Quote of the Day (P.J. O’Rourke, on our New Technological Lives)

“To say that our gadgets and appliances come ‘with all the bells and whistles’ is to indulge in anachronism. I haven't heard a bell or a whistle for ages. We wake up to the beep of alarm clocks and go to sleep to the sound of bad language beeped out on network TV. Then we're up in the middle of the night--the way I am right now--because of a loud, infrequently recurring beep, coming from who-knows-where in the house, indicating that a ladder needs to be dragged in from the garage to replace a battery in a ceiling-mounted smoke detector. Beep.”—P.J. O’Rourke, “But Enough About You: Beep, Beep, *&%ing BEEP!,” ForbesLife, May 24, 2010