The More They Overthink the Plumbing...

In Star Trek III, The Search for Spock, Chief Engineer Mr. Scott said prophetically in his signature brogue, "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

This weekend's events thus far have been instructive. 

Kiki and I were contemplating spending large sum...over $500 on an expresso maker. The more we looked, the more daunting the process. Some of these ridiculous things connect to the internet.

Then Kiki thought, "how did they do this before they had $15,000 machines and $250 grinders?" It turns out that they had humble little pots sort of like percolators. Worth a shot, we thought, for $30.

It turns out that this makes a truly mean cup of expresso. We bought a $30 milk steamer. Voila. Better than a Caribou.

Saved ourselves about $460. The simple, analog, manual ways are best.

No experience illustrated this better than the way I spent half of my morning. I got my mom a so-called "smart" T.V. Call me crazy, but I thought that if you wanted to just plug in an antenna and watch over-the-air T.V., this would be the easiest thing you could possibly do. She's elderly. That's all she really wants, but this would have PBS passport so she could watch her public T.V. shows on her own schedule, and she could watch movies on Netflix. Easy peasy, right? 

Wrong. 

No. The Roku T.V. I purchased for the simplicity of its remote I had to register. We had to create a Roku account with a password. At a certain point while trying to find PBS on some disaster of what was called "live T.V." (300 channels of streaming garbage), we lost the icon. You have to connect it to the internet, which requires another password. 

In the end, I had to call customer "service." All to just turn on a television. Yes, digital world has made everything so much easier. Thank goodness.