mars brand name is 3 Musketeers, but you probably wouldn’t want to name the wandering candy display Musketeer, a word which is derived from the word musket, an antique gun used in the early sixteenth century, carried by the musketeers who guarded the French king. So in this day and age of wokedom, shouldn’t this gun carrying moniker, musketeer be canceled? If so, should we rebrand the candy bar with a less violent connotation such as three persons, three servings or three pieces? We should leave initial number three which is an important designation associated with the candy bar from days of old the when the 3 Musketeers bar was marketed as being able to feed three people at a time with the once oversized candy bar. Implied by this sharing was the three musketeers’ pledge to each other of “One for all, all for one.”

The new suggested names are inoffensive, unpoetic labels which are no worse than renaming the Washington Redskins, The Washington Football Team, which I feel was done so in irony. Remember that as we are being inoculated while wearing our muzzles, our literature and language are being riddled with innocuous terms, as the mosaic carpet of poetic language is being yanked out from under us.

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