Signs of the end times — 10/6/06 edition

  • At one time I thought about hav­ing a sep­a­rate cat­e­gory just for the cul­ture sight­ings that make you think that surely the world’s about to end soon. I was going to name it “The mov­ing walk­way is end­ing” in honor of some­thing you hear a lot in air­ports — so much, in fact, that it begins to seem more like Pure Truth rather than a recorded inanity. I may still do the cat­e­gory, but for now, here’s just some of the lat­est evi­dence that the clock is tick­ing:

      Annies orphans

    1. Don’t know if this means the end of the world or just the end of rap music, but when I was at the gym, I was hear­ing a rap-styled song, one of the ones that’s a fusion of the boom­ing urban beat and snip­pets of some older song (thus allow­ing them to be per­ceived as both edgy and retro. Can you say ‘mar­ket­ing’?). In this case, the older song was some­thing sort of annoy­ingly sung by chil­dren. It turned out to be “Hard Knock Life” as sung by the orphan­age girls in “Annie.” So, rap music is get­ting its playlist from 80′s Broad­way musi­cals now? Yep, we’re all going to die.
    2. SL fallsI think I know the des­ti­na­tion of my next road trip, and this would be bet­ter than the last one. Not only would I not have to leave the area, I wouldn’t have to leave this chair. Accord­ing to this month’s Wired mag­a­zine, the lat­est thing for those who love play­ing com­puter games online is a vir­tual world called “Sec­ond Life.” That would be … a world. It has its own geog­ra­phy, cities, pol­i­tics, indus­try, econ­omy and pop­u­la­tion (cur­rently about 500,000). So the next time you tell a geeky friend to get a life, he can proudly say “I have a first and Sec­ond life.” And the scary thing is, he’ll prob­a­bly mean it.
    3. TransporterFor those of us who are still kind of grumpy that we didn’t get the rocket-ship-cars we were promised when we entered the 21st cen­tury, you’ll be glad to hear that sci­en­tists have been mak­ing head­way with tele­por­ta­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, the break­throughs (includ­ing this lat­est one) have been tele­port­ing infor­ma­tion rather than mat­ter, which means that the recip­i­ents of all this fab new Star-Trekkiness may be com­put­ers. But hey, it still counts!
    4. TV fridgeThey make refrig­er­a­tors that have tele­vi­sions built into them. Okay, so that’s not new, but I still can’t get over it. Who is it that needs some­thing like this? Has any­body been cry­ing out “Dog­GONE it, why do I have to miss the com­mer­cials when I go get some­thing to eat? If only there were a TV right there on the refrig­er­a­tor door so I wouldn’t have to miss the next spot from FreeCreditReport.com!!!” If we’re going to start to be that lame and lazy, why not bring the moun­tain to Mohammed — why not a TV set with a fridge in it? I mean, sure you’d cut down on all that thin screen action, but you wouldn’t have to lose valu­able sec­onds going to and from the kitchen.
    5. And of course, North Korea may test nuclear weapons this week­end (HERE), and if it does, the UN is almost cer­tain that it will be very, very angry about it and do some­thing, but it doesn’t know what yet.

    ….. tick tick tick tick tick …….


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    1. Good times and bad times

    October 6th, 2006 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Word­mama 10.06.2006

    The TV in the fridge still bog­gles my tiny lit­tle mind. Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Who on earth is so demented as to buy one? How are you sup­posed to use it, since if you open the refrig­er­a­tor door you can’t see it, and it’s in the mid­dle of the fridge door and really REALLY tiny, so the only way to watch it is to pull a chair up to the fridge and set­tle down for the night? Insane! Where is Betty Fur­ness when you need her?

  • Grace

    Betty Fur­ness! Boy, there’s a ques­tion for the inter­net. I bet she’s just hang­ing out around her house proudly show­ing off the fea­tures of her toaster oven for friends and family.

    Well, so nei­ther one of us thinks a TV set needs to be in a fridge. We need to hear from a happy TV-fridge cus­tomer — maybe we’re just not think­ing of all the great­ness of this idea.

    The only user I can think of is a per­son who likes to have a TV on when they’re doing stuff but doesn’t really watch it. Some women have lit­tle TVs all over the place so it can be blab­bing at them while they iron, do dishes, clean the smoke­house, vac­uum the ser­vants’ quar­ters … you know, allll that stuff you have to do for long hours every day.

    As lit­tle time as I spend doing house­work, a fridge mag­net is all the heavy inter­ac­tion I need.

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