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In the Year 2000

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It is always fun to look at how a previous age viewed the future. More than a hundred years ago, Jean-Marc Côté drew a series of illustrations to be used for cigar boxes and postcards depicting what the world would be like in the year 2000. You can view a selection of these pictures at The Public Domain Review, from which I have taken the charming “Rural Postman” above.

Far from having flying postmen covering the farm households of America, we are now considering how to pay to deliver mail to them at all. And what kind of fuel would all these personal flying vehicles use? And, given France’s horrible auto accident rate, who would police the traffic in the air so that an accidental sneeze or text message would not send flyers plummeting to their deaths below?

A casual look outside your window would demonstrate that the steampunk dreams of yesterday were not realized. We now live in a digital world, immersed in tiny handheld gadgets with teeny-tiny screens that contain our lives and distract us mightily from the business of daily life.

And our forecasts for the future? We are so tied now to a digital paradigm that we don’t see that it can—and will—be replaced by something else, and probably sooner than we realize. Subconsciously, we have internalized Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated surfaces doubles every four years. But as we know, trends do not last forever. There will be a new paradigm, a new equivalent to Moore’s Law, and there we go again!

What will it be? Can it be, possibly, a return to analog? It’s possible. There may even be something which we haven’t yet begun to imagine.

Nonetheless, I will hazard a prediction. I predict that the future will bring new wonders and new problems in roughly equal measure. Certain problems that we now regard as insoluble will be solved; and new problems which will seem insoluble will emerge. Of one thing we can be sure, our children will look upon the wonders of the digital age exactly the way we look at steampunk. Those thirty-somethings tapping away on their notebook computers and iPads at Starbuck’s will look like mustachioed suspender salesmen behind the wheel of their Ford Model-Ts.

Time and Chance …

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.—Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version

Death for Some

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Anders Behring Breivik

Now that Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik has been ruled sane and sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, I keep thinking about the death penalty. Norway, like most of Europe, has no death penalty. In fact, Breivik will spend as little as ten years in a fairly luxurious prison.

Call me bloodthirsty, but I think Breivik should have been hauled out of the courtroom and executed at once without the possibility of appeal. In a Europe that is reeling into recession, a long prison sentence in a facility with a private gym, laundry service, flat-screen TV, and access to computers and the Internet. Sounds to me as if killing Norwegians is an excellent career choice. And, when Breivik will be freed at some point between the ages of 43 and 54, he can do it all over again—probably with even more conviction.

The idea of rehabilitation, I fear, is a mere ignis fatuus, mere swamp gas. A cold-blooded murderer is not likely to come out of stir smelling as sweet as a petunia. (Certain young offenders who are in for minor crimes, on the other hand, can benefit a small percentage of the time.)

In the United States, much is made of the high cost of execution compared to a lifetime prison sentence. That’s because we allow them to clog our legal system filing endless appeals: We even encourage them to do it. People like Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City) and James Holmes (Aurora) are definitely guilty of the crimes with which they have been charged. I believe that it is irrelevant whether they are sane or insane. When there is no question of identifying the guilty party of a particularly heinous crime, the result should be summary execution within twenty-four hours without the possibility of appeal.

Most people on death row in the United States, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t be there. Mostly, these consist of poor black or Hispanic males who impulsively murdered someone. Or, more likely, they committed the unpardonable felony of “messing with Texas.” (Over 1,235 men and women have been executed in the Lone Star State, which prides itself on this statistic.)

I hold with former Minnesota Governor Jesse L. Ventura, who wrote in Ain’t Got Time to Bleed:

How come life in prison doesn’t mean life? Until it does, we’re not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of “punishment” for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers.

If I were a Norwegian, I think the only advantage of a prison sentence for Breivik is that it allows me some time to file papers for emigrating to a “less civilized” country.

An Enigma

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.—Umberto Eco

Another Change of Plan

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Quebec City

Originally, Martine and I planned to take our Fall vacation in the American South, but then two things happened to make us change our minds:

  1. News kept hammering on a massive drought and heat wave throughout the entire area, with temperatures above 100° Fahrenheit almost every day. We didn’t like the idea of vacationing in a disaster area.
  2. Los Angeles was hit with a three-week heat wave (which, thankfully, has abated somewhat).

Then, Martine thought it would be nice to see her old friend Angéla Piquéras in Paris while she was still alive, but she was dismayed by the cost of doing so. (That was a pity, because I would have loved visiting France again.)

It was then that I suggested the Maritime Provinces of Canada. We had been in Nova Scotia briefly in 2008 and really enjoyed it. This time, we would, in addition to Nova Scotia, see parts of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Northern New England. We fly to Manchester, New Hampshire, rent a car there; see a couple of places in Vermont that we love; have breakfast at Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire (the best breakfasts in all of Christendom); pay a short visit to Quebec City; take the St. John River Drive in New Brunswick and see the tides of the Bay of Fundy; visit Cap Breton National Park in Nova Scotia; swing south to Annapolis Royal; and return to Manchester via Acadia National Park in Maine.

Despite all the long miles, it would be a good trip—and it would be in an area where the weather would not scorch our hides. On the other hand, we are bound to have a few days of rain, but for Southern Californians like us, that would be a welcome novelty. We would make it a point to stay in as many French-Canadian-owned places as possible, so that Martine could keep up her French (she was born in Paris).

If you’re interested in seeing the 740-odd pictures from our last trip to Eastern Canada, you can click here and select the slideshow option on Yahoo! Flickr. You can even display my captions. By the way, here’s a picture of Polly’s Pancake Parlor from seven years ago:

(It’s really that good!)

Because I am an impossible bookworm, I am thinking of reading Francis Parkman’s great study of the French and Indian War, Montcalm and Wolfe, from my Kindle as I travel. Canadian history is interesting in that the United States is one of the great villains: We invaded Canada twice, during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Both times, we were beaten back by the British. You may be interested in this website about Sir Isaac Brock, the always outnumbered, always outgunned British colonel who nonetheless frustrated two American invasions.

Another Theory …

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.—Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Vicc

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And look where it got him!

Vicc is the Hungarian word for joke, pronounced VEETZ with the vowel sound slightly shorter. I don’t have much time today to write something serious, but I thought I would aim for a snicker or two.

Just to show what kind of snicker I am looking for, here is a short video:

* * * * *

That reminds me of my favorite story regarding Zimbabwe:

After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus-stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

Well, that’s all for now, folks!

No Heaven…

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.—Hunter S. Thompson

The Phantom Lands of Eastern Europe

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Map of Galicia

If you’ve read any of the literature of Eastern Europe, you will see names of provinces and whole countries that you have difficulty in locating on a map. Names like Galicia (not to be confused with the Galicia region of Northwest Spain), Bukovina, Volhynia, Moldavia, Moldova (this one’s currently a country in its own right), Wallachia, and Silesia—just to name a few.

Most are pawns in the endless historical struggles between Russia, Poland, Germany, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Balkans. Most of the time, they were absorbed into an adjoining larger country (such as Wallachia into Romania), or split between countries (such as Galicia going to Poland, Russia, Austria, or the Ukraine). Only Moldova, the former Moldovan SSR ( Soviet Socialist Republic), is an independent nation today—at least for the time being.

Much of the problem is in the shifting borders affected by the partitions of Poland and the vagaries of fortune of the Ukraine, which was in recent history a political football between Poland, Germany, and Russia.

When one thinks about it, there are only a relatively few countries in the area that have maintained their independence, albeit with constantly shifting borders and political affiliations, over the centuries. Germany and Russia are two examples of relative stability, with just about everyone else being stretched, shrunk, or absorbed multiple times.

Much of the Eastern European emigration to the United States, Canada, and other Western countries is a result of this constant instability. It would be difficult for me to walk down certain streets in Los Angeles without encountering the children of immigrants from these phantom lands of Eastern Europe.

Ages of Faith…

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.—Richard Feynman