27 June 2015

Birthdays
Chandler Riggs b. 1999 (The Walking Dead, Jesus H. Zombie)
Matthew Lewis b. 1989 (Harry Potter)
Ed Westwick b. 1987 (S. Darko, Children of Men)
India de Beaufort b. 1987 (Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire)
Sam Claflin b. 1986 (The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Lost Future)
Drake Bell b. 1986 (I [Heart] Vampires, Dragonworld: The Legend Continues)
Sam Hoare b. 1981 (An Adventure in Space and Time, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Golden Compass)
Courtney Ford b. 1978 (True Blood, The Big Bang Theory, The Vampire Diaries, Alien Raiders)
Tobey Maguire b. 1975 (Spider-Man 1, 2 & 3, Pleasantville, Eerie, Indiana)
Christian Kane b. 1974 (The Librarians, Angel)
Stephen Barker Turner b. 1968 (Forever, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2)
J.J. Abrams b. 1966 (writer/director, Star Wars: Episode VII, Fringe, Star Trek, Super 8, Lost, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Armageddon)
Isabelle Adjani b. 1955 (Nosferatu the Vampire)
Julia Duffy b. 1951 (Wizards of Waverly Place, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Voyagers!, Wizards and Warriors, Battle Beyond the Stars)
Ken Marshall b. 1950 (Deep Space Nine, Quantum Leap, Krull)
James Daughton b. 1950 (Hologram Man, Weird Science [TV], V, The Incredible Hulk, Future Cop, Planet of the Apes [TV], The Sixth Sense [TV], Shazam!)
Paul Koslo b. 1944 (Stargate SG-1, The Flash, Xtro II, Solar Crisis, Robot Jox, Misfits of Science, The Greatest American Hero, The Incredible Hulk, Galactica 1980, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Omega Man)
Sandra Smith b. 1940 (Star Trek)
George McCowan b. 1927 died 1 November 1995 (director, War of the Worlds [TV], The Shape of Things to Come, The Starlost, Frogs, The Invaders)
Wallace Earl Leven b. 1926 died 27 February 2012 (The Greatest American Hero, Time Express, The Six Million Dollar Man, Planet of the Apes, The Monster That Challenged the World)
Skelton Knaggs b. 1911 died 1 May 1955 (Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere, House of Dracula, The Invisible Man’s Revenge)
Billy Curtis b. 1909 died 9 November 1988 (The Twilight Zone [1986], Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, Batman, The Angry Red Planet, Adventures of Superman, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Jungle Moon Men, Superman and the Mole Men, The Wizard of Oz)
John McIntire b. 1907 died 30 January 1991 (The Incredible Hulk, Twilight Zone)
Greta Schroder b. 1892 died 8 June 1980 (Nosferatu, The Golem)

Notes from the birthday list.
1. The Picture Slot. In previous years, the Picture Slot went to Tobey Maguire, who turns 40 today, and Matthew Lewis, best known as Neville Longbottom. Continuing with the trend of iconic stuff from the 21st Century, today it's Chandler Riggs from his most famous role as Carl on The Walking Dead.

2. The Gal at the Door. It's a short list today. No one born after WW II died young, there is no one born in the 1930s and everyone born in the 1920s is gone. These three facts conspire to make Sandra Smith the Gal at the Door. Her most famous role was as Dr. Janice Lester on the third season Star Trek episode Turnabout Intruder, my second choice for the Picture Slot today. As always, special birthday wishes go out to anyone singled out by this odd demographic coincidence.

3. The Geezer Canadians. There are two Canadians on the list today, both of them born before 1950 so their credit lists don't have that much in the way of Canadian genre productions. They are the actor Paul Koslo and the director George McCowan.

Many happy returns to all the living on the list, notably Sandra Smith, and to the dead, thanks for all the memories.

Movies released
Transformers: Age of Extinction released, 2014 
WALL-E released, 2008
 

Predictor: Morris L. Ernst in his 1955 book Utopia 1976

Prediction: We can already see the outlines of 1976 products. Telephone and telegraph lines are to give way to microwave radio. Electronic lighting will give safety on sea and land. Atomic batteries are not far off and Solar batteries will be commonplace.

Reality: Even the things he gets right are more the outlines of 2015 than 1976. Microwave radio is a good description of cell phone reception, solar batteries are getting more commonplace every day and at an accelerating pace, but atomic batteries ain't happening and I'm not even sure what counts as "electronic lighting". LEDs perhaps?

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Regular old Sunday tomorrow means another prediction from Robert A. Heinlein's The Door Into Summer.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
 

20 April 2013

Birthdays
Andy Serkis b. 1964
George Takei b. 1937

I could put up a picture of Mr. Serkis, best known as the motion and voice actor for the CGI Gollum, also excellent in Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvy, but I decided to go with a picture of The King Of The Internet, Mr. George Takei, taken from the Evil Federation episode Mirror, Mirror.

Many happy returns to both gentlemen.

 
Predictor: AT&T ads from 1993 & 1994

Predictions (and reality): Technically, there are no dates given, but these ads are twenty years old now, so let's see how they did with their twenty predictions of things you had never done... but you will.

Right on the money
Borrowed a book from thousands of miles away
Crossed the country without stopping for directions
Paid a toll without slowing down
Bought concert tickets from a cash machine
Tucked your baby in from a phone booth
Opened doors with the sound of your voice
Carried your medical history in your wallet
Attended a meeting in your bare feet
Watch the movie you wanted to the minute you wanted to
Learned special things from far away places
Put your heads together when you are not together
Had a classmate thousands of miles away
Or kept and eye on your home when you are not at home
Fixed your car with a television
Had an assistant who lived in your computer


The only quibble here is that some of this stuff was not brought to you by AT&T, but instead by competitors they didn't even think of as competitors twenty years ago, such as Apple creating Siri.

Close but no cigar
Checked out of a supermarket a whole cart at a time (bar code readers are still a little tempermental)
Make a phone call from your wrist (phones are small and portable, but people like a bigger screen)
Send a fax from the beach (fax technology is a little old fashioned now)


As we say in Oakland, "Oh, hellz no!"
Renewed your drivers license at a cash machine (The DMV is still run like a Soviet bureaucracy and TECHNOLOGY CAN'T FIX IT MOTHERFUCKER!)
Conducted business in a language you don’t understand (Yeah, right. Let's work out the bugs from AutoCorrect before we go to instantaneous translation of languages, okay?)

Still, it's fun to look back at this. A strong set of predictions.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!



Another glimpse at the fabulous future of Los Angeles 2013 as seen from 1988.
 

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

7 April 2013

Birthday
Heath Ledger b. 1979 died 22 Jan 2008

Mr. Ledger's best known work in the genre is The Dark Knight, and he was also in The Brothers Grimm and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, his last film.

Prediction:  As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them in the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

Predictor:  George Orwell in 1984, published 1949

Reality:  So much stuff this little paragraph brings up. 

First off: Pneumatic tubes!  A while back, I joked that The Holy Trinity of Mid Century Futurism were flying cars, moving sidewalks and food in pill form. Well, I have to lose that trinity bit because pneumatic tubes are just as important. I might very well stumble on some other thing that is just as iconic.

The main part of the prediction is the memory hole, a place where facts go to die. Winston Smith's job was re-writing old sources of information so that it all agreed with whatever the current official version of the truth was.

Needless to say, we don't live in the future Orwell predicted. This map of Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia and the Disputed Territories is not the way the world is split up. We don't have a state run by a single party that always needs to rewrite the past to show they are infallible in the present.

This does not stop some people from believing the past has been doctored, that some unnamed soul is doing the same kind of work that Winston Smith did in the novel. If you believe that Obama was not born in Hawaii, you have to believe his various birth certificates and this announcement in the Honolulu newspaper are frauds perpetrated recently to re-write the past and all copies of the "original" papers have been sent down the memory hole.

Which brings us to the world we actually live in.  Friend of the blog Leo Lincourt tweeted a link to the Smithsonian's Paleofuture website.  In it, the late Internet pioneer Paul Baran made a remarkable prediction in 1969 that more TV stations could create a media environment where people could find news outlets that would cater to the things they believed were true. Baran mentions the John Birchers and left wing student groups as possible consumers of such media  It's stunningly accurate but I have to sneak it in sideways onto this blog because it did not give a date as to when this would happen.

Thanks to Leo Lincourt for finding this gem.

So we have this split world, mainly cleaved along the lines of conservatives and liberals but actually much more fractured than that. Instead of erasing the past completely, both sides assume in a manner "as nearly as possible unconscious" that the other side is filled with lying scumbags. There are competing versions of the truth on more topics than I can count, and each side is convinced what they read, hear and see through their media outlets is the real truth.

Like a lot of liberals, I have come to hate the "both sides do it" argument. Some recent research suggests conservatives buy into conspiracy theories more than liberals do, but that doesn't mean our side is simon pure. As I study more about climate change, it's obvious both sides completely discount the other. The thing is, there is some data that casts doubt on the idea of man made climate change. A strong example is that the rise in CO2 is undeniable and unprecedented but the temperature increases have not moved in lockstep. Because such questions are often raised by people who think the science community is a money-making scam (another conspiracy theory I can't begin to understand much less accept) questions that should be answered are largely ignored instead.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

A look at Newspeak, the language that will replace English.

Join me then... IN THE FUTURE!

12 March 2013

Birthdays
Jaimie Alexander b. 1984
Aaron Eckhart b. 1968

Yet another Whole Lotta Pretty day in the birthdays, and yet another heterosexual male choice on my part for the lead photo. Ms. Alexander's best known work in genre is as the goddess Sif in Thor.

The puppy looks a little pre-occupied. Maybe he just saw a squirrel.
 

In the year 2000!

Prediction: Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision. [In 1980 he observes that the likelihood that phones tied into home computers will accomplish the second sentence, and will eventually enable 3-dimensional holovision and stereo speech.]

Predictor: Robert A. Heinlein in 1950 and 1980

Reality: Old Sensible Bob makes a comeback this week, especially the 1950 version. Predicting miniaturization in 1950 takes some doing. His 1980 "improvements" are more along the lines of Ridiculous Bob, as hologram technology is really hard and stereo speech is both expensive and close to useless in a cell phone, since the two speakers would be inches apart.

Regular readers will realize I don't love Grumpy Old Bob, but I do recognize that he is generally an optimist, except for his 1947 essay where he was sure Hap Arnold was right and no one would listen and WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! Regular correspondent Leo Lincourt pointed out that Heinlein went through a nasty divorce in the late 1940s from a woman who was an alcoholic, and after getting disentangled his writing became much more optimistic.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Wednesday is John Elfreth Watkins Day, that mid-week pick me up all serious students of antique futurism anticipate eagerly.

Join me then... IN THE FUTURE!

6 March 2013

Birthday
Allison Hayes b. 1930 died 27 Feb. 1977

My thanks to reader gbaji for pointing out this name I missed. Miss Hayes is best known as the star of the original 1957 version of Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, an awful film with one of the most famous and iconic posters of all time.
 

In the year 2000!

Prediction #1: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.


Prediction #2: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.

Predictor: John Elfreth Watkins, writing in a 1900 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal

Reality:  Damn, this guy is good. He's writing from a time before Edison has made The Great Train Robbery but slightly after Marconi's first successful experiments. All he guesses correctly are TV, transmission of color photos, (nearly) instantaneous worldwide news.

Of course, we denizens of Watkins' wonderful predicted future turned this stuff into the cable news industry. That's on us, not him.

Watkins made only about two dozen predictions. He gets things wrong, but when he is accurate, it's almost eerie.  I'm going to miss him when I write his last one.  I'll probably bring him back next year maybe like once a month.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Thursday belongs to Arthur C. Clarke, who predicts in the 1960s some strange alliances in the year 2001.
 
 Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

24 February 2013

 Birthdays
Edward James Olmos b. 1947

...in the year 2001!

-->Predictor:   Gen. Carlos Romulo (Philippine delegate to the United Nations):

Colonialism will have ended...

Instead of 35 million increase a year, world population will increase by 100 million a year...

I might be able to talk to Manila from New York with something I have in my pocket...

Predictor: Oliver Read (editor Radio & Television News):

All rails and planes will be radio-controlled...

Long distance shipping by rockets...

Atomic energy supplies electrical power, solar radiation supplies heat...

Telephones with attached TVs are the standard...

Trips to the moon and Mars should be a reality...

Anti-gravity devices will allow us to float from place to place...

Electronic devices will be able to pick up and decode thought waves...

Reality: The general is obviously not a tech guy and Mr. Read definitely is, but the general gets two out of three (the actual increase per year in 2001 is closer to 70 million), while being generous, Read gets the first one then misses six straight. Planes are more like in constant radio contact rather than truly radio controlled. Rockets use a hell of a lot of fuel and are very hard to land, solar radiated heat is still a very small part of the grid, TV phones exist but aren't standard, space travel, not so much. Anti-gravity was a popular concept in mid-century sci-fi, but that's just a sign that these guys didn't really understand Einstein's ideas about gravity very well. Being anti-gravity means being anti-geometry, and not in the sense that you really didn't enjoy geometry class. 

And then there's electronic telepathy. Well, not yet, not close and - if Odin, Vishnu and the little baby Jebus are kind - not in my lifetime.

 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! We finish off the Amazing Stories predictions. A numbers guy doesn't do that well with numbers and a guy who makes pencils tells us... PENCILS ARE AWESOME!

Hard to argue with that.

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

3 January 2013

In the year 2000!

Transistors and communication satellites will make telecommuting from Tahiti or Bali just as practical as working from London.  If worthwhile, any executive, administrative and physical skills could be made independent of distance.

Brain surgeons in Edinburgh will be able perform operations in New Zealand. There will be no commuting only communicating.

For this reason,  cities may not exist at all.

Travel only happens for leisure.

Predictor: Arthur C. Clarke

Year of prediction: 1964 on the BBC TV show Horizon. (You can see Part 1 and Part 2 on the You Tubes.)

Accuracy: Good old Arthur C. was never short on speculation about the near future, not unlike Robert A. Heinlein. He is right that telecommuting has become possible, he just missed that it hasn't replaced regular old commuting just yet. He breezes over a lot of difficulties with his prepositional phrase "if worthwhile". Cities still exist because cities make it easier for people to get the stuff they need to live and work.

If you want a clever sci-fi story, you can read Arthur C. Clarke. If you want to understand cities better, Jane Jacobs is a better source.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Friday is Antique Postcard Day! Yes, both French and German postcards will be our Friday fare for many months to come.

French postcards!  The kind men like!  Especially men not interested in looking at nekkid ladies, but instead forward looking men hungry for knowledge about... THE FUTURE!

Join me then... IN THE FUTURE!