Bots Up, Doc?

The Sharper Image catalogue has a number of items for people with more money than sense. For example, the $50 LED grill light (yes, a portable light to attach to your grill so you can grill in the dark, since you apparently spent more money on the grill than on lighting your back porch, or deck, or wherever the grill is located).
What I found both intriguing and alarming were the Bots. (And they no longer even bother with the apostrophe. Robots without the Ro would normally be 'bots. But I'm picky that way.)

The Pleo is a baby dinosaur that you raise. If you treat it nicely it "grows up" friendly and outgoing. If you're mean or neglectful, it becomes timid and withdrawn. I personally would like to see a mistreated dinosaur grow mean and spiteful and turn on its owner, but that's just me. And oh, yeah, it's $350. Plus shipping.

There's also an interactive R2D2 (will it cook dinner?), a Panda Bear that's billed as "a delightful interactive companion for children," and an animatronic Elvis head that sings 8 songs and says a few words lifted from recordings the King made while living on Earth. "No, Elvis is not dead, he just went home!" I find this last one to be quite sad actually. Can't you just watch a video? I knew a few fellows who worked at Graceland in the very early 80s, when the Elvis sightings were still particularly rampant (after all, at that point he'd only been dead 3 years). Women (always women) left notes all over the house and grounds, presumably because Elvis himself did the cleaning up every day and would obviously read them and save them all in a scrapbook. They would leave full names and addresses on these notes. So these guys took it upon themselves to write back to these poor deluded women. As Elvis. And now you know why so many people insist that Elvis is still alive.

Wow. There's a post that started out as one thing and turned into something else entirely. Kind of like Elvis himself, now I think of it. And before I start getting hate mail, I myself am an Elvis fan. The Elvis Christmas album is in my CD player as we speak. But you know, the man's dead. It's sad, but there it is. And look at it this way, if he were still alive he'd be 72. Somehow I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have aged gracefully. And I just had the startling realization that I am older than he was when he died, so I'm going to shut up now before anything else occurs to me.