Category Archives: technology

‘Future events such as these will affect you in the future’

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Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives, and remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

I posted something the other day about a couple of old science-fiction movies set in the year 2013. Escape from L.A. (1996) was about a guy escaping from a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, I think, while The Postman (1997) was about a lone letter carrier who delivers hope in a post-apocolyptic world, one letter at a time, or something. (I never saw either of them.)

That got me thinking:

We really are living in a world that would have seemed like science-fiction a generation ago.

thingstocome

This is how we’ll dress in 2036, according to Things to Come (1936).

Smartphones. Skype. GPS. Kindles. If someone had told you 20 years ago that you could stream movies onto a 50-inch, crystal-clear TV screen hanging flat against the wall for less than the cost of a movie ticket, you wouldn’t have believed them.

Heck, even the idea of a blog would have seemed crazy a generation ago. Seriously, you mean anyone can write anything they want, and people all over the planet can read it instantly and talk to you about it?

What’s funny is that none of this feels like “the future.”

It turns out that the future sneaks up on you and is a lot less snazzy than I thought it would be when I was a kid.

This is how we dressed for work 14 years ago. (Cast photo from Space:1999.)

This is how we dressed for work 14 years ago, according to Space: 1999 (1976).

We don’t all wear matching jumpsuits or have hover cars or work on the moon. We can buy turtle-sized robots to vacuum the carpet, but we still can’t buy jet packs, and I don’t know anyone who owns a laser gun, although a few have laser pointers, for some reason.

We can put a man on the moon, but we don’t want to. We can pull in 500 cable channels, but mostly it’s just “reality” shows about silly people with daddy issues and persistent low-grade fevers (I’m guessing) doing stupid things so people will look at them.

We haven’t found a cure for cancer, but you can’t watch a ballgame without seeing a dozen adds for drugs to treat erectile dysfunction.

I don’t know. I guess I’m OK with the future not being what it was supposed to be. Things could be better, but they could be a lot worse, and, besides, if you think it through, hover cars would probably just scoot around as freely as a puck on an air-hockey table. I think we’re probably better off without them.

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Too awful not to read: a 200-year-old dictionary of vulgarities

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I haven’t been blogging as much as I used to because I’ve been working on a couple of research/writing projects. The other day, I was looking up something on Google Books when I found this:

Francis Grose

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: The Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged by Francis Grose, published in London in 1788. (Google has scanned in thousands public domain books and posted the copies online. It’s like having a great university library on your laptop.)

I had no idea such a book existed, and I was struck by the fact that this was the second edition.

Publishing always has been a business, and coming out with a second edition was clearly a business decision. It means not only that a lot of people bought the first collection of vulgarities, but that Grose’s publisher, one S. Hooper of No. 212 High Halborn, facing Bloomsbury Square, decided he could make even more money by publishing an even bigger collection of vulgar words.

Some of the 224-year-old vulgarities are actually more offensive now than they were then. There are lots words for and references to various parts of the body and to venereal diseases and to prostitution, which, apparently was very common in 1780s London. Plenty of entries are sexist or bigoted or just plain hateful.

We tend to imagine people who lived in the 1700s as somehow better than us, more civilized, less crude, more refined, but they weren’t, at all, and this is proof. You would not want to hang out with these people.

Here’s a sampling of some of the vulgarities and slang that isn’t too awful to repeat:

  • Act of Parliament: A small beer, so called because Parliament once required landlords to give soldiers five small pints of beer free of charge.
  • Ape leader: An old maid whose eternal punishment for failing to have children will be to lead apes in hell.
  • Baptized (or christened): Watered-down liquor, as in, ”I believe this whiskey has been baptised.”
  • Child’s Best Guide to the Gallows: A deck of cards.
  • Christmas compliments: A cough and running nose; a head cold.
  • Death’s head on a mopstick: A description of an especially scrawny man.
  • Face making: To bear children; to bring new faces into the world.
  • Fire ship: A wench with a venereal disease.
  • Fortune teller: A judge who tells a convicted man what’s to become of him.
  • Frenchified: Someone with a venereal disease.
  • Holy water: The object of one’s hatred, as in, “He loves him as the Devil loves holy water.”
  • Jason’s fleece: Someone whose gold has been stolen.
  • Little snakesman: A small boy who enters a house from beneath the floor then opens the door to let in the thieves he works for.
  • Lobster: A British soldier, because of the color of his uniform.
  • Maneuvering the apostles: Robbing Peter to pay Paul; borrowing from one person to pay another.
  • Master of the wardrobe: Someone who pawns his clothes to buy liquor, which apparently was something that happened so often that people came up with an expression to describe it.
  • Moll Thompson’s mark: A moll was a prostitute, and this is play on words referring to an empty bottle of alcohol, because of the initials M.T., meaning empty, as in, “Take away this bottle. It has Moll Thompson’s mark on it.”
  • Nicknackatory: A toy shop, a shop that sells knickknacks.
  • Petticoat pensioner: A man supported by a wealthy woman.
  • Queen Street: Said to be the address of a man who’s governed by his wife.
  • Quill driver: A clerk, scribe or hackney writer, who drive their quills into the ink well.
  • Saint: Wood that’s too knotty or warped for a carpenter to use, so it’s thrown into the fire like a martyred saint.

So, we’re losing another bookstore

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Our little town south of Nashville lost Border’s a little over a year ago, and now we’re losing our discount book store, the one by Kroger, the one with really interesting books that weren’t bestsellers and that are dirt cheap.

We still have a Barnes & Noble, which is nice, but walk in, and the first thing you see is a big display of Nooks, the company’s e-reader-slash-Android tablet, which I think seems like an obvious bit of foreshadowing. It’s like going to see a romantic movie, and, soon after meeting the love of her life, the wispy heroine develops a nagging cough that she says is just a cold; you know how the story is going to end. (Hint: It’s not just a cold.)

I’m really sorry to see the bargain bookstore close. It wasn’t the greatest bookstore ever. It didn’t have a lot of character. It didn’t have overstuffed chairs, a coffee bar and free Wi-Fi, but it was a bookstore for people who love books.

It’s the kind of bookstore where you see people buying an armload of books. Thing 1 (the 12-year-old) always ended up with a couple of Mike Lupica novels, and Thing 2 (the 6-year-old) always found something in the children’s section, which had a giant castle-shaped entrance and a big bench where we’d sit and I’d read him stories about whatever he was into that day, usually something like Spider-Man or Power Rangers.

I didn’t know this was even a genre.

I honestly don’t believe traditional books are dead, but I also understand that the paper book is just a format and that content is what matters. What’s important is that people are reading and learning and thinking about things. It’s the same with music; I don’t buy many CDs these days, but I buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t care about having a lot of shiny plastic discs. I care about listening to great music.

Still, I’m a romantic when it comes to traditional books. I like having them around, and I like showing them off, but I don’t think the kids are going to feel the same way. Thing 1 just got a Google Nexus 7 for school. It came with a $25 online credit. First thing she did was download a book. I’m OK with that.