I nearly posted this story in the comments here but realized at the last moment that it had nothing to do with the internet, besides the fact that I shall now tell said story on the internet, and refrained because we don’t want to look like a corny old guy on someone else’s weblog do we.

I was visiting a friend back in the days when nearly everything happened exclusively in real life. I was visiting a friend, in fact staying at his house for an extended period. I won’t say that he left me to my own devices a great deal, but I did spend a fair amount of time watching his pet squirrel run in the wheel mounted in its cage. It was a rather small cage, and being a squirrel the animal had lots of energy, and spent a lot of time running in its wheel, and I spent a lot of time watching it – being a lazy human I had less energy, at least relatively so; or perhaps merely more indolence.

One day my squirrel-watching was interrupted by a blonde woman who, well, not “burst,” and not “barged” … who “entered the room with a certain dramatic flair” and announced to everyone there (at this point I had reached a stage where I watched the squirrel closely even when other, potential conversation-partner types were in the room) and announced, “Boy do I ever hate American men.”

I sort of looked up, then went back to my squirrel-watching, thinking, “it’s you and me, little buddy.”

I also thought, “wonder if all Austrian women are like this.” (I should interject at this point that this took place in Austria, you see, a stone’s throw from where we now live. Well, a bit further. How far is a stone’s throw… fifty meters would be a good toss, wouldn’t it? Depending on stone and wind conditions? More like thirty stone’s throws from where we now live, but by car it takes just a couple minutes, it’s very near. But it was a long, roundabout story between that meeting and moving into the house where we now live.)

And that’s how we met.

The squirrel’s cage squeaked, faintly but constantly.

Banshee Studios.

All you hip travellers out there might be interested to know that a new online travel magazine, The Hip Traveller, is seeking article submissions.

Either real people are actually signing up for the Metamorphosism Challenge or someone’s playing a joke on me.

Wish I would have thought of this.

Did you know that there was an episode of Space:1999 called The Metamorph? Not to mention the whole “Moonbase Alpha” thing. Driving to work today, after the fog cleared, I saw a pedestrian, a woman in her late forties with a savage red dye-job and a hairdo just like the sort of fluffy page-boy do’s that the women on some television science fiction show had; I think it was Space 1999, but cannot find any images online. As a boy, that sort of defined the ideal woman for me. Dressed in silver, with a haircut like that, wow.

[Correction: As pointed out by Eeksy-Peeksy in the comments to this post, the show I was thinking of was UFO. So just forget all the stuff I say about Space:1999 except that Barbara Bain is pretty hot too. But really. The girls on UFO were something, weren't they? And look, their hair was purple!
I never knew that -- we had a b/w set.]

And now that we’re here in the future, look at it. What a ripoff. I mean really. Is this what you thought it would be like?

There was an article in the editorial pages of a newspaper I read. It was about robots and how they’re doing our work for us. And how we’ll have all this leisure. What it didn’t mention was that said leisure will be consumed in the form of unemployment, unless you happen to own a robot. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, we were told that increasing productivity would mean greater leisure, more time to educate ourselves and pursue hobbies. In fact, those of us with jobs, some of us at least, are working longer hours than before. If you don’t own the means of production, improved productivity does not help you.

Other than that, the future is pretty cool.