what to get your nephew for xmas

The newly made-over Number One Hit Song* goes to the Wired NextFest Opening and does tell:

There were those robot vacuum cleaners that everyone's so fucking hot about. And, finally, there was the Philip K Dick android.

I loved the Philip K Dick robot. It was set up in a trailer that was supposed to be his living room and was sitting on a ratty couch with top of its head missing and a bunch of wires sticking out the back. It had been loaded with every word that PKD had written or said in an interview and could answer general questions (where were you born? What's your favorite movie? Etc.) as well as talk about his work. It was fitted with face recognition software too, so it scans the crowd looking for faces and looks you right in the eye when it talks to you. That was creepy enough, but the fact that you can tell exactly how much it hated the fact that you, unlike him, were alive and not on display was didn't help. I talked to the guys who built it as I waited in line and asked them if they were ever creeped out themselves. One of them told me that as they were getting ready to bring him to Chicago (from Memphis), a cord got wrapped around the robot's arm and, as they walked away, the arm seemed to move by itself, causing him to freak out.

*Extreme Blog Makeover, coming soon to an imaginary television near you