Okay, my theory’s disproved.
No, no, and no.
Mine used to be Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a kid. Now it’s usually Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Never mind that they’re *fictional *historical figures. I’ve done Queen Elizabeth I, also, and a few others.
Usually they pop into existance in the back seat of my car and start freaking out because we’re driving down the interstate at 70 mph. They have to be convinced that modern technology isn’t witchery, and I take them to the dentist.
My perverse fantasy involves escorting some good, wise, person from the past, like Abraham Lincoln, showing them a freeway accident with the “spectator slowing” in the other direction.
Abraham Lincoln would marvel at the moral progress we’ve made! So many people are slowing down to see what they can do to help the victims.
Umm…no.
The Scorpion King. I’d show him a picture of the Narmer Palette, and ask, Is this really your son?
This thread reminds me of the “Adam Explains to 1780’s Guy” bit that was on Adam Carolla’s short-lived TV show: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JzvYtvY_aEM
Not a historical figure, but I’ve often thought I would enjoy showing a young Isaac Asimov a modern-day laptop computer. Imagine what his stories would have looked like then!
Madison would have been quite familiar with pineapples. They weren’t everyday items, but they were a common gift for special occasions. They got a reputation as a symbol of good luck, which is why pineapples are carved on a lot of colonial furniture. They got them from the Caribbean, where they’d been cultivated since pre-Columbian times. (Pineapples are native to Brazil and Paraguay. Hawaii got them from Jamaica after Captain Cook.)
Sorry for the geek break.
I often fantasize about going back in time with some easily-portable device just to show it to someone special. Like showing an iPhone to Alan Turing, or one of those RC helicopters to Da Vinci. For that matter, show almost any portable device to Volta, and tell him what batteries turned out to mean to the world.
I’d love to show Galileo and Newton the results of their ideas. We often fail to realize how scientific thought has touched every aspect of our world, and how rare such thinking once was (though it’s often too rare today).
You guys have no idea how delighted I am to know that other people do this too. Well, maybe you do. I am so excited to know that I am not a freak! (Or, possibly, we are all freaks together.)
Like SpoilerVirgin, my recurring guest is James Madison, although I can’t come up with a good reason why Madison, specifically.
This is a cool thread. 
Me, I’ve never had any fantasies of bringing a historical figure forward, but for some weird reason even since I was a teenager I’ve had one about showing up in the Little House on the Prairie era driving a big old black Lincoln (we had one when I was in high school, which is where that came from) and pulling out my computer (which has since become a laptop) to show them all the cool and wondrous stuff that would occur in the future. I know that I’d only have as long as the battery stayed charged and there’d be no internet, but even standalone games and word processors would have been pretty amazing back then.
Of course, they’d probably have had me shot as a witch, but hey…
What I don’t get is why everybody has to go back hundreds of years. Just try explaining this post to people from 30 years ago. Then go back and see how many things you’d have to explain first.
I was on writing a post of on the SD …
- that’s a place people write stuff on the internet …
- a whole lot of PC’s linked togeth …
- You know, like a mainframe, but it sits on my desk …
- No I’m not rich, why do you ask?
If you want to try a similar exercise for real, just go and watch an old (ie more than a decade or so) movie with a kid and try and explain why:
- they spent so long trying to find a phone booth - use a mobile
- they just walked on the plane - where’s the security?
- they couldn’t figure something out (haven’t they ever heard of google?)
- why the music sucks
DancingFool
I too am surprised this is common. Probably explains why when, several years back, Hillary Clinton revealed that she was in the habit of “chatting” with Eleanor Roosevelt, everyone (except the vast right-wing conspiracy) yawned. It’s normal.
As to why we do this, I dunno. For me, I think it’s a technique to try to get into the mind of someone I’ve read about.
Since I am an organist, the guy I “hang out” with the most is J.S. Bach. I’m sure he’d take to our much-improved pedalboard design, and if I could wrangle him the opportunity, he’d be in hog heaven trying out the hundreds of stops on the Wanamaker organ in Philadelphia.
Not to hijack this thread (maybe we should start one on this topic), but do you ever imagine yourself as some figure from the past? I’ve no idea why, but for the past couple of years I’ve often put myself to sleep at night imagining myself in the Apollo 13 mission. (I’ve played the roles not only of all three astronauts, but also some of the folks in Mission Control.)
Dancing Fool: Personal computers existed 30 years ago, only they were largely still called microcomputers and they had less computing power than a good programmable calculator these days. The person from 1977 would be familiar with Radio Shack’s brand new TRS-80, Apple’s brand new Apple II, and Commodore’s brand new PET.
Networking microcomputers would be a new idea, most likely. If the person had been lucky enough to live in Berkeley he’d have possibly known about the Community Memory project, which put teletypes (an UPPERCASE-ONLY typewriter wired to and controlled by a computer) and, later, CRT-based terminals in the neighborhood for random people to use beginning in 1972. In Des Moines? Not so much. CBBS, the first BBS system, went online in 1979. (A BBS is where one computer direct-dials another using a modem and can leave messages and transfer files only with the computer it just dialed. BBSes are not part of the Internet.)
So comparing your computer to a mainframe would be good from a processing power standpoint, but he’d look at it and think ‘really big microcomputer’ until you turned it on and demonstrated its capabilites. At which point he’d go crazy and brain you with his atlatl for being a witch.
It’s probably partly a way to work through our fascination about the way the world is. You can’t exactly grab a random friend and marvel at mundane things like microwave ovens or the way we travel today. A person from the past would think it was cool though. Since we know so much about some historical figures, it might seem like we “know” them enough to have a chat.
Ok, that makes perfect sense.
- I taught English for a couple of semesters.
- Two younger sibs.
- An invisble pet dog, an English setter.
I’ve had similar sorts of fantasies involving fictional characters, but it’s not so much to explain things to them as to see how they react outside of their set worlds. But I write fan fiction, so this is more in my usual line. I once filled an imaginary country house with characters from various novels to see how they’d interact. And a few years ago, after a friend gave me a live-sized cardboard cut-out of the 4 hobbits from LOTR for my birthday, I imagined them raiding the fridge and eating me out of house and home, Sam fixing up my mess of a garden, and Frodo watching movies once he figured out the DVD player, but that was a short-lived thing. I still have the cardboard figures (they are not 4 feet from my desk right now), but don’t think much about hobbits living in my house anymore.
My fantasy time travels have me going back and setting Aristotle and Galen onto the ‘right’ track regarding natural science and medicine. Assuming they’d pay any attention to me, and having to overcome a significant language barrier, etc.
Also cool would be transporting my 2007 condo (complete with Internet hook up, somehow) to 1950. I’d bring along a modern high speed Xerox machine, and set up shop as an all purpose Maven at $1000/hr. If no one wanted to hire me, I could always clean up with sports bets. (Why yes, I have read Ken Grimwood’s Replay, Why do you ask?)
Bloody hell!!
My fantasy exactly
Thirding da Vinci.
But three pages and still no love for H P Lovecraft? Man, if I had the choice of hanging out with anybody from history, he’d be in the top 5, easily. Just seems like he’d be a really interesting guy to chat with.
I have a feeling he’d freak out at some of the directions astronomy has gone in the last 80 years.
A couple of times I’ve thought of taking Ben Franklin for a car ride. I think he’d catch on fast.