Hold On!

Well, the UAW and the GOP members of the United States Senate stared each other down tonight, and neither side blinked, thus killing the bridge loans passed in the House today. I fear tomorrow's trading on Wall Street is going to be a free fall. Could the Dow drop to 5000 or below? How many jobs will be lost in the wake of this? It's not pretty. I don't believe the automakers deserve the loans, but for the sake of the greater economy, I think they are necessary to avoid an even bigger disaster than we already have. This is not a pretty picture.

Bye Bye Polaroid Pictures

Another icon of the 20th Century is headed to the proverbial dustbin of history. Polaroid is ceasing production of its instant photography film. The advent of digital photography has killed off the experience of waiting 60 seconds and having a picture that came right out of your camera. The early Polariods I remember had to be peeled open after developing. Some of the later cameras used a film that had the developer inside a clear window on the picture so you could actually watch the image form from the gray square. The company had many hits, from the famed Polaroid Land Camera, to the 60s hip Swinger, to the Sun camera to the SX-70, Polaroid brought the magic of instant photography to the masses. Even as Polaroid makes digital cameras, they aren't real Polaroids.

Who could ever forget, "Meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger". After all, it's almost alive, and it's only nineteen dollars and ninety-five! Yeah Yeah! And you know, you just gotta wonder...how many actual "swingers" used these cameras for those pictures they couldn't take to the corner drug store to be developed.

Here's the commercial that anyone alive in the 1960s should remember, featuring a young Ali McGraw.