Daddy, can I ask you a question?

This is the latest installment in our 4-yr old's quest to form a consistent cosmology...

Last night, Emily asked me, "Why is there night?" and we did a whole demonstration with the rechargeable mini-MagLite™ that lives on her nightstand, where the MagLite was the sun and my fist was the earth, and we looked at the shadows, and we talked about how the sun was incredibly hot, etc., etc.

Tonight, she asked me, 'Daddy, can I ask you a question?' and the question was, 'Where is God?'

So I say, 'Most people believe that God is everywhere,' and she says, 'So God could be on a star?'

Then I say, 'Yes, God made the stars and he's in them and everything else.'

'So God must be very good at being really hot, huh?' she asks.

'Yes,' I admit, 'that must be right.'

Then she says, 'I guess God must have learned how to be really good at being hot from somebody. It was probably from a dinosaur that he knew.'

I'm in trouble...

By the way, do I believe in God?

Well, rationally I'd like to say no, but given the spectacular miraculousness of all that is, I just have to believe that there's something greater and more magical than just bare existence behind all of this. My current gut-feeling is that it's a little like the old Nintendo games, and our understanding of the weirdness at the subatomic level is equivalent to the Mario Bros.™ noticing that, hey, every time we look at these 'basic building blocks,' it appears that each 'atom' is made up only of three simpler particles (or 'pixels') that we whimsically call 'red,' 'green,' and 'blue.' And they seem to follow some very specific rules of cause and effect that we can't quite explain, but seem to be laws of our universe.

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Planned Obsolescence

We have a VCR that we've had for a few years that we absolutely love. It's, I think, either the 3rd of the 5 or the 4th of the 6 VCRs that we've owned in a little over 11 years of marriage. When we started out, we were buying the basic 2-head Sharp units because they were like $299 instead of the fancier $369 4-head jobs. The last time we bought a VCR, I got a Sony 4-head, Hi-Fi unit out at Target for something like $84.

So now we have this RCA VCR that we've had for about 5 or 6 years that we love, and I'm thinking, gee, I could buy a $14 head cleaner that won't do anything, or I can cut to the chase, check the ads, and go buy a brand new VCR for around $59 day after tomorrow.

A few years ago when we still had the Sharp, we think the remote accidentally went out in the trash, so we ordered a replacement by mail and paid $79 for it, and that VCR crapped out about 4 months later.

Times have changed.

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One of the things that I think about from time to time, is whatever happened to recording analog sources to videotape?

It was a big deal when I was in college, back in the early '80s, when Beta was still around, and they'd just come out with Hi-Fi Beta format, and VHS was in its infancy, that you could record records to the new video format, and it was (much, much) better than the best Nakamichi cassette deck. Of course, a nice Sony Hi-Fi Betamax unit cost around $1399 in those days, but hey, I was a poor college student, and still I paid $495 plus tax for a Harmon-Kardon cassette deck that I was never happy with... in those days, we had no idea what the value of cheap Chinese labor was to become.

But now we do, and I'm thinking, hey, I can get a Hi-Fi VHS setup for around $60, and the tapes hold 6-8 hrs at $0.69 each, and the specs are near-CD, and there's no copy protection issues, so why doesn't anyone do this?

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Time magazine has a story on Reagan's letters. I have to admit that I've never thought much of Mr. Ray-Gun (In 1980,when I was exactly 18 and old enough to vote, and had just registered for the draft 'under protest', I naively voted for John Anderson, not even realizing that I was denying a much-needed vote to President Carter. Oh well.)

But I digress. Mr. Reagan's letters, or at least the selection presented by Time, paint a very endearing portrait of a thoughtful man with no mean writing ability, so I may need to do a little scholarly research and re-evaluate my opinion. But then again, come on, I mean, Star Wars? Evil Empire? Hmm.

posted by Chris at 12:25 AM Permalink