Critics loved to hate on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Why? “Rock Operas” were the thing back then. Xanadu by the Electric Light Orchestra, Flash Gordon by Queen, fun little escapist nonsense, so what? There are worse things in this life than a cute little blonde Australian woman that looks good in Spandex, and has one of the top 10 singing voices of all time! It reminds me of when they had the Disco Burn in 1979 at Comiskey Park, to make sure everyone knew you were supposed to hate disco music. Why? When you’re trying that hard something is up.

Dear WordPress: Please stop ‘improving’ things. If you go to the free side of WordPress they go after you with a vengeance. They want to make your blogging experience as painful as possible. Why? If you don’t want to offer free blogging, don’t! Is someone holding a gun to your head? One of the things they do is instead of just putting a small ad at the bottom of your post, now the #2 “post” is a full-width ad obscuring your other posts below it. It makes the reader think you have a 1 page blog. They also took out the “classic editor” so its impossible to get to “categories and tags”, or get the size of your font right.

How do television remote control makers design them so a button or two wears out after a year and no longer works? I first noticed this about 20 years ago and thought myself so fortunate to find a store in Georgia that sold the one I needed. I thought it was dumb luck at the time, now I know its an entire cottage industry. Laptop makers did that with power cords. They use this little 18 gauge wire that is guaranteed not to last beyond a year. Its not limited to electronics. Teflon was invented in the 60’s. The new non-stick miracle cooking pan material, it was good. They soon realized, “We can’t have people buying 1 pan in their life, let’s get it to self-destruct!”

Microsoft does this bullshit by not selling a functional word processor with their computer software. You either have to rent one by the month or buy Word separately (thank God I found out about the free Libra). Everybody wants that recurring expense, after you “bought” their item. They even want you to buy vacuum bags for shop vacs now! It used to be you just shook off the filter, put it back in and away you went! (mine finally crapped after 30 years)

Its all about screwing the consumer with a substandard product. Cars are the epitome of this concept on many fronts. One of those is the “transverse” mounted engines. They’ve made it impossible to do the simplest things. They say dealerships don’t make the majority of their money on sales, but on repairs. Another is designing cars with bare steel on the bottom so they are guaranteed to rust out. Metal coatings the last 40 years have exploded, there’s no reason for this, if there ever was. They could have just primed and painted the bottom side when they made them, just like the topside.

Don’t even get me started on temporary asphalt roofs and 10 year water heaters. No reason for it. But the most confounding (and life threatening) thing I don’t get, is the attitude about vaccines. You saw this 30 years ago with school immunizations. “Everyone has to have them so all the kids will be safe!” Well if your kid is immunized, why do you care about that other kid? Yours can’t catch it? I don’t get it. Now Canada is talking about quarantine internment camps for people who don’t have the COVID vaccine and the US is talking about “travel passports”! Why? Your not gonna die, only the people without a vaccine, right?