I'm in love with Sam

...Waterston, of course

Time leaps from 6 seconds ago to 6 billion years ago to 6 million years from now.  They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. But there were ice cream castles in the air and feathered canyons everywhere.  And Barbie, the film, which caused a national shortage of pink paint.

We didn’t have  incompatible browser or pinterests or Gwyneth Paltrow suggesting steaming female private parts or Lily Tomlin’s character on “Grace and Frankie” inventing a pelvic yam product instead.  We didn't have free radicals or frothing cable news hosts screaming over pulsing chyrons -- designed to raise blood pressure. Yours. 

Now with one click, I have Pros and Cons of Sex with Robots – and the Exclusive Algorithm Used By Netflix to tell you what to watch.  Which turns out to be (I hope you are ready for this)— a human, NOT an algorithm at all.  Can you imagine that? 

When I began in media, we used pen, paper, and news judgment. We had Selectrics and Kodachrome days. We didn’t have online recipe aggregators. You couldn’t look for “lasagna” and get 122,014 ways to produce the world’s best lasagna, including those with 5 stars, 50 million hits, or “loved by real Italians for 900 years.”

But let’s get back to Grace and Frankie. Having four lead actors over the age of 80—Fonda, Tomlin, Sheen, and Sam Waterston—let the show tackle once-taboo opportunities from vaginal dryness to assisted suicide. Grace and Frankie also invented a toilet called Rise Up to assist a senior in sitting down and getting up.

A few decades back, I loved a show called Mork and Mindy, which starred Robin Williams. In one episode, Raquel Welch arrives with two girls named Kama and Sutra, and when the phone rings, Mork answers the toaster. That’s sort of like brain damage. Mine.