The Future, the way it used to be: Rocket Mail!

Howdy!

MizBubs and I met the lady to your right last December in Las Vegas. She was taken with my gold lame jacket, and we were both impressed by her atomic headgear and pneumatic sense of style. After a few drinks and a reasonably priced buffet, she agreed to stop by and help host our "The Future, the way it used to be" feature.

The year is 1957. A bold visionary by the name of Frank Tinsley reports that, in the not-too-distant future (1965), mail will be delivered via rocket:

IT’S Friday noon. In the home office of a giant New York corporation the final drafts of a secret merger are being signed. If they can be signed by the party of the second part in San Francisco and be back here in the office before the stock market closes—so that “buy” orders can be rushed to dealers throughout the country—a possible Monday financial slump can be averted. The atmosphere is tense. A micro- photo machine has been moved into the president’s office and a trusted operator inserts the sheets, one by one. Two tiny prints of each emerge, one for the files and one for mailing. The latter is sealed in a pencil-thin plastic carrier bearing the written address and the code punch for San Francisco. The carrier is then popped into a pneumatic tube that takes it to a central post office where it emerges into a sorting machine. Automatically identifying the punch mark, this device drops it into the San Francisco container. At scheduled intervals, an attendant seals these containers and inserts them in a large pneumatic tube to the rooftop heliport. Here our letter is picked up by a fast convertaplane that flies hourly between the city and the rocket base.

Arriving at the base, our pilot hovers over the Frisco-bound rocket. Mail containers are lowered to a loading crew perched high on the missile’s open cargo doors. Parcel post packages follow swiftly and the doors are swung upward and locked. The “service stand” retracts its telescoping tower, folds it neatly on its bed and pulls away from the missile pit.

You can see the rest of this nifty article at one of my favorite places, Modern Mechanix. Honestly, I am envious of all the cool stuff they've got over there.

The Future, The Way It Used To Be: Pre-Halloween Edition

It's no secret I dig the chicks from the future. For those of you uninterested in glamorous space-age cheesecake, check out the ripped abs and futuristic lightning bolt sash on spaceman, there.

I aim to please.

The Future, the way it still has a chance to be (II)

I nearly forgot. While a future populated by hot space girls and robot dogs might be my ideal, what do you gals have to look forward to? Well, don't worry. The future could also be full of earnest, friendly and intrepid young space men in reasonably tight-fitting velour tunics, carrying amazing futuristic devices that take at least, oh, 6 or 8 "D" cell batteries...

The Future, the way it still has a chance to be

Yeah. That's the ticket.

Hot space chicks and adorable little robot dogs. Now there's a future I can look forward to, even if I'm only a head floating in a tray of plasma by then.

The Future, the way it used to be: 1936

From one of my favorite sites: Modern Mechanix.

On the cutting edge of pointless information

I am in awe of sites like BoingBoing that have the ability to constantly find interesting stuff from around the world. If my monkey-training experiment grant money ever comes through, I might have the technical capability to run a blog like that some day. Frequently I get excited about finding something interesting that I want to share with everyone, only to find out (like with Alexyss K. Tylor) that I'm about two weeks behind the rest of the interwebs.

Sometimes, though, I do get satisfaction from being ahead of the curve. That happened twice in one day yesterday. Yesterday was a great day--I dragged my ass out of bed and made it to the Saturday morning training run with the Alpine Runners in Lake Zurich. Later on in the day we attended a combination Cinco de Mayo and birthday party for Splotchy's youngest son, and finished by stopping by the Sand Bar Tiki Lounge in Brookfield.

Anyway, I'm driving home from my run, listening to NPR. Weekend Edition ran an interview with Daniel Wilson, author of a new book titled Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived. I see that Mr. Wilson's book was published on April 17 2007, so I'll graciously assume that he had the majority of it written before I posted this, or this, or finally, this piece about the Bell Rocket Belt. And another thing--I think "future that never arrived" sounds suspiciously close to "future the way it used to be." But like I said, I'm gracious, and I wish Mr. Wilson success with his book.

Here's the second incident: after making a run to Costco, I put on CNN hoping to catch up on some news before leaving for the birthday party. The news wasn't on, but I did catch a segment called "In the Money"; during this segment they talked with author Robert Sutton about his book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

Here's what the hosts said in the lead-in to the interview:

ROMANS: The title of a new book by Robert Sutton includes a seven-letter word --

VELSHI: Which I taped over.

ROMANS: That management won't let us say on TV and we probably shouldn't say. We don't want to say it anyway.

VELSHI: Right as long as we don't want to say it while the TV's rolling, but the word starts with an a and ends with somebody wanting to put their fist through the wall.

ROMANS: It is causing a buzz; nonetheless, author Robert Sutton joins us. Welcome to the program. ...

"Causing a buzz" CNN? Causing a buzz?!? The book was published in February 2007, but if anyone at CNN had done proper research by reading this blog they would have learned about Mr. Sutton's important work back in November 2006. I even followed up the initial post with a Monday Morning Asshole Update.

There you have it folks. Enjoy your day!

It's a Beautiful World

Erik from Erik's Choice reminded me of this video from Devo. While I'm sad to report that this video does not feature the same mambo lovelies as appeared in my earlier post, there's still plenty of goodness in there. At one point I thought "NICE MARACAS", and get this--the Bell Rocket Belt even makes an appearance!

Yes, it's a beautiful world today. MizBubs, girl dynamo, and I have started our annual de-whitetrashification of our yard, and I'm taking a brief break while she goes out for mulch. She's pretty and she's strong. I got to see my niece and nephew this weekend to celebrate my nephew's first birthday. I managed to slip away from work without any major hassles, and now I'm off for a couple of days; starting Tuesday I'll spend the rest of the week at a conference that I've really been looking forward to. I might have more on that later.

Today is our youngest daughter's 15th birthday, and hopefully, when she gets home from school, I'll get to go for a run with her while she rides her new, shiny pink, retro-looking bicycle. She's just incredibly smart and good-looking and feisty, and I can' t wait to pick her up after school. We "celebrated" yesterday, so tonight will just be a relaxed family evening. She shares a birthday with Henry Mancini, so we might celebrate tonight with some swanky music. Who knows. I know I've got a tasty dinner planned--roast pork tenderloin, roasted beets, and cabbage braised in red wine.

Our eldest, Dystopia (the one who tells me she can't blog because, unlike her sad, bitter and ineffectual father, she has a real life) just got accepted into Phi Theta Kappa, an honor society for community colleges. Pretty slick for an 18 year old whose peers are just finishing high school.

So, without further ado, Devo:

The Future, the way it used to be: The Bell Rocket Belt

When people think of the future the way it used to be, they almost always think of the rocket belt. Specifically, the Bell Rocket Belt. Pictured to the right is the Bell Rocket Belt Traveling Team, relaxing poolside in Williamsburg, VA. The inventor of the Rocket Belt, Wendell Moore, is the fellow leaning on the umbrella stand.

The US Army Transportation Research Command and the press got their first look at the Rocket Belt at Fort Eustis, Virginia, on June 8, 1961.

Who got to fly this masterpiece? Hal Graham. Hal Graham, who in my book is one of the 10 coolest human beings in all of history, has a fascinating website devoted to the Rocket Belt.

Here's a link to the official US Army Transportation Museum page dedicated to the Rocket Belt.
Click here to see a cool picture of another individual flying machine concept, the solar copter imagined in 1957.

Now enjoy the educational video.

The Future, the way it used to be!

This is the first installment of a new feature here at the compound:

The Future, the way it used to be!

Today we feature the Ampex home videotape recording unit, featured in a 1966 newspaper story. Ampex also had a fancy model that came as part of a massive console television. The console model came with a pert blonde who would sit and stare longingly at the screen for hours on end.

The portable home model shown above was a huge improvement over the 1956 model pictured here.

R.I.P. Stardust

Another piece of old Las Vegas disappeared this morning with the implosion of the fabulous Stardust Resort & Casino.

Back in the day the Stardust was BIG, baby: biggest hotel in Las Vegas, biggest pool, a huge drive in movie screen...no fancy lawns or sweeping circular drives like other casino hotels at the time--no. Just a big-ass parking lot full of cars with tail fins. In 1960 the Aku Aku Polynesian restaurant and tiki bar opened, and the space-age Stardust was graced by a big stone tiki head out front.

Siegfried and Roy started at the Dust. Wayne Newton played the showroom in the declining years but bailed and let George Carlin take over toward the end.

The Stardust was a famously mobbed-up casino, run by Frank Rosenthal and Tony "The Ant" Spilotro. While it was referred to in the movie Casino as "The Tangiers", the Stardust appeared in all its glory, as itself, in the classic "Showgirls". It also appears in "Swingers".

MizBubs and I have only one Stardust story. On our last trip, in August 2006, we stopped in one afternoon after visiting Elvisarama, and had a drink while a karaoke competition was going in the lounge. There we saw one of the coolest old men we'd ever seen doing the most hep version of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." This guy wore a sky blue baseball cap and some high-waisted jeans, and when he was done he sat down at a table with a couple of boozed-up young pretties. What a guy.

Two months later, in October 2006, the place was closed. And now I'm sad, even though I never stayed there or gambled a dime in the casino. I just liked knowing it was there, a bit of old-school class, surrounded by vacant lots, porn slappers and tacky souvenir shops, in what my brothers referred to as the "bitch end" of the Strip. It was a good place to catch a cab after leaving the Peppermill Fireside Lounge (which is perhaps the swankiest place in all of America.)

I've only been going to Las Vegas since 1998, and I'm amazed at how many places have been torn down and replaced in 9 short years:

The Aladdin was torn down and replaced by...The Aladdin. Which is now Planet Hollywood.

The Desert Inn (the first place I ever stayed in LV, and the best-smelling hotel lobby ever) is now the site of the Wynn.

The Boardwalk, formerly home of Purple Reign, and one of the most horrible clown facades in history, is gone.

The Westward Ho, where I was frequently mistaken for security, is about to become luxury condos for rich assholes from California.

Mandalay Bay, The Aladdin, Bellagio, Paris, The Venetian, and Wynn have all come online since my first visit. The San Remo is now Hooters. The Treasure Island, which used to have the coolest sign in the world, is now "TI", with the pirate show replaced by some buccaneering showgirl atrocity. I know I'm forgetting stuff, but you get the picture. Imagine how this all looks to someone who pulled up at the Stardust back in 1959, eager to check in to his $6 room.



You can read about the final days of the Stardust, with some really cool pictures, here. You can find a good chronology of Las Vegas implosions here at Vegas Today and Tomorrow.

I wanna be an airborne ranger

I wanna look like Wile E. Coyote, super genius...

This is the airborne special forces operator of the future, according to this article: