James Maguire's Thought Circus

I just bought one for $278 bucks. And if you’ve been out to an electronics store recently, you realize that’s a subversive act.

The problem for TV manufacturers is that TV’s are like computers. They get cheaper every year — or they should. But TV makers don’t like that. So they’ve fed us this line of horse manure about High Definition blah-blah-blah and Flat Screen Plasma yeah-yeah-yeah.

So instead of TV’s getting cheaper, they’ve gotten astonishingly expensive. Walk into Best Buy and you’ll see $4,000 TVs, even $7,000 TVs. Plenty of TVs are in the $1,500-$2,000 range. In this over-hyped market, a TV set for $900 starts to look reasonably priced.

There’s no way that a middle class family should be spending two grand on a TV set. But by the looks of the traffic at Best Buy, it happens all the time.

That’s lunacy. My $278 model (a good old fashioned cathode ray tube, I admit) plays just fine. It has a DVD and VHS built in, and it even has a timer so that you can set the TV to turn itself on and off automatically. (Presumably for people who just can’t face turning on the set themselves.)

Please, resist the hype. Cathode ray tube: just say yes.

Posted by James Maguire at 09:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Actually I’ve been registered for years, but since we moved to Baltimore a year ago I hadn’t registered locally. Now, with the midterm elections nearing, I’m looking forward to casting my vote.

My goal this November is to allow the Republican congressional leadership a much needed breather. It’s time for them to go home. Surely they must be tired, after so many years of running the show — the breathtaking deficit they’ve run up (zooming the national debt from $5.6 trillion in 2000 to $8.5 trillion today) and the tragic war they’ve never questioned (in which more Americans have died over there than died on 9/11).

Also exhausting must’ve been their attack on the middle class. In February, the Republican-controlled Senate cut $12.7 billion from the college aid program. Think about: They rang up $3 trillion in new debt, but they decided we couldn’t give working class families a hand in sending their kids to school.

And let’s not even talk about that Foley ugliness. That stuff doesn’t smell good.

Yes, those fine public servants must be plain tuckered out.

But the best reason to send the Republicans home – and give the Democrats a chance at power – is to provide a counterpoint to George W. B**h. We really, really, really need a counterpoint to Mr. B**h.

(I’m using asterisks in place of the letters because his name is very much a four-letter word — a true profanity. This is a family Web site, and I’ll allow no foul language.)

I can’t wait for November!

Posted by James Maguire at 07:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)