Futurology

Sunday night stuff:

The future is already here:
There’s a regular piece of media shtick where they show a clip of tomorrows world etc from the 60’s where James Burke or Raymond Baxter are enthusing about some potential innovation and predicting how we will use them in the future (i.e. today). They then cut back to the present and the two presenters (neither of whom can rewire a plug or attach a file to an email) make jokes: cue talk of hover cars and pills instead of meals etc

Well as far I can see we just didn’t deserve hover cars, tinfoil clothes well that’s down to Topshop and as for pills for meals well apart from the meat and two veg pill, we gobble plenty of omega 3 etc now don’t we. Of course the future wasn’t the Jetsons but it isn’t that bad. No one jokes about wrist watch TV anymore, now we have I phones and we have other minor miracles too.

Take the thumb drive, USB memory stick, doggle call it what you will, they are science fiction. My first computer was a Dragon 32 i.e. it had 32 kilobytes of memory (that wiped it self when you turned it off) I now have 2 USB sticks that hold 4 Giga bytes of memory, in my pocket that is almost 500 3 min pop songs, they are truly amazing and they cost less than tenner from Argos. The memory card in my phone is even tinier (about 4-5mm square). It’s predicted that very soon your entire hard drive will fit on USB stick and you can carry it around plug it in where ever you go, that's a laptop in your jeans!

Of course back in the studio Kirsty and Dermot will joke about not being able to understand the instruction book and then cut to Darfur and talk to Kate Addie over a satellite video phone, we some times forget how far we’ve come.

Friday night is comedy night:
Speaking of innovation, do yourself a favour and download the podcast of the Newsquiz the first 5 mins of this edition is worth it alone. Andy Hamliton makes an excellent gag about a proposed British Motto being “ I keep thinking it’s Tuesday” which is so accurately sublime and even Mark steel is funny, check it out.