I offer the two pictures above for your perusal and ponderation.

The top one is one of my favorite personal snaps, which I used as my desktop wallpaper for many years. It’s from my first Norway cruise (2001, I think). As I recall, I took it from the aft deck, on the Aurlandsfjord, at breakfast on my birthday, which is in July.

The second picture is one I generated the other day using my bete noir, Artificial Intelligence. My new laptop includes the Paint app, which has a brand new AI feature. I tried a few experiments with it in odd moments, and one time I asked it to show me a Norwegian fjord.

It gave me three options, of which the one above was one. I thought it looked familiar.

I wonder if the gnomes of the interwebs incorporated my image into their “fjord” database.

Of course, how many possible combinations of mountains and water can there be? My photo pleased me because it was sort of an ideal of a fjord. The resemblance therefore, could easily be coincidental.

[Not only do I hate AI, but I fear it. I cannot bring myself to openly accuse it of plagiarism. What grim vengeance might it take?]

As an aside, I might mention that my attempt to restore curly single quotation marks, in the draft of The Year of the Warrior that I’m preparing for Amazon paperback, was wholly successful. It worked. It worked at once. It worked better than I dared hope.

Scary.