August Body, But August of What Year?

As with any episode of The Daily Show, the whole seven-odd minutes of this clip is worth watching, but the bit relevant to my commentary starts around 1:54.

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I'm about to type a sentence I never thought would come out of my fingers.

Can someone please hook these folks up with PowerPoint? Keynote? Open Office Impress? Something?

Now, I have never been a fan of presentation software, primarily because people tend to use it as a giant ass-backward teleprompter. In short, nothing any more useless than a giant blue placard that reads "$15,000,000,000,000" to impress upon us just how big 15 trillion is. The problem isn't that we don't know how many zeros are in a trillion and need it shown to us; the problem is that the human mind is only capable of comprehending numbers up to a certain point. After a while, more zeros are effectively meaningless, no matter what color the placard is.

As much as I loathe PowerPoint, this is the U.S. Senate in 2009. They should be using more advanced presentation technology than a middle school science fair circa 1992. Actually, circa 1992, we were already five years into the age of PowerPoint. My middle school was just a bit behind the curve. Why in the name of modern technology is our Most August Body still using easels and placards as visual aides?

I know we are in a budget crisis, but surely even an LCD projector, 100 thumb drives and the salary of a 14-year-old computer geek to run the projector--no, I don't expect senators to learn 20 year old technology--has to be less than the budgetary line item for printing all those giant placards. Those things don't come out of the inkjet by the receptionist's desk, after all.