Typical Microsoft land grab. I had to install MS Teams for one client. After that, every time I started my computer, Teams would launch and overtake my desktop. Notice that I was never given the option by Teams to automatically start. Microsoft just figures, "We assume you use our beautiful, beautiful software ALL THE TIME." Nope. Fortunately, it was easy to deselect the autostart behavior, at least in Ubuntu Linux.

Amazing accomplishment. Congratulations, NASA! The Perseverance rover's mission is to search for signs of ancient life on Mars. A follow-up mission by Space Force will be to shoot the fuck out of anything that doesn't look American, including rocks, shadows and, of course, rovers built by the lefty science nerds at NASA.

Why don’t smokers toss the unused end of their cigs into garbage cans, including those weird looking, fluted receptacles one sometimes sees outside bars that have been specially designed for this purpose? I’ve stopped asking why. Smokers regard the ground as a natural and convenient ashtray or litter box.

Vape pens have been getting a lot of bad press lately. A tiny number of fatalities, possibly caused by an unapproved additive, have caused a panic. Along with dozens of lawsuits, there are growing calls for legislation to limit the sale and marketing of the pen-shaped vaporizers.

For starters, like nearly everybody, I'm against marketing tobacco products to children; I'd be perfectly happy prohibiting the sale of candy-flavored vape oils, for instance. That said, vapes serve an admirable purpose and shouldn’t be outlawed entirely. Let me explain.

A single vape cartridge replaces a lot of cigarettes. One JUUL cartridge is roughly equal to a pack of cigarettes, or about 200 puffs, according to the JUUL website. (In fact, vape enthusiasts debate this statistic endlessly in online forums.) 

So what? If you, like me, clean up trash in your neighborhood daily, you’re already aware that cigarette butts are the primary trash category. Discarded cigarette butts on sidewalks and in street gutters are much more numerous, albeit less obvious, than all the pieces of paper (receipts, wrappers, tissue), coffee cups, plastic bottles and aluminum cans that I collect. On every single walk, I pick up dozens and dozens of butts — at least until the futility of this exercise overwhelms me. Researchers in 2011 concluded that “cigarette butts are the most common form of litter, as an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are thrown away every year worldwide.” 

In other words, vapes produce less trash, since we can safely assume users don’t toss their vape pen after a few puffs, even if it’s one of the $3 to $7 disposable systems. Besides, most vape pens, those in the $15 to $50 price range, use replaceable “juice” cartridges.

Aside from being unsightly street trash, you may be unsurprised to learn that cigarette butts are toxic. Chemicals such as arsenic, nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals have been found to leach into the environment from cigarette butts littered along roadsides and in laboratory studies. It’d be marvelous if tobacco companies had figured out a way to make cigarette butts edible, a la Pez candy, but they didn’t. And here we are. 

Why don’t smokers toss the unused end of their cigs into garbage cans, including those weird looking, fluted receptacles one sometimes sees outside bars that have been specially designed for this purpose? I’ve stopped asking why. Smokers regard the ground as a natural and convenient ashtray or litter box.

It’s worth observing that cigarette smokers are different from pipe smokers in this respect. I know something about pipe smoking, a largely abandoned form of the habit. In the late 1960s, after my dad quit smoking cigarettes, he began buying meerschaum pipes. As a youngster, I fondly watched him clean and pack his pipes, a collection that was, sadly, lost years ago after a number of downsizing house moves. (Unlike cigarettes, meerschaum pipes become more beautiful with use.) As I remember it, dad spent 10x more time fussing with his pipes than actually smoking them. He quit all forms of smoking by the time I was in college. Nevertheless, decades later, in his 90th year, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away a few months later. And if you’re wondering: I blame cigarettes, not pipes. 

So for ecological and health reasons, I’m in favor of vapes over cigarettes, and pipes over either. After the world’s surviving cigarette smokers switch to vapes (or meerschaum pipes), maybe we can get everybody to quit tossing their empty plastic water and soda bottles into the street.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Tom Petty’s death on Monday was a confusing affair. Early reports of the singer’s demise were published, then corrected, then revised – for an entire day. Petty was reported dead; then he was on life support; then he wasn’t on life support, but dead; then he was back on life support. Internet wags suggested Petty had become Schrödinger's cat, existing in a quantum state of being both alive and dead.

Forty-eight hours later, Petty had settled into one state. He was dead, there was not doubt whatever about that.

Driving through the canyons today with the radio on, I listened to NPR’s long obituary. The report began by saying that Petty, 66, had been discovered in full cardiac arrest at his Malibu home. I’m near there, I thought. Wonder if the address is listed …

After playing some iconic Petty songs (“Breakdown,” “Free Fallin’” and “American Girl”), along with portions of a “Fresh Air” interview with him from several years back, the report ended, “He passed away at his Santa Monica home.”

Wait, what? Malibu isn’t Santa Monica or vice versa, as residents of these two, nearby-but-unquestionably-separate coastal cities will tell you (assuming you can get them to roll down a window of their air-conditioned BMW.)

Reading the Billboard obit didn't shed any light. The music trade paper's web site tells me that Petty died "at his Los Angeles home.” For those keeping track, LA isn’t Malibu or, even, Santa Monica. Besides, LA has always had more than its fair share of unexpected celebrity deaths. LA should sit on its hands.

Tom Petty, wherever you are, rest in peace.

David (deliciously played by Michael Fassbender) returns from the previous installment, 2012’s “Prometheus,” to ask: What is my relationship to creation, now that I've met my creator and found him wanting?

While a duplicitous, “synthetic” crew member is nothing new in the “Alien” franchise, this idea is at the heart of “Alien: Covenant.”

More than that, it’s the AI’s hunt for existential meaning that captures our imagination in director Ridley Scott’s latest movie. (Don't worry, there’s also plenty of the expected kind of hunting, too, as various Xenomorphs chase down screaming, doomed characters. “This new ‘Alien’ prequel is mostly a gore fest ... ,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer.)

(Caution, possible spoilers ahead.)

David (deliciously played by Michael Fassbender) returns from the previous installment, 2012’s “Prometheus,” to ask: What is my relationship to creation, now that I've met my creator and found him wanting?

This is a big, grand idea -- but again, not entirely new for the franchise.

In the very first movie, 1979’s “Aliens,” that film's synthetic, Ash -- whom we think is a human crew member until just before his messy, fiery end -- says this about the creature on board the Nostromo: “Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

While Ash appreciates the organism, David dedicates himself to creating one. (He also meticulously sketches their various forms -- one of the movie’s nods to Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo.) By so doing, David seeks to actualize himself and his creation.

More broadly, by giving birth (albeit via unwilling human hosts) to a new lifeform -- one more perfect than himself -- David mirrors the actions of his own creator, whom we briefly meet at the start of “Alien: Covenant.”

It’s pretty clear that Scott is more interested in David’s search for meaning and personal definition than all the expected face-huggers, chest-busters, and bloody deaths in “Alien: Covenant.”

In fact, Scott has been toying with these themes for a long time. In his second “Alien” movie, 1986’s “Aliens,” there’s this memorable line when one crew member calls Bishop (played by Lance Henriksen) a synthetic. “I prefer the term ‘Artificial Person’ myself,” Bishop says.

In “Alien: Covenant,” the difference between David’s recognizable humanity is made more explicit when he encounters his “brother,” a synthetic named Walter (also played by Fassbender), who explains that his generation was designed to be less human-like. “You made them uncomfortable,” Walter explains to David in his flat American accent. By comparison, David feels … alive. He strives, he explores, he invents. He’s like us.

“Alien: Covenant” puts a synthetic at the center of the action and the argument. Why? Because this conversation is already well underway. In 2017, the culture is both fascinated by and anxious about the blurring lines between real people and seemingly real chat bots and robots.

The “Alien” monsters have become a trope; they fail to surprise or challenge. Next time, I hope Scott finds a way to dispense with them entirely, to focus on his real interest: artificial intelligence, and how these creations will struggle, just like we do, with being alive.

My treatment for a new reality TV show, featuring three powerful men looking to reboot their careers:

"Right of Way" will star pugnacious ladies man and (former?) Fox host Bill O'Reilly and easily irritated (former?) White House spokesman Sean Spicer. The Odd-Couple pair will be driven around the U.S.A. by former NSC member and (former?) White House chief strategist Steve Bannon -- known by his CB handle, "WhiskeySoaked"-- in 19-foot, 15-year-old RV.