"Good Morning, Mr. & Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea...."

Why the strange intro this morning? - Just for the hell of it, Kiddies. It's an old, old phrase once used by the columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell whose columns were syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and were read by some fifty million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His radio broadcasts on Sunday evenings, from which this heading is approximated, were usually opened with the phrase "Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. This is Walter Winchell with your evening's news...". That opening line was usually heard by about 20 million listeners from the 1930s until into the 1950s. His radio show also had some catchy sound effects to accent the intro.

Now then, so much for that! Finding something different for a heading to these isn't always easy, as we learn from doing a few of them.

Today's 'Question Everything' is:- "Do you usually purchase the extra service or warranty extension along with a new appliance or vehicle?" I usually don't, but in a recent purchase of a new TV, I did get their 5-year extended service plan, and I'm glad that I did, because here it is only 3 years later, and the TV is not doing its usual thing. What's wrong with it? Several of its channels are displaying an image which is 'jittering' or jumping rapidly up & down instead of holding steady.

In days of yore, when we were all much younger, TV sets had user-operated buttons to adjust things like 'Horizontal Hold', 'Vertical Hold', and so on, but now all that is incorporated into an Integrated Circuit or 'IC' which has no user-adjustable controls. It either works or it don't, and when it don't, you take it to a technician who removes it from its motherboard, and replaces it with a new one. Sounds expensive. I'm glad I spent the money on that extra 5 years of servicing. All I have to do now is find out if they'll actually fix the damned thing.

"So," you ask, "Who made that mess anyway?" I thought you'd never ask - it's a 27-inch Toshiba, and it was new on the 10th of January 2007, so it isn't old enough yet to be dying on the job. I always thought Toshiba made pretty good stuff. I know they used to, but then a lot of people used to but don't now. We can't judge today's quality by how they did it ten or fifteen or twenty years ago because there's a whole new flock of workers in strange lands doing it now, and they obviously need further training, or cleaner hands, or newer glasses, or better lunches, or a slightly slower-running assembly line, or all of the above. Because....? I think you know the answer to that. Nobody wants to pay hundreds of dollars for something that's not worth dragging home and setting up on the table - especially when it weighs 88.2 pounds (40 kilos) and you're older than the discovery of nuclear fission. 



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