It's ELECTRIFYING

What a wonderful world it is with iPhones, PDAs, and the ability to keep 10,000 songs on a chip the size of a dime. Years ago, in the Jurassic period when I was born, we had mechanical things and motors and light bulbs and other primitive Ben Franklin spin-offs. We had very little high-technology. I remember my first transistor radio and hand held calculator. I paid $135 for a calculator that could add , subtract, multiply and divide, do square roots, and had memory. That would be about$1000 in todays dollars for something you get in a Happy Meal at McDonalds, only not as good. We had people who could repair your toaster or tune your car without replacing any parts. Today, we have to either throw the whole damn thing away or replace the "mother board." Some robot made this elaborate part with printed circuits, more silicon than Pam Anderson, and swoosh, out it goes into the landfill and you pop in a new one. And talk about planned obsolescence. You buy a digital gizmo today and it's out of date tomorrow. Back "in the day" your radio lasted your entire high school career. Like your virginity.

There is a dark side to all this technology, other than "to keep up you have to take a second mortgage" if you can find one. The basic construction of just about everything is just not as good. Take Hybrid cars for example (and take them far away, please.) Not only do they not save you any money because of the window sticker far exceeding a non-hybrid car and no amount of fuel savings will approach this number, but they take a tremendous environmental toll to manufacture. The batteries alone... and all that Lithium. One Prius could keep a million manic-depressives hooked up for a year. In order to keep these vehicles from weighing 3 tons, they thin out and cheapen the entire car and substitute plastic wherever they can. So, when you are in an accident, it crumples like a ball of aluminum foil, beyond the safe controlled crumpling that is designed into modern cars. The battery weighs so much it makes the car difficult to stop and negatively affects the handling. EMTs who have to cut you out of the car in the event of an accident can get the shock of their lives. And lastly, when the battery goes dead, what landfill do we throw it into? The one where we put all our CFL mercury containing light bulbs? Oh, and did I mention they are uglier than an Obama supreme court nominee?

And finally, a thought that enters my mind everyday as I look around for the correct receptacle to throw my used plastic water bottle, "I feel like a schmuck working so hard to save the planet one Aquafina at a time and there are a million gallons of crude oil spilling into the Gulf. Talk about peeing into the ocean and expecting it to get saltier.