Mood:
brightTopic: Retro Rules!
For reasons unknown my blog entry for Monday has vanished. Gone! No longer in existence. It is an ex-entry. It is now somewhere in the cyber ether never more to be seen again until someone finds it years later in a usenet archive for alt.weird.pointless
Speaking of pointless, here's a news article...okay it's not an article; it's three paragraphs about a company that wants everyone to send them $1.99 so the user can down load a symbol that is supposed to represent sarcasm. They are hoping that it becomes accepted world wide as the punctuation mark for sarcastic statements. really? really? A dollar ninety-nine? By credit card? To a company that no one has ever heard of before today? So you can use a symbol that looks for all the world like a dollar ninety nine boob job? Because some people don't pick up on a sarcasm? Oh yeah...a can hardly wait to send all my credit card info to someone as non-dodgy and trustworthy as you.... see? it wasn't hard to pick up on that as a sarcastic statement, and I didn't need top hit anyone over the head with a symbol that looks like a boob.
I simply must share this picture of the ultimate interpretation of the rugged yet girly lumberjack look. It is fun, witty and has everything Michael Palin's lumberjack wanted in a dress. It's got lots of metal hardware so it looks rugged enough for the girls, It's done in a classic black on color lumberjack plaid, yet it's got the classic ballgown silhouette so it's nice and girly because the guy lumberjacks like to look girly, just like either their dear mama, in the TV show or their dear papa, when performed live on stage.
The dress is from the Hot Topic website, a US chain that sells goth clothes, rock band t-shirts and other stuff. Some of the goth stuff is what is unkindly called "shopping mall goth" but every once in a while they completely hit the mark, like with this dress.
The Retro Future Has Arrived:
So, here we are, January 1972, poised on the brink of the future. If you go to your nearest Radio Shack you might have seen a "calculator" behind the desk. These pocket sized adding machines have no gears, no wheels, and no paper tape, only lights. And they can do the same work that a room sized computer did ten years ago. These will be in the pockets of everyone and even more amazing things will be in your home soon Imagine playing games on your TV. Getting music from your telephone! Small 7-inch discs that hold more music than a 12 inch LP! Imagine what life will be like in 2010! ...back to the reality of 2010...Someone recently uploaded and posted a children's book from the year I saw my first pocket calculator: 1972. The book chronicals life in the far reaches of the future: 2010 and is aptly named: 2010:Living in the future" found here!
Going through the book: So it got plenty right, such as TV screen that connect us with the world and that we can actively interact with using telephones...I can imagine someone from 1972 would describe the internet thusly using common words from that time. The idea that we wouldn't have beds or that homes wouldn't have wasted space was off base. Space is a status symbol, people put small furniture in the center of huge rooms to give the feeling of more space. the book says there are no bathtubs, only showers. Again, huge bathrooms and tubs are modern status symbols. Oh yeah..the fashion page is way off base...we don't wear jumpsuits...and thank the goddesses of fashion and taste for that! It describes a "boiler" that heats, cools and cleans the air, much like modern HVAC furnace systems.
The kitchen is a thing of ugly. For "no wasted space" this thing looks like the control wall of NASA. There are hundreds of small ovens, bunches of small fridges and all is controlled by a typewriter that sends messages to the tiny ovens. They missed badly on that one. Wait..disposable dishes and cutlery only? That is more about 1972 and the disposable culture of the time. Groceries come via "vision phone" sort of like internet groceries, which failed because you can't squeeze melons via the internet. They didn't realize some people enjoy shopping, it adds to the whole food experience. You pay by dialing in your bank info...which I have done to pay bills via touch tone phone.
School is done through vision phone. you can get teachers from all over the world direct to your home classroom. They didn't understand the importance of social skills in 1972 or how isolating sitting in front of a screen can be...however they got internet webcasts and Skype broadband video correct! The book envisions vision desks, with screens, typewriters, cameras and once again a huge waste of space. Laptops can do all that and more.You vision desk sends school work to a school computer that takes up an arena's worth of space. As I look down at my desktop system with a Terabyte hard drive tucked inside and my 16 gig smart card and 32 gig USB drive.
Meanwhile adults always work from home and only work three days a week. IF ONLY!To be fair...Dave can use or home computer to access everything that's at his office, effectively making the preditions true. Speaking of IF ONLY statements here's a direct quote from this book: With few people traveling to work there are no morning or evening rush hours—no streets crowded with cars, buses, and people. Gone are the oily smells and fumes of traffic. When people travel, they go by electric car, bus, or train
Which is so far from reality it isn't even funny...it's sad. highways built for that future are clogged with cars in today's reality. Of course, to make this happen the future in the book relies on public transit. The reality of the present is that public transit takes you where it wants to go, not where YOU want to go.
Then the book sinks in a Utopian morass of mid century morality. It says we will all be happy and take free buses everywhere and technology will bring us to a perfect state of being. The reality is that the same problems faced by the average person of 1972 are the same problems faced by a person in 2010. We may have the technology predicted, but it didn't help. It simplified nothing, it only made life more complicated.
This next passage predicts Google: " This file contains all the books that have ever been written. It does not matter whether they were first written in Chinese or French. They will be here, translated into English. There is also an index of films and newspapers. You could spend all day watching comics, but it wouldn’t be a good idea." nor would pr0n be a good idea, but its the number one things searched for in these libraries. and then it predicts Amazon's Kindle reader: "The first page appears on your screen. You can turn the pages backward or forward by using buttons on the vision phone. "
We are told that flying is like taking a local bus. Flying takes no time at all, planes fly 4000 miles an hour so it takes less than an hour to go to Australia. Here in reality-world it takes five hours to pass through security, two hours to load the plane. an hour waiting to take off, and when you arrive, three hours of sitting on the runaway waiting for an available gate, then another few hours at security again. You could walk to Australia from the US in less time.
And it concludes by telling us that 2010 will not be much different than 1972. And that is the single most inaccurate statement of all. Back then the future seemed so shiny and bright, now the future seems less shiny, less bright and less optimistic. The future just isn't what it used to be.
And now it's off to work. today is the structural work on one dress, facings on another, then to morrow it's hemming on both. One is easy, the hem band is sewn as a seam, I only have to cut the bottom of the dress and resew the band seam, then press. The other will need to be done using the big machine and the rolled hem foot. That's also somewhat easy. I have to have the entire kit and kaboodle ready for Thursday evening. I might be up really late tonight, I do some of my best sewing in the evening.
Later!
