where have all the coffeepots gone?

Now I am not so sure that I heard that tika tika when I was a lad, maybe I have it confused with the other noises of breakfast, particularly that glass knob where the boiling coffee burbled.  Why did we get rid of those pots?  They were handsome objects and kind of fun.  An arrangement of metallic strips, springs, and levers you say (with the elegant and proper Oxford comma), an arrangement which doesn't sound as easily tinkered with as Old Dog claims, and I don't remember toast always turning out that swell.  Seems to me that there is a lot of variance in bread, and even in that bag of bread that built strong bodies twelve ways. As the week went on surely the moisture content varied quite a bit.  Maybe the best thing to do is stick a stick through a slice and toast it over a roaring open fire, more fun anyway. 

Maillard reaction?  Does that have something to do with postal service, with ducks?  I await Old Dog's explanation.

I don't get these driverless cars.  If we invested all that money in public trans we could have trains and busses across the country carrying us in clean and unpolluting elegance wherever and whenever we wanted to go while we sang songs in praise of the worker's paradise.  If we had to walk a couple of blocks from where we got off to our door, that would be good for us.

I thought people liked to drive cars.  At least that's what they say.  What about all those commercials where cars are roaring through mountain passes and slushing and splattering through mud?  Seems to me that NASCAR is probably a lot easier to program for than highway or city street driving.  It's all the same kind of road, and only left turns I believe, and all the same kind of cars all trying to do the same thing.  And don't they have plenty of crashes with humans driving?  Isn't that the point of the whole thing for Chrissake?

I guess noir films are okay, as long as they are truly noir with moral ambioguity, and not just a movie with a noir look, but all the characters are good or bad and it ends up with the good guy punching out the bad guy in the abandoned warehouse down by the river.  I hate caper, it's the complete surrender of characters to a complicated plot.  There was a movie in 2001, The Score, which elevated the characters which was pretty good.  I wasn't too keen on Hell or Highwater, though the Tomato Meter was all the way to the right. I thought it was hackneyed.  I liked the $200 tip and the waitress, and the brothers had some chemistry, but the sheriff and the deputy had none, and that whole shtick about the Midland bank got old in the first ten minutes.  

I'm not buying that movies are being supplanted by these episodic shows.  There are still plenty of good movies being made, and there have always been plenty of bad ones.  Anymore teenage movies are popular among adults.  I just think that there is something artificial in episodic shows, but I don't have like ten hours a week to research them.  Charles Dickens was not that great.

A human brain is more than a flow of electrons, there is all this other shit going on too.  And it's way way way more complicated than any computer.  I daresay the brain of a gnat is way way way more complicated than the worldwide web.  Still the flow of electrons seems to be the main thing going on.  Apparently they can tell what we are thinking about by mapping the electrical activity in the brain.  I believe that there is a declining wave of awareness as animals become simpler (not sure about plants), so maybe this Hal character has a consciousness way way way less than a gnat, but way way way more than a rock hitting flint.