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lost worlds
Nov. 30th, 2007 | 11:34 pm
Finished reading a book tonight, and it was too late to start another, so I decided to watch some TV until bedtime. Wound up watching a repeat of "The Tonight Show" from June of 1995.
Good Lord, how the world has changed.
Jokes about the "Contract with America", which of course has since proceeded directly to the "Dustbin of History". Or Kato Kaelin and the OJ Simpson trial, which was the beginning of my current opinion that the news media is as dumb as a bag of rocks.* Apparently a person named "David Hasselhoff" was extremely popular at one time, and people actually thought Colin Powell might become president-elect in 1996. Barely anyone had heard of al-Qaeda, NAFTA had only just begun to eviscerate US manufacturing, and the Iraq War was something that had already happened.
No iPods, no DVDs, no flash drives, no Google, Facebook, or MySpace, no digital cameras, hardly any laptops or cell phones. I need only turn in my desk chair to see half a dozen technologies that simply did not exist twelve years ago. In June of 1995 Microsoft would not release Windows 95, the crude forerunner to modern Windows systems, for another two months. In 1995, the entire lunatic force that is the modern Internet and blogging world had only just begun. I myself would not use the Internet for the very first time until 1996, and I didn't even think about trying my hand at writing until late 1997 or so.
Is the world better now, or worse? I don't know. More complicated, surely. Or maybe I'm just older.
-JM
*This may be unfair to bags of rocks.
Good Lord, how the world has changed.
Jokes about the "Contract with America", which of course has since proceeded directly to the "Dustbin of History". Or Kato Kaelin and the OJ Simpson trial, which was the beginning of my current opinion that the news media is as dumb as a bag of rocks.* Apparently a person named "David Hasselhoff" was extremely popular at one time, and people actually thought Colin Powell might become president-elect in 1996. Barely anyone had heard of al-Qaeda, NAFTA had only just begun to eviscerate US manufacturing, and the Iraq War was something that had already happened.
No iPods, no DVDs, no flash drives, no Google, Facebook, or MySpace, no digital cameras, hardly any laptops or cell phones. I need only turn in my desk chair to see half a dozen technologies that simply did not exist twelve years ago. In June of 1995 Microsoft would not release Windows 95, the crude forerunner to modern Windows systems, for another two months. In 1995, the entire lunatic force that is the modern Internet and blogging world had only just begun. I myself would not use the Internet for the very first time until 1996, and I didn't even think about trying my hand at writing until late 1997 or so.
Is the world better now, or worse? I don't know. More complicated, surely. Or maybe I'm just older.
-JM
*This may be unfair to bags of rocks.