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- Read Cathy's local affairs column every Saturday in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (see link below).
- Her national affairs column appears every Tuesday exclusively at cathysorbo.com.
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| A great big beautiful tomorrow. |
| Posted: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 |
Back in nineteenhundredsixty-something when I was a youngin?, the year 2000 was heralded as The Superfuture. We all had jetpacks. Families took time-travel vacations. Everyone had robotic servants. Some of us even had gills.
Well, here we are, 7 whole years past the magical 2000 mark and we have the Segway and a gadget that will let us carry 14,000 songs with us wherever we go.
Even though we are still shy of a George Jetson lifestyle, all of our new technology is exciting to me, but it wasn't always. I was one of those who had to be physically, emotionally and intellectually dragged into the digital age and the world according to Steve Jobs. Now I fully appreciate the way technology allows one to advance, communicate and enjoy various forms of entertainment.
Thanks to high-speed computers and gadgets of every conceivable use, a new age has spat forth self-made publishers, recording artists and videographers. In fact, the Apple application iMovie has basically replaced television as my young daughter's choice for entertainment.
There are even self-made space entrepreneurs, namely Sir Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic outfit, and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin who recently debuted a vertical takeoff and landing by a development vehicle called Goddard.
Virgin Galactic has a debut mission goal-date of June 2008 with a 2 1/2-hour flight. Ticket price: $200,000. This flight already has more than 150 seats reserved, including one by actress Victoria Principal, who portrayed the drama-stricken Pamela Barnes Ewing on the TV show "Dallas." Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is also hot for space travel, and Sir Richard will be welcoming him aboard by picking up his tab.
But here on Earth, cars are still King. Women still fret about cellulite. Crappy television shows pervade almost all households.
So world peace and all that aside, I present my Top 20 Wishlist Items for the Future, near or far, in no particular order of importance:
A breed of non-defecating housecat
Colorful money
Unpunishable use of the Marijuana plant
Nutritious toaster food
Sentient companions for only-children (also non-defecating)
Absence of emailed chain letters
Covered moving sidewalks for The New Pedestrian
A Good-at-Math pill
No boundaries for beer on ferry boats
No more sitcoms
Guaranteed snow at Christmastime
Goats allowed within city limits
Four-channel only television
Banishment of local celebrity news teams
Time travel to 1972 Led Zeppelin shows
Cryostasis replacing need for babysitters
Store-bought DIY dental work
A Debussy Channel
A pre-sleep dream selector
Mildly hallucinogenic Listerine Breath Strips
And finally, affordable space travel. I don't know how much money Charles Simonyi had to bust out for his Russian-based training and space trip, but I'm certain he feels it's all worth it.
I realize there are extreme dangers concerning space flight; technical malfunctions, radiation hazards, Victoria Principal's repetitive stories about her "Dallas" days, but more so I fear that I'll be forever stuck down here to endure solar flares, magnetic shifts, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and Nip/Tuck reruns while Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Victoria Principal and Stephen Hawking are sipping luminescent space liqueurs on their yacht on Lake Methane while the colony of 150 get to lay out the plan for expanding life on another planet.
Now there's an iMovie waiting to happen
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