Les Bonnes Choses

I received a catalog of sorts in the post today. Crutchfield is the store's name, and they appear to specialize in electronics -- in other words, this catalog should be to grown-up me what was the back half of the Consumers Distributing catalog to 9-year-old He-Man-collecting me. Why, back in the day, I could spend hours looking at the crazy playsets and toys. As a child, I had, in retrospect, an odd understanding of money. For no particular reason, I was tracking the Canadian/US dollar exchange rate for about a year between 1984 and 1985. I wasn't involved in any FOREX trading, so my drive probably had something to do with a mashup between patriotism and achieving a high-score. But I don't think my appreciation of what constitutes an unreasonably expensive gift was unique. I'd wager the ability to detect outliers develops pretty early, so a $120 toy in a genre of $4 action figures sort of stands out.

These catalog-browsing skills do me no good with the Crutchfield catalog. Here's a representative page:

How much are these fancy television sets? I have no idea. I do, however, know how much they are not. And so the catalog sits, unopened, on my coffee table.