Well, the new millennium is upon us and, despite frantic planning (or the frantic avoidance of said planning, which is what actually took place), the final equinox changing seems to have come with more a whimper than a bang.

Still, it’s definitely a fact that the twentieth century is finally over and that we’ve passed completely into the sci-fi epic that was supposed to be the twenty-first century.

Hmmm…

Kind of a letdown, innit?

Despite waiting several years before writing this column (ahem… I started it in 2001…), sitting it out and observing what’s new with the world, it turns out that this bright new age of discovery and science isn’t all that much different from the dark old age of, er, discovery and science, and is nowhere NEAR what people thought it’d be a few decades ago.

Jump back to the fifties and sixties (or before, if you can do so) and take a look at what they had in mind for the year 2003 and you’ll see a pretty huge discrepancy in what they had foreseen and what actually happened. Frankly, I’d be happy with just a ray gun or a floating car or something… but we don’t even have that much.

My computer doesn’t accept voice commands, nor does it control things in my house. That was one of the big things I was looking forward to… I wanted to come home, say “Turn the lights on,” to no one in particular and have the lights turn on. Then I wanted to go in the kitchen and say, “BLT on white, no mayo,” and have it materialize in some little techno-cubby for my consumption. That just didn’t happen. My computer does do some fairly interesting things like make little guys jump around and play movies and whatnot, and my mouse is cool and lights up, but it always could do that and still doesn’t do anything remarkably twenty-first century-ish.

My car does not float above the ground. Granted, it’s not a NEW car (and probably weighs too much) but, from everything I’ve seen, new cars also do not float above the ground. If they did, there would be a lot less traffic on Route 23. New cars DO manage to achieve a lot of cool (though vaguely useless) things like superimpose your speedometer on your windshield and automatically keep the temperature at a specified level while, for some absurd reason, simultaneously telling you what the temperature is outside (where you’re not), but still, nobody seems to have perfected that whole floating thing.

My dog still sniffs its butt. I was hoping against hope that with the coming of the new century he’d instantaneously turn into some crazy Hanna Barbera dog and start talking to me and responding to voice commands but, alas, that seems to have not happened. I have seen a cat with opposable thumbs (a horrifying thing, let me tell you), but I’m not sure if that’s due as much to evolution as it is to just plain weirdness.

There’s a Sony Playstation occupying the space that some people thought would be occupied by some ridiculously high-tech virtual reality brain chip machine. Though the Discovery Channel tells me that they exist in huge corporate laboratories, military contractors and whatnot, I’ve yet to see (or use) one of them. The closest I’ve got to it is playing Doom with the lights off… which is sort of anti-climactic when you consider the intended alternative.

Mind you, we HAVE advanced somewhat. For instance, we’ve done away with Disco (despite the efforts of some VH1 executives) and Ford Pintos, and I’ll be damned if I can find a hippie within a thousand miles of here (I do know someone with love beads, though I’ll deny it if you ask me).

Frankly, I don’t think things CAN get much more advanced. People keep talking about new technologies and how it’s time to overhaul everything we’ve used for the past century but, at least in my opinion, I think what we’ve got is pretty efficient.

For instance, I know how to use a stock, one-piece, non-Dvorak computer keyboard. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve gotten fairly quick at it. But computer developers believe that it’s time to do away with that, to create something totally new (if not totally inane), which doesn’t set with me because I’m good at using a keyboard. Remember, people also said that, with the advent of the computer, television and formatted audio/video media, that text would eventually be dead. It isn’t yet, as you have probably noticed (if it was, you wouldn’t be reading this, now wouldja?) and I attribute that to the simple fact that, like the old QWERTY keyboards, it is efficient and can’t really be improved upon.

There’s also the subject of newer technology that can’t ever work right. I was watching something the other night about how some plane manufacturer wants to make jets that pilots can control with their EYE MOVEMENTS. That’s right — some test pilot in a simulated situation managed to (stressfully) maneuver a fake jet around an obstacle course. Great idea on paper, but I don’t care how complex and foolproof the computer systems get — if that pilot’s eye twitches, he’s going to crash into a mountain and there’s just nothing that can be done about it.

The twentieth century was one of those centuries that shot by and totally revamped the way the world worked. By the end of it we’d developed computers, airplanes, television, automobiles, weapons of mass destruction, fifty-seven friggin’ varieties (and spelling variations) of ketchup and God only knows what else that wasn’t there at the beginning. Now that the twenty-first has arrived, people are thinking about what’s next.

Waste of time, if you ask me: I don’t think we CAN predict what’s next, because whatever it’s going to be is going to be something that, frankly, never occurred to us. I mean, in the early 1800’s, who seriously considered the concept of an airplane or a computer?  Nobody! People were still wearing buckles on their shoes and reinforced, non-contour dresses wide enough to be circus tents, and it’ll be at least a decade or two into this century before we even get a glimpse of what’s to come. Check it out, though: when you hear some minor news report about an entirely new technology, some teleportation device or something, that’s being mucked about with by tech students, think where it’ll be in a hundred years, and THERE is your next big technological advancement.

In the meantime, I’ll stick with my old-school computer keyboard, my car that doesn’t float and my dog that still sniffs places that he oughtn’t, and I’ll be perfectly happy with it.

Well… I could do without the butt sniffing.

AJH