2004-04-25 - 2:10 p.m.
Ah, good, I am so glad, Jeff has made it over to this new site that I secretly had to create. I wasn't sure how many actually made it over here. Since this is really a "few bells and whistles" site (maybe the modern version of that statement might be a few "ringtones" site), I'm not even a Gold member, so I have no "stats", which is probably just as well as I did sometimes have the tendency to be sickeningly obsessive about stats and they really never told me much, anyway. What do you mean no one's logged onto this site today, not even any bizarre Google word combinations? Regarding bizarre Google word combinations, I was getting so many Google hits almost every day that I began to think I was at the top of the Google spider's mind. Honestly, for a while there, whenever anybody Googled "Michael Jackson", my diary entry about him came up first. Thank God that stopped happening. I really don't know much about him one way or the other (nor do I really care to all that much), but somehow it began to make me nervous that whenever anybody would search on his name, my diary would come up. That's too peculiar. It got so people would even e-mail me questions, such as "Can you give me a list of the names of all his videos?" How did I get to be Michael Jackson expert just because of one diary entry? The truth is, it must really suck to be a celebrity, even though so many do everything in their power to become famous. Honestly, having somewhat experienced both (in a very, very tiny fish pond), I sometimes think obscurity is the preferable state.
Speaking of ringtones, I have such an old-fashioned cell phone that the only ring choices are among three different speeds of the normal telephone ring sound. These days, it is EASY for me to know it is my phone ringing, because mine is the only one that sounds like a normal telephone. All around me it is the Star Spangled Banner or La Bamba or the theme song from Ren & Stimpy or some new hit by Christina Aguilera. I do kind of like to think about what ringtone I would have if I had a newer version of phone. The only one to actually make me even think of ringtones was one a student had, in which it played the Harry Potter theme. Actually, that is not strictly correct, it was what is officially called (on the soundtracks) "Hedwig's Theme," that is to say, it is the theme of the owl when it comes to bring some mail. To me, that was wonderful, to conjoin the Harry Potter owl bringing mail and the receiving of a cell phone call. Magic in different forms.
So I might have wanted to have that ringtone, but upon playing around with a ringtone site on the Internet, the one that I found I REALLY wanted was "The Pink Panther Theme." I just love that "ta dum, ta dum, ta dum da dum dum da da daaaaaaa da da a dum...." Oh well, I know I'm a silly "meunkey", and damned proud of it.
Jeff, I wasn't necessarily recommending wench's "dimmemories" survey...in fact, the two you answered she created after I wrote my diary entry so I didn't even know about them. I was speaking of her surveys in general, because she will write back a note discussing ones answers. She's got lots of other ones, maybe there's one on a subject that interests you. I think the nostalgia ones are probably boring or irrelevant to people too young to have actually experienced those changes. They're just fun for us old fogies (although wench, herself, is positioned somewhere between you and me in age; I guess you could say that she is on the cusp of enjoying some of those changes, and maybe not some others). I, myself, feel that I, too, am on the cusp of technological changes in general, because for my parents' generation (my father is 88 and my mother is 80), and maybe even my grandparents' generation, there were changes that probably outshown even the ones that my generation experienced. Imagine introducing things like electricity, light bulbs, telephones, automobiles, aircraft, radio, and so on, or having been through the Depression, two World Wars...which are things, by the way, that still affect my father. He's still living like he's in the Depression, washing and reusing drinking straws and plastic forks, saves plastic bags from the grocery store, carefully recycles every single thing that can be recycled, and FIXES everything, even the cheapest appliance that most people today would simply throw away and buy a new one...and they might do that even when the appliance isn't even broken.
But I don't blame him for what he does and, in fact, I admire it. But I also understand that he lived through different times that we are living in now, or, at least I think so. Of course, he also lived an economic abundance that we can hardly imagine, now. Such as after he got his masters degree in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., he and my mother took a job-hunting trip across country from North Carolina to California and along the way he gathered up thirty-two job offers! Today, I know people who have been looking for work for a year and haven't received the slightest nibble or any shred of hope. And, as I have written before, imagine a person with a median income (like my father had then and I have now) being able to single-handedly support a housewife and four children, have a house with two swimming pools (one outdoors and one indoors), have four go-karts and a quarter of a mile asphalt go-kart race track for the amusement of the kids that wove all around the redwood-tree studded property, and then buy them all cars when they turned sixteen and send them all off to four years of college? In no way can I do any of that, myself.
Jeff, your list of "Do You Remember, circa 2052" was brilliant, I loved each and every one, and none of them are really very far-fetched!
Computers are already starting to escape out of the box...Apple advertises a whole family enjoying wireless computing and my i-Book will have built-in what they call an "AirPort" receiver. Probably the wirelessness of computer components and personal data assistants and cell phones will melt out into blending into other media in ways we can only begin to contemplate at the moment.
Automatic transmission has all but eliminated the need for a shift lever and probably with some other fuel concept (fuel cells? solar? nuclear?) or other method of getting around, there won't be a need for a transmission. Jet airplanes, surely they don't have transmissions, do they?
I can certainly imagine a personal vehicle that is somewhat like a Harrier Jet (and there was even a company working in Davis, California, intending to build something like that). It goes straight up and down, can hover in mid-air, and can shoot forward at any speed, simply by rotating the position of the jet nozzles. Well, maybe not that simple to do, but simple in concept.
What with the advent of global positioning devices and the maps that talk to you in the car ("You missed that turn, so now you need to take a right at the next intersection"), you'd hardly ever have to ask anybody for any directions. And probably by then polluting fuels such as gasoline will have been superceded by something else that maybe doesn't even have to be refilled except maybe once every couple of years, like a lithium battery in a wristwatch.
I could see television becoming some kind of projected hologram that would appear as solid, three-dimensional objects anywhere you wanted it to. Of course, now a television is no longer a piece or furniture, but something to put on a shelf (like mine) or hang on the wall (like a plasma screen).
No more utility poles and cell phone towers! Nearly a hundred years ago (I think it was), Nikola Tesla came up with a system that "broadcast" ultra high frequency electricity like a radio beam and people didn't have to have wires, but just an antenna on their house that received the electricity transmission and transformed it back down to a usable 110 volts. His system was sabotaged and destroyed by the utility companies, because they couldn't see how you could make a profit over electricity that wasn't controlled by the transmission over individual wires. Anyone with an antenna could pick up Tesla's electricity for free.
The cell phone towers could already be eliminated thanks to satellite transmission.
Cell phones could (heaven forbid?) become a miniature chip surgically installed in the ear, or something like that, and, of course, people now can send just-taken photos via their cellphone cameras.
One of my favorites, "Remember when everyone on earth was born here?" That one's coming very soon, of that I am sure! Well, pretty sure....
News from a newspaper...well, I for one, no longer get my news from a "newspaper," but, instead read news articles from news sources all around the world on the Internet.
Regarding the two-party political system, oh, you've just got to be right about that one! I've mentioned some time before a guy I was once friends with who held an elective office in Sweden; it was a kind of county commissioner kind of office. He showed me the ballot with his name on it and I swear, even for a relatively insignificant position like that, there were candidates from twenty different political parties running. "The Conservative Christian Socialist Party," "The Anarchic Labor Party," "The Animal Rights Party," "The Homeless Formerly Rich Party,"...I'm just making those names up, but they really were very specific combinations of interests! Why, today, in the United States, do we have these two parties that have these features that you love along with these features that you hate, so nothing really expresses how you really feel. For several of the past major elections, I'd read all the party platforms and actually vote for a candidate who most closely represented what I really wanted. I don't think my votes were even COUNTED, or, if they were, their results sure weren't bothered with. It would be something like: "Gore, 47% of the vote," "Bush, 46.5% of the vote (but we're not really sure)," "Nader, 5.5% of the vote," "The candidate that Pitbullshark voted for, .00000023% of the vote." Gee, I'm trying to make a political statement with my vote, here, but I'd like a little support from other people!
I will admit that even though it was a circus, it was awfully fun to have ALL THOSE CANDIDATES running for California governor. Sure, Arnold won, it was hardly even a contest, but I had fun reading the stuff from each and every one and I carefully picked the actual one I liked--he was a civil liberties lawyer working in West Hollywood and he actually had a pretty fair showing, all told. I think he came in a little bit behind Gary Coleman and Angelique, which was pretty good considering the fact that he had never been on a television show and didn't have a well-known billboard showing him in a low cut dress with a pink Corvette and immense breasts hanging out.
Banning "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer from school, it would be great to finally have it that "separation of church and state" is viewed as a principle of liberty and not one of obstacle, i.e, allowing this and this and this (and supporting a mutually respectful coexistence), instead of a this is forbidden and this is forbidden and this, too, is forbidden.
No more hardware stores? Does that mean no more machines, or no more fixing things and doing things oneself? That one, I'm not quite sure what your vision is. But I bet it is a good one. The machines never break down, or maybe they fix themselves.
The fastest way coast to coast by airplane! If airport security keeps getting more and more draconian (six hours, they say, in London airports for planes going to the United States), nobody will be able to fly! The security checks would take longer than the actual flights. I could see some ultra high speed bullet trains, something along the lines of France's Train a Grande Vitesse (I just love the name!), but you were probably thinking along the lines of space shuttle type things (straight up to orbit, sit there a moment while the Earth spins a few time zones past, then drop back down again) or maybe even my "The Fly" teleportation devices in which the essence of the person is "broadcast" from one location to another. Or maybe we'll all become quite "quantum" and realize that we are everywhere in the Universe at once and all that we need in order to go from one place to another is to simply switch where we place our focus. (Kind of like moving our attention from an itch in our leg to our growling stomach.)
Cordless appliances, you bet, and either with super-long batteries, or else Tesla-like transmitted high frequency power from a central source.
Without being tracked by the government, wouldn't that be a paradise! When it is finally understood that we each are our OWN government (as Jesus said, "why be concerned about the splinter in someone's eye when you've got a whole plank in yours?"), and people would do what was RIGHT, or their actions wouldn't harm others and therefore would be freely allowed by everybody else ("it's just his thing..."). I'm sure that's what Jefferson had in mind at the very beginning, and what Franklin meant when he said that we would have a Republic, if we could keep it. And let's not forget "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," and that means ALL the people, not just certain ones.
"Don't forget to turn out the lights"--they would automatically turn off whenever no one was there, or else they didn't have to be turned off because they were the product of an infinite power source (channeled via the Sun, or something), or else there would BE no lights, the walls would be impregnated with some kind of glow-worm or firefly-type substance that simply gently radiated out the perfect level of light...or something else again.
I love that one: "Remember cancer and AIDS?" Like "remember polio, leprosy, smallpox, scurvy," and whatever that wierd disease was that killed George Washington (something like dropsy or mopsy, I don't know, something peculiar-sounding).
P.S. After writing this, I did an Internet search to learn the name of the disease that killed George Washington. After looking through several sites, I found this one that I liked the best. The word I was looking for was "quinsy," which according to this site, is an infection of the tonsils, but it is not what killed Washington, despite that being what they tell you when you tour Mount Vernon. Other sites will tell you Washington's last disease was pneumonia, but apparently what he had was an infection of the epiglottis, which blocks the entrance into the lung, making it nearly impossible to breathe. The doctors didn't know what to do, so they tried the method of bleeding him and even though eventually Washington asked the doctors to stop, they kept bleeding him until they had taken out a third of his body's blood. Essentially, it looked like he was killed by his doctors, bleeding him to death, when he could have been saved by a tracheotomy, but the doctors were afraid to perform the then-experimental procedure on such a revered man. Apparently it would have worked if they could have done it. Very sad. But the main point is that we have all but eliminated all the infections diseases, but the ones medical science now need to work on are the degenerative diseases (which cancer clearly is). Though few would agree with me (but some Nobel-prize-winning scientists do agree with me, or, I should more properly say, I agree with them, since it is from them that I even came to understand this), I will go out on a limb and say that I consider AIDS to be a degenerative disease, not an infectious one.
All your ideas of future changes were very cool, and very, very possible. Great thinking. You sure you didn't experience all these changes, somehow, without actually being here? Jumping from testicle to testicle? Ow, that image hurts. "Get this boy born NOW!"
Anyway, thank you for reading, and go take a wench survey that you will enjoy. As for me, I think I'll tackle the "aging" one which, of course, applies to me more than it applies to you, although it really doesn't apply to me all that much, either. But I am sure that I will have something to say about it, though.
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