Michael Goes Consumer Crazy!

America is safe again! In a moment of weakness, I consumed — I bought a new television set yesterday. I did research on the Internet, picked an Amazon 5-star unit, went to one store and paid cash, which seemed to confuse everyone. The clerks, happy to see a living human being, helped me cart it out to my almost-paid-for utterly boring Honda Element, in which I sat in post-coital bliss after single-handedly relaunching the tanked economy.

To my credit, I bought the TV to replace my aging upstairs Sony, which I bought brand new in 1984. In recent months I've been worrying that I was going blind, or that my Sweetie was smearing Vaseline on the television screen in some sneaky attempt to get me to send Alf the Wonder Beagle to seeing eye dog school. It turned out that after a couple of decades the old Sony, which probably uses more energy than Pakistan, was fading. So my master plan was to move the downstairs television — a 9 year-old Toshiba tube set...a pup, so to speak — upstairs and get a new television for downstairs.

So far, so good. I'll probably spend the rest of the day fretting over cables and stuff. If you must know, I bought a mid-level Sony LCD 46-incher to replace my aging mid-level Sony. I paid about 50% of what I would have paid in September. With luck, I won't have to walk into an electronics store for a decade or so, assuming of course that there will be electronics stores in 10 years rather than Bob's Burkha Outlet.