One Giant Bong

I was recording some cartoons for my 5-year-old grandson to watch when he comes over to visit with grandma and grandpa. Today I decided to grab some Huckleberry Hound and Pink Panther shows for him. One of the Pink Panther cartoons had our favorite pink feline working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. He presented a menu to the patrons, and it was quite amusing. I am not sure if the word "bong" did not carry its current meaning (a water pipe used by people to smoke marijuana) back in the 1960s; or if the writers were oblivious; or perhaps it was their little inside joke. In any case, I got a laugh out of the menu item of "1-Giant Bong, Serves Four Persons" on the menu.

Meant as Humor, But Makes a Good Point

Technology is just getting too hard for many of our older citizens. It used to be you turned on the tv, flipped the dial to the channel you want, and presto, you had TV!

Nowadays you have to mess with multiple remote controls, converter boxes, cable or satellite boxes, home theater receivers, and to top it all off, television stations in the United States will cease to broadcast in good old analog NTSC in February, rendering any TV over a couple of years old useless without a converter box of some kind, be it cable, satellite, or over-the-air.

The following video was meant to be humor, but I fear that it is all too true for many. The closer we get, the more I think this whole conversion to DTV is a scam to make money for the government, the consumer electronics industry, and others who stand to gain from this conversion. For young folks who grew up with iPod earphones stuck in their head and a cell phone in their hands, it is no big deal. But not everyone can handle the intricacies of the change. And with DTV, instead of a little snow but a perfectly watchable picture, we get no picture with a weak signal. We also are subjected to compression artifacts and pixellation.

As to the video, I actually had the two cable boxes on the first two TV sets you see...the one with the knob and the one with rows of push buttons.