The FlowBee. I always hated having to go out to a barber, wait in line and and then sit for 25 minutes making small talk every month for year after year. I wondered why someone couldn’t invent something that fit on your head and cut your hair to preset lengths in the comfort of your own home.
Doesn’t mean I own one, but it’s there if I ever change my mind.
I don’t/haven’t actively disliked him as much as I do most Steelers (Mike Webster for example - may he rot in --------- someplace or other) but there is still something there that bothers me a little. Must have been the commercials with Myron.
Which brings me to having a NFL team flee in the middle of the night to another city. Stuff like that is for dreams; not reality. Until the Baltimore Colts did it.
My WAG would be Jack Lambert.
When I first moved to NYC in the early '90s, I would occasionally gawk at some of the taller buildings and wonder what it would be like if a plane crashed into one of them. I had read about a small prop plane crashing into the side of the Empire State Bldg during WWII; I think that’s what initially prompted me to think it.
Then 9/11 happened.
<interesting facts note>
Not small, a B-25. A 68 foot wingspan, almost 20,000 lbs. empty weight, it’s two 1600HP engines weighed about a ton each.
In the early 60s I was riding in the car with my parents and realized we were never getting home in time to watch The Flintstones. Devastating. At that moment I wished someone would invent a way for TV’s to save programs until you got home.
From the late 50s on I dreamed of Oreos with extra thick fillings. I don’t remember when Double Stuff Oreos came out but they were a dream come true.
In the late sixties I wondered why there was no such thing as blue nail polish. I just accepted that it had to be some shade of red, pink, orange or white because that’s all there was. Now blue polish is everywhere.
In 1974 I was riding in a car through the night across several midwestern states with some college classmates. I wished there were some way I could type messages home and to my friends, telling them where we were at any given moment. I just assumed they’d want to know. Now I can use my cell phone to email or text everyone I know and tell them every dull, pointless detail of my life whenever I want, wherever I am.
I remember driving on the overcrowded Long Island Expressway back in the 70s. I imagined a small screen in the car that would show a map of the area, and where I was located. It would also show where the traffic was heaviest, and map the most desirable route to take. I hadn’t anticipated the nagging voice.
I own a magic book now. A couple of them, actually. Three gigabytes is a lot of books, and they’re on a thing that I can stuff in my purse. I specifically bought a 3G Kindle, which comes with lifetime service included in the initial purchase price. I am resisting the temptation to paint DON’T PANIC in large friendly pink letters on its cover.
The other computers all talk to each other via Magic Internet Rays that permeate the apartment. I just used the laptop I’m typing on to transfer a bunch of media from the laptop hooked to the TV in the living room to the tablet sitting on its charger in my bedroom. That tablet will someday be the death of me. I now know exactly why people call them Crackberries. I still sometimes think I’m living in Star Trek.
[ETA: It’s occurred to me that this is probably exactly the way my parents felt when someone finally invented flip phones. I’m lucky they didn’t spend a solid decade wandering about and answering their cell phones with, “Kirk to Enterprise.”]
On a more personal level: All the way up through college, I had a hard time even picturing being in an environment where I was not constantly getting weird looks for knowing facts and reading stuff and learning things for some purpose that was not somehow directly tied to earning more money. I live in Boston now. Boston thinks I’m cool, which just blows my mind.
I also didn’t expect people to pay me for being on stage and posing for pictures, but as I never imagined that in the first place, I’m not sure it counts.
A little less mind blowing, but the or the day I was complaining about the amount of time that I spend listening to music on hold, and mused that they should put on the news or language instruction or something so that that time would be marginally useful.
Then, a few days later, I started a conference call and found the news playing.
Bingo. I was a total bookworm as a kid, and had dreams of exactly the same thing. Now I have an IPad, and a Nook, and an IPhone with the Nook app. To be sure it’s not the same thing, but it’s awfully close.
Same-sex marriage. I really believed that same-sex civil unions that were functionally the same as marriage were (a) a good thing and (b) an achievable goal (and in fact I did a lot of work for free for an organization in my state working towards that goal), but I thought that attaching the word “marriage” to the legal institution would doom it politically.
I was wrong. At least in my state (and in most states, as it turns out).
I wasn’t surprised at all that we eventually elected a black president. Back in the 70s, when I was in high school, we all basically assumed it would happen someday, and definitely in our lifetimes. No big surprise there.
I still don’t think this country will elect a Jewish president, though, not in my lifetime.
If Obama was the Mule, I doubt there would be so many people shooting their mouths off about how he’s a socialist and he’s ruining the country, etc. He’d probably just nail their dials to “unquestioning support” or perhaps “neutral tolerance” if he wanted to be sneaky. Or, if he really wanted to be sneaky, he’d alter the opposition to appear to be against him while taking courses of action that were bound to doom them, politically.
As for mine: when I was younger, I remember wishing they would make dark chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Then they did, for a little while. They weren’t as great as I had imagined.
No longer having to change your phone number when you move around.
About 20 years ago (before cell phones became commonplace), one phone company was touting that you could get a number in a specific area code, and that number would be able to follow you wherever you moved. A friend of ours proudly shelled out for it.
Nowadays, if you have a cell phone, people can reach you anywhere by just dialing your regular number. With number portability rules, you can take that with you to another carrier, or even to no carrier at all (hellO, Google Voice!). Hell, I can get a phone number through Google Voice for any area code in the country (ok, any area code that GV has numbers for).
In practice, most people opt for a phone number that is “local” to where they’re living, and change it when they move. But they don’t HAVE to do that, and in fact they can just port the old number to GV, get a new local number, and have the old number forward to the new one.
I’m actually a little surprised at the remaining limitations on landlines. My inlaws moved about 5 miles last year. Same general area, different municipality. They had to change their phone number.
I was such a movie fan as a youngster, I often wished I could watch any movie I wanted, any time I wanted and even watch it again back-to-back. I figured that would never happen. Now it has and it’s already ancient technology. Go figure.
I’m still waiting for the Jetson’s conveyor belt where I ride in looking like a mess and come out impeccably dressed and groomed! lol
Nuts to that, I want the car that collapses into a suitcase. No more spending 20 minutes looking for parking. Screw flying cars, where’s my suitcase car?