It’s interesting how far we’ve come.

Since they started making electricity back in the, um, 1730s or whenever, it’s pretty amazing how much things have changed. And for the most part, technology has been good.

Take this picture for example.

These are the phones I forgot to recycle the last time we moved, whenever that was. Oh wait, it was fucking last year. But I digress.

These phones represent about 10 years of our technological growth. A couple were mine (look close for the ones with duck tape) and the rest were sugar-mama’s. It was how we communicated and grew with technology to the point where now I can take that pic with my iPhone (which I did) and can email it to myself (again did) and then use it here on this blog. If I wanted to, which I will during poker weekend, I can actually even blog from my phone with this full web interface.

Pretty crazy shit if you think about it.

But for those of us who grew up in the Park among our ring of friends, there is something that’s even more amazing and more mind-boggling than the fact that little Xs and Os pinging through the atmosphere can bring us porn, er, I mean ESPN on our phones.

No, that’s nice and all, but the technology that was needed to get the new Carlson to the point that he’s at right now, well, it must be classified by the CIA, NSA and about 14 other clandestine foreign service departments.

There is no known algorithm nor a computer database in the public forum that is capable of handling the data needed to be consumed and regenerated to make possible the turnaround that Carlson’s made in the past couple of years. It’s like he’s finally hit puberty, grown a beard, gone to college, won a beer bong contest, road tripped to a Phish concert in a van with eight other people and gotten an MBA in the course of just three weeks. He’s multi-faceted in his knowledge and become almost normal.

The first question we started to ask ourselves was: What the fuck? And then we wanted to know what’d he do?

Home-schooling?

ITT?

Calling in and getting the info from that really random commercial of the girl in her pajamas pretending to go to college online, which by the way was obviously created by someone who will be on an upcoming episode of To Catch a Predator?

Nope, not so much.

Dwin seems to think it all falls back in line with the fact that he’s finally getting some. I’ve got to concede that he probably has a point.

Before getting a girlfriend, Carlson was as likely to read a box of Cheerios as he was to read a book. Now, he’s spelling accurately in Facebook posts, and sometimes even using punctuation correctly (still gotta work on capitalization there big boy, but it’ll come to you).

Hell, he’s even figured out how to  have a sense of humor that other people get. Even just talking so that people could understand him in general was a task before.

For the first 23 years I knew him, he was just as liable to murmur, “Bladtta tom gibberga cheeseburger and fries somda myeo dattdada WWE” as anything you or I might say in a typical conversation about the weather. That was as coherent as we knew him from 1986 to about two years ago.

It’s really been a significant upgrade in the Carlson we know. He even is winning at cards (which we’re really not fans of) and has lost weight (which he needs to get his still-fat ass in the  next weight-loss competition, but that’s beside the point).

We’re actually fairly almost impressed. I’d think the doctors who put Lee Majors back together on the Seven Million Dollar Man would be too.

But I still want to know what black ops tech group came up with the technology to make it happen. And don’t tell me it was Comcast.