buttering up the butterball

Planned obsolescence was a charge leveled at automobile manufacturers.  I don't know that they deliberately made cars that would break down in a few years, but they kept changing what cars looked like so that people could tell when your car was old and look down on you.  It was an exciting time though wondering what the new Chevy was going to look like, would it be a radical change or just some alterations to the previous year?  Life magazine would publish some photo (probably leaked) of next year's Mercury, and America would let out a collective gasp.  We knew how to have good times back then huh?

Those old cars grab all the attention in old photos and movies.  There's the hot new starlet having a wardrobe malfunction in the foreground, but in the background is a 1956 Dodge!

I'm still on CDs, I have maybe a thousand and I just go through them again and again.  I feel like I should be listening to new music, but music never really changes.  It develops new genres, but within the genres it stays pretty much the same, the new blues is like the old blues.


Before the internet I was intrigued at how there was no new thing in my time.  If you brought a person back from fifty years ago things would be newer and shinier but basically the same.  Where were the jet packs?  I guess it was sitting right on my desk.  My first computer had a cassette tape for storage, than the floppy disk, than the two-sided floppy disk, then the hard drive.  I had a volunteer job in Austin Texas in 1987 and the boss was kind of a geek and one time he showed me where he could put a cable between two computers and put some info in the one and then it showed up in the other.  Oh my, ain't we got fun.

So that was the beginning of the internet I guess, but what seems to be the factor that really drove the current madness was when they put it on the phone and now you could carry the internet with you no matter where you were. 


Which brings us to current events.  I was really expecting when Trump had his physical from a real doctor and not some toady. that he would be shown to be in bad health.  But apparently not that bad the real doctor said, but then he went on to say how great Trump's shape was.  It wasn't that great, obese, high blood pressure, something else I think, but the doc just couldn't stop crowing about this magnificent human being. 

At the time I thought it was passing strange, but now I realize he was just paying attention to Trump's toadies who all go out of their way to lavish praise, and I guess he was eager to become one of them.  And now it turns out that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde, though as of this morning Trump is still pushing him.

It seemed that this is what was going on with Putin when he said nice things about Trump, but anymore it is pretty obvious that Putin has something (pee tapes???) on Trump.  The Saudis certainly laid it on for Trump, and I think that was what Marcon wad doing with all that palsy walsy stuff.