Friday Evening Thoughts

I continue to have problems with Customer Service phone lines or online chats offered by businesses I patronize. Everyone's real good at apologizing for my inconvenience, real bad at fixing whatever the problem is. I might settle for all these phone support people being replaced by Artificial Intelligence as long as it actually was intelligent.

When the original Star Trek was on TV, it annoyed me somewhat when friends who wanted to talk about last night's episode didn't ask, "Did you see it last night?" They just assumed that if they had, I had — and started discussing the episode. Now, it annoys me somewhat when people do this with every freakin' show that's streaming online…and there are a lot of shows streaming online.

Half the lawyers in this country seem to be writing articles posted on the web about how lousy Donald Trump's legal defense was in the E. Jean Carroll matter and how lousier it is regarding the possible/probable indictments ahead. I'm no lawyer but it seems to me that the problem is that achieving the result of their client being found Not Liable or Not Guilty is Trump's — and therefore, his attorneys' — second priority. The first seem to be whipping the MAGA crowd up to view any investigation of him as the greatest injustice in The History of Mankind for purposes of donations and protests.

There are still people who call and ask me for advice about renting an apartment in Los Angeles even though the one and only time I did that was in 1975 and there's no reason to assume I knew what I was doing then. And even if I did, I'll take a wild guess that the real estate market might have changed somehow in the last 48 years.

For me, the most interesting part of online how-to-cook videos is when what's being made is done and the chef takes a bite and tells us it's the greatest thing he or she ever tasted in their lives. I keep waiting and waiting for one of them to say, "Okay, this didn't turn out so well so maybe you'd better not listen to me." That's the one I will listen to.

When I first got into home video, I bought all my favorite movies on Beta. Then Beta became obsolete so I bought them on VHS. Then VHS went away so I bought them on LaserDisc. Then LaserDisc went bye-bye and I bought them all on DVD. Then DVD became outta-date and I bought them all on Blu-ray. Now, I'm supposed to forget about owning them at all and just pay to stream them. My current fear is that the industry will soon start a campaign that asks, "Why stream when you can own?" and they'll bring them all out on Beta and start the whole cycle over again.