Dotty Parker

Developed for NASA

The shopping mall is catching up with tv infomercials at a frightening pace. It seems like one weekend I'm contemplating the purchase of a new teflon coated, folding, heat resistant pancake flapjacker (It folds in half so when one side is done, you can turn the whole pan over, rather than use a turner.) and two weeks later it's there in the "As Seen On TV" endcap in the drug store. I don't have to use the phone or go on line to own my own piece of television. It's right there, as seen on my tv.

Many of these products claim to have been developed for NASA astronauts
I'll buy into that particular misleading fact, but I would think that NASA would demand some kind of royalty payments on their fabulous ideas. So upon reconsidering, I won't buy into it.

I will accept that some of the ideas may have come from NASA. Like the way the movie E.T. came from NASA.

And there's another odd thing: the movie E.T. claims that E.T. is a hard to find little guy, lost in a world too big and too scary for him to survive. But he's in the store too, right next to the As Seen On TV stuff. All kinds of E.T.s.

Tex and Florette kindly invited us out to a party (we left at 8:30. Are we dorks or what?). I had a cold and was thus brain-impaired. We were chatting about the lack of cash flow into NASA, which I'm ambivilant about, I kinda sorta think. Nevertheless, in my foggy haze, I said that it was pretty amazing the number of lab techniques and machinery that was devised by NASA.

Another guy at the table mentioned that it wasn't all NASA inventions. It was the secret, frightening military experiments that gave us all the data for the most part.

Ah, yes. The truth comes out. As Seen On TV, developed by and for the Military Industrial Complex. And probably the Nazis, too.

Posted by dotty at October 22, 2003 10:44 PM