Whether the curriculum was standard for public education I don't recall, but back when I was a young school boy, we studied in considerable depth the science of bionics.

In the medical documentary series, The Six Million Dollar Man, we learned how all human organs could be replaced with artificial components, to the point of creating a so-called “super man,” faster than a speeding locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and, off-screen, even married for a time to the world's most gorgeous woman, Farrah Fawcett — all despite a persistent glitch in early 1970s bionics. Every time the technology activated, it was in super slow motion, and with a loud tinny warble that sounded a Slinky oscillating a quarter inch from your earhole.

Six Million Dollar Man: “Oh, Farrah, baby, baby, you look absolutely — bweenoinga-bweenoinga-bweenoinga.”

Farrah: “I'm outta here.”

(Little known Hollywood celebrity non-fact: After Farrah split, The Six Million Dollar Man married his spin-off TV character, The Bionic Woman, with whom he had three children, a baby girl and twin male Shop Vacs.)

Today I look back on the promise that was first-generation bionics with two observations:

1) Six million dollars must have been a lot of cabbage. For you and me it still is, of course. But in real 2010 dollars, $6,000,000 barely buys one year of a second-string defenceman, much less a CEO to mismanage a financial institution into bankruptcy and seek federal aid. Bionics? Six million today wouldn't replace a half-dozen rivets and repack the knee bearings on the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.

2) Bionics fell far short of its potential.

Not to belabour a long-standing personal gripe, but I was supposed to fly to the moon. We all were, on regular commercial passenger flights, by 1985, 1990 at the latest, according to predications during the heyday of NASA's Apollo program. Similarly, by now I did not expect to be so much of my original flesh and bone, or so droopy and achy in both respects. I anticipated my body to be in the shop for regularly scheduled bionic refurbishment, and not just for the actual replacement parts that I so far enumerate: Two porcelain teeth and a pair of soft plastic squish-on discs that float in my eyeballs. I am the Six Hundred Dollar Man, able to see my toast from any distance and also to chew it. Yet Sandra Bullock never calls.

Bionics has fallen from its original lofty goals, from “Gentlemen, we have the technology; we can rebuild him,” all the way down to “Hey, fellas, let's accessorize!” The latest, I now read, is a supplementary tongue accessory designed to render the tongue useless. Canwest News reports that a plastic surgeon from (guess where) (just guess) (thaaaaat's right) from California (!) has to date sewn 35 stamp-sized fabric patches on the tongues of his patients as a weight-loss aid.

How the tongue patch works is that the dieter spots a monstrously caloric item on a restaurant menu, eggs benedict for example, and, appetite whetted, proceeds to order: “Awths babadat, plath,” making no sense whatsoever. Also — and this time factually — the mesh patch makes solid food painful to eat, leaving liquids as the only nutritional alternative, for weight losses of 20 pounds or more in the month it takes the polyethylene stamp to wear away.

Same could be said of duct tape, but still. This is a true medical advancement. Rather than not eating too much food, humans can now pay $3,000 for painful organ attachments to gag on perfectly good food.

How North America explains to the world's underfed people that we now spend their equivalent of three year's income for a month of dry-heaving at the dinner table, I have no idea. But statistics say the often hungry people of the planet likely number one billion. We might want to forget bionics altogether, and get back to work on those commercial moon flights, for the skedaddling off the planet before we're forcibly evicted, and with just cause.

Ron Petrie is a humour columnist with the Regina Leader-Post.