miscellany

[totient]

• While cycling past the snow-covered parked cars on Hancock Street, I saw a street sweeper go past on Elm Street. Signs of spring. I wasn't ready to believe winter was really over until it had its last shot, and this is it.
  
• Mozilla 1.3 rocks. I whined about needing to install it at home, but boy am I glad I did.
  
• Tidbit from Seattle: the sign reading "Welcome to Fremont, Center of the Universe. Turn your watch back 5 minutes."
  
• We live in a postmodern age, in a way the futurists never predicted. The future is retro now. There's an antique store on Mass Ave that sells 1950s "futuristic" furniture, small appliances, dishware, and such. Fashion from 1970s SF media is fading from "dated" into "quaint". The tools of the future have been abandoned.
  
  But abandonment isn't always caused by transcendence. Sometimes the future just doesn't work out. It's not just the flying cars and "highways in the sky"; the former never got off the ground and the latter were built too low (the bridge under which the Fremont Troll sits, and similar nice-looking elevated highways many tens of meters up, prove that). Sometimes we build a technology, get it working right, and then discover that we just don't have what it takes to keep it going.
  
  Case in point: there's a sign on the back of each seat on the Boeing 737s I flew to Seattle and back on. Right underneath the Airphone, it reads "Service disconnected effective March 31, 2002".
  

Comments

[chris-warrior.livejournal.com]

The future is retro now. There's an antique store on Mass Ave that sells 1950s "futuristic" furniture, small appliances, dishware, and such. The future is retro now. There's an antique store on Mass Ave that sells 1950s "futuristic" furniture, small appliances, dishware, and such.

i relocated an old set of photos in the move: Disney's Epcot Center circa 1986. i'd taken a dozen pictures of displays in "Future Land."

i found myself looking at them and thinking "god, the future was supposed to be orange and aqua."

[fin9901.livejournal.com]

With the Big Dig finally opening, we have highways underground instead, in Boston at least.