Statue at the main square saying Hey Cluj Buna Szia Servus

It is always fun to learn a little about the town you live in. So when we were stuck at home, I took the opportunity to rummage through old newspapers and see what I could find out about Cluj’s mayor, Mr Emil Boc.

You might find the same information that I found in the Ziar de Cluj or Făclia if you read Romanian Insider.  Maybe they read the Romanian newspapers and translate some of it for you.

Emil Boc saved a puppy recently.  He also found an actor who would pay 9000 lei to have a coffee with him.  It must be really good coffee, but anyway, not bad for a dead guy.

But Emil Boc is alive and well, you say.  Sure, his Peugeot is almost fifteen years old, but he took on new responsibilities just this year.

Well, when the newspapers did not reach our goal of ten interesting facts about Emil Boc, we turned to the Internet.  After finding the same articles we already had on paper online, we ventured out to the lazy man’s resource, Youtube.  One more fact there, Emil Boc participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge.  And, he took a bus, speaking with some guy for over half an hour about nothing.  Not necessarily any different from anyone else, but most people might edit a video like that before uploading, you know, highlighting the interesting parts.

While the video itself did not produce any immediate insights, a suggested video caught our eye.  There was a new AI content creator in town, and it could write history reports for you.

Could it, perhaps, help unravel the mysteries behind Emil Boc?  Why was a man who was once Prime Minister now content with being mayor of Cluj?  Could we imagine Boris Johnson returning to be mayor of London?

Well, the AI produced some interesting Data.

The first answer said something like “Emil Boc was a Romanian…”

Hold on, “was?”  They usually reverse “was” for dead people, at least in the introductory sentence.  He is a former politician.  No, scratch that, he is a current mayor, former prime minister.

Anyway, unfortunately the first attempts were lost, but we copied and pasted later essays on Emil Boc.  Apparently, after resigning as Prime Minister he ‘never regained’ that level of influence.  You wouldn’t know that by reading the papers.

And then came the bombshell. 

He died in 2017 at the age of 52.”

What?  Our beloved puppy rescuer, the smiling man with the glasses who people would pay thousands to have coffee with, is dead?  

No, it is just the AI who thinks he is dead.  And any writers who rely on the AI, or social media fake news filters that rely on the AI, might help to spread that rumour.

The AI has been wrong about other things too.  It isn’t just Cluj that it is clueless about.  We recently asked it to do long division and it showed us, step by step, how:

“343 divided by 7 is equal to 347.”

Yikes!  This may explain why we keep having to prove our residency to our bank, why our post gets lost, why so many other things seem to work so much more poorly than they used to.  The AI is not only moderating you on social media, it is also being used to catch money launderers and find the best candidates for jobs.

Happily, however, we can report that Emil Boc is alive and well.  And just to make sure, we go out nearly every day to buy a newspaper printed in Cluj Napoca which will probably tell us something about him.

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