October 2009 Archives

So far, in 2009, the monthly amount on my Comcast cable bill has changed four times. This is for plain old cable TV -- no internet, no phone, no metered usage, no pay-per-view, no changes whatsoever to the service. Sometimes the actual cable service price changes. Sometimes the taxes change. Sometimes the surcharges change. Sometimes the fees change. It makes no sense to me.

I suspect part of my cable bill pays Comcast employees whose sole job it is to meet regularly in committee and institute inscrutable changes to my bill. The tools of their trade are probably dice and a Ouija board. It's annoying, but I suppose I'm supporting the economy by keeping them employed.

If anyone has an explanation why there is so little slack in Comcast's finances that they really must make pricing adjustments of as little as 0.02% about every two months, I'd appreciate hearing it.

(Yes, I call them "Legos," not Lego-brand blocks. Get over it.)

Like many of my generation, I've complained bitterly about how modern Lego sets are full of special-purpose blocks that can be assembled exactly one way, versus the old sets that were just a bunch of red, blue, yellow, and green rectangles that forced you to use your imagination to make anything. I figured it was a ploy to sell more distinct sets to a single kid, rather than just hoping the kid would want to grow his or her collection of abstract blocks. I think this is true, but recently when a catalog arrived in the mail for my son, I realized another reason why Lego had to go this way.

The Spongebob Lego contest sought Lego creations that looked like Spongebob characters. And wow, the winners were frickin' HUGE. It's a simple question of resolution. When you have a "pixel" that's at least a half-inch across, any expressive artwork is going to end up a couple feet across, not to mention unwieldy and expensive.

So when the Lego guys wanted to get into branded stuff, they probably tried building a Darth Vader out of regular blocks that was only a few inches tall, and it ended up looking like crap that even George Lucas would have rejected. They really had no alternative but to cheat by manufacturing a few special-purpose blocks to build a model that was both small and instantly recognizable. Scale that across a complete set and you end up with what we have today.

My objection stands: it sucks that my kids want more and more Legos rather than thinking of new ways to assemble the sets they have. But I am no longer sure that the Lego guys intentionally betrayed their original mission to sell sets of building blocks. Instead, I think it was fallout from a different decision (to get into branding) that happened to align perfectly with their goals of selling more stuff.