Will I be the last person in the world to buy a $4,000 flat-screen plasma TV? I see the ads in the paper every day and all I can think is “Where is everyone getting $4,000?” The last time I had an “extra” $4,000 I wasted it on food, taxes and health insurance. What was I thinking? I could have had a TV. Not that I could have afforded to watch it. Once you get the $4,000 TV, you’ve got to subscribe to cable or satellite or there’s no point. And you don’t want the basic package, you want the HDTV package with all the sports and the movie channels, so let’s add a $150 each month to the cost of your television. Face it, once you’ve seen “Deal or No Deal” on a giant, flat-screen plasma TV, there’s no going back to the 27-incher.

When I was a kid, there were only three channels on television. Unless you lived in a big city where they might have one or two extras. And there was the “educational channel” on the UHF dial. We could never figure out what that UHF dial was for, it never seemed to work.