I miss analog cable TV from back then. You could change channels instantly. Now it seriously takes like 5 seconds.

We always had a B&W TV in my house growing up because my parents were cheap hippies. My senior year in high school the TV broke and we had nothing at all for months until my grandfather died and we inherited his color TV. I had to read books and play outside! I still haven't fully recovered from this horror.

It is a bit weird to me that when I was a kid (in the '70s) great emphasis was placed on the inventors of the lightbulb and phonograph (Edison), the telephone (Graham Bell), and the television (Farnsworth).* And now those technologies have all been largely replaced by alternatives that work on very different physical principles. I'm not sure they even teach that inventor stuff in schools any more.

* Yes I know that nothing is ever really invented by one person.

Spy magazine back in the '80s used to have an annual "10 worst people, places and things" issue. Trump always made the list, although it was more of an NYC-centric thing. Each listee always had a "mitigating factors" item and Trump's was always "at least he's not in politics". :(

My favorite bit from back then was that Trump once offered to pay for the funeral of a child who had been killed by a bear, and then reneged on the offer.

my grandma also got weirdly angry at everybody and everything right before she started to forget who we were, and eventually who she was

This is depressing. My elderly mother gets enraged whenever someone uses one of her precious Revereware copper-bottomed pots. I'm assuming it's a precursor to Alzheimer's, which her younger sister already died from.

Fun fact: "walking the plank" was a myth made up by Hollywood. And think about it, would you bother having the ship's carpenter build a temporary diving board out of precious timber when you could just throw the person overboard instead? There was a punishment called "walking the yard" where they made a man walk off the end of one of the cross-members that held the sails; whether you survived or not depended on the weather and how high up the yard was. Not as cinematic as walking the plank, though.

I don't think I've ever seen a movie where they showed keelhauling or flogging around the fleet.

This is what Mission BBQ is like, but add in the guilt trip to buy a $3 plastic drink cup "for the troops". And the barbecue is not good. It's not inedible or anything, it's just that everything (including the sides) is loaded with sugar.

At least there is a certain biological limit.

Unless he died years ago and has already been replaced with a younger double. I want this to be a joke but I don't see why they couldn't do that. The media and the Democrats wouldn't call them out on this even if it were obvious.

You just sit on limes.

Sit-truss.

He would take calls and engage with his audience directly.

Lol very rarely did he do this. His show (which I unfortunately had to listen to a lot because of various right-wing bosses I worked for) was 99% just him talking and talking and talking. Taking calls led to the very slight possibility of his having to argue against people who disagreed with him, something he was terrible at. On his TV show, in fact, he once famously had the entire audience cleared out because a small number of people had shown up to heckle him.

My dad died last fall and when I called the funeral home to arrange for his body to be picked up, their answering service was fucking AI. However angry you think that might make you feel, it's worse than that.

Hey now, we're still the #1 lapdog of the petrochemical industry!