I blame the Illuminate!

I am quickly turning into a curmudgeonly old man starting many of my sentences with "In my day …", or at least the blogging equivalent. I can’t say I am proud of this, but on the other hand … serious WTF people? Who’d a thunk that the more "advanced" we get as a society … the softer we would get? Well basically any technophobe out there. But who’d a thunk they were actually right?

Once upon a time, when we did outdoor activities, such as say … riding a bike … or even more simply … running, if we had an accident, we got cut and learned a lesson. But we survived, and for the most part as functional human beings. Nowadays, we practically wrap our kids in armor every time they leave the safety of their bed, and we wonder why they are so dependent and … well … entitled. There is nothing wrong with being safety conscious, but at what point does it become Fear of … EVERYTHING. The next thing you know everything that goes wrong must be someone else’s fault.

Oh wait.

Now that the xmas selling season has started (after all Halloween was a couple of weeks ago), the savvy advertisers of the world, recognizing that the best way to sell ANYTHING is to convince impressionable children to harass their parents so much that they buy out of sheer desperation, a whole slew of new toy commercials has appeared. Ignoring the fact that it seems that there are few original toys out there, but rather technologically advanced versions of the same ones our grandparents had, there were a few commercials that caught my attention. First was the slew of kids weapons, which seem to be the only toys that actually have original designs and advance at a technological rate that surpasses medicine. Good thing our society knows its priorities.

But there was one "new and improved" game that made me … well … write this post. It is the game called Operation. it has been around at least since I was a kid, so we are talking about CENSORED years. And I am pretty sure it is older than me. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, basically it is a board with a man on it, with various depressions holding "organs" in their appropriate places. The game is to "perform an operation" on the man … basically removing the various "organs" with tweezers without touching the sides of the hole … which would generate an annoying buzzing sound. It is basically a game to help develop manual dexterity … and yes … it could be quite frustrating.

Apparently, however, in the softening of humanity, the NEWEST version of the game is now "easier to remove pieces". SERIOUSLY? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of the game? Back in my day … ahem … when something got hard you just kept practicing until it was no longer hard. Apparently that is no longer politically correct.

What’s next? Magnetized Jenga?