Frac the Interac.

I am grateful for my self restraint in North American stores and restaurants. I have yet to hurl one of their Interac machines across the room through a plate glass window.
In Europe, when you are handed the little machine, you are requested simply to enter your passcode and hit OK - and that's it, transaction completed, goodbye, have a nice day, please come again, next time bring a friend.
Not so much over here. Over here, the little machines treat you like a freaking moron. Are you sure you want to spend this amount? Then you have to spend an extra five seconds agreeing to agree with the transaction and then you get another screen suggesting you enter your passcode!
Why is this? If your card is in the machine and the machine is in your hand, good chance that you're good with the whole money spending thing, no? As soon as it's plonked in your fat little hand, the only thing your index sausage should have to worry about is entering your passcode - I mean, COME ON, am I wrong on this?
Think about how many times you use Interac in the course of a day - multiply by five seconds, multiply by 365 days, multiply by 30 or 40 years. Get the picture?
(Of course, this is just a tiny fraction of a much, much larger bank rant, but we'll save that for another post.)

Hey Dude, where's my 21st Century?

What I love most about the 60's is that the future back then was so much better than what reality has turned out to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hate to be the one to break it you, but we’ve all been had.

The movies of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s promised us a certain level of cool in the 21st Century.

Well here we are, and here it isn’t.

Manned space flight to Jupiter, eradication of all ailments, universal jet packs, colonies on the moon, personal robots, a greed-free Utopian society and, of course, the ubiquitous flying car. No, nope, nah, not, not bloody likely, I wish and yeah, right. I don’t know about you, but I’m lucky if I can coerce my truck up a steep hill, let alone into the wild blue yonder. And in terms of the vehicles we do have, there really haven’t been great strides, have there? Each new model year seems to be about which automaker’s designers got the most sandpaper for Christmas and whose safety engineers got the most exploding balloons. Isn’t there a point at which it ceases to be a car, and starts to become a balloon-filled jello mould?

Perhaps most heinous of all, we don’t even have video phones yet! Okay the latest iPhone is edging us closer (providing you're in a wireless LAN environment.) But otherwise folks, it’s 2010 and the best we can do is beam anemic, low rez images between cell phones. Woo hoo! (Is that a zit on your forehead or do I have a dead pixel?) And then there’s the really important stuff. Take cancer. They’ve had over half a century to nail that one. And we’re still dropping like flies. Where are the nanobots that were supposed to be coursing through our veins like tiny latter day Dukes of Hazzard?

So seeing all the broken promises, we should probably cast around for the guilty, that at least seems very 21st Century. But does one blame the scientists for not providing this cool stuff? Or the novelists and movie makers for over-promising on it? I think the former, since these things really aren’t that outlandish and they’ve fallen so far short on so much. To the point where this “21st Century” future is really more of yesterday, repackaged with better graphic design.

Or am I just expecting too much too soon? I don’t think so. More than one movie of yesteryear was specifically about life in 2001. And then there are all the things which I had promised my future self. New products that I was sure would be on the shelves of Walmart in the early years of this bold new century. Like the microwave that makes things rapidly cold instead of hot and the flashlight that emits darkness instead of light. (Hell, I even have names for those two, the nitrowave and the flashdark. Cool huh?)

And yes, I know we have managed to come up with a bunch of new methods to communicate, like email and text messaging - however in the main they are used to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. Besides, the really cool one - you know, the one that lets you hear the other person’s voice and actually talk together like humans, was invented a century ago.

Worse still, our future – today’s future –  has suffered. The future we collectively envisaged mid-way through the last century was far more exciting than the one we imagine now. It’s like our writers and film-makers are so disheartened by the no show of yesterday’s tomorrow, they’re hesitant to imagine today’s tomorrow.

In fact, throughout our society, nostalgia has usurped today’s culture. Not only have we failed to create a credible dream for the future, in many ways (certainly culturally), we are still stuck in the past. Our top radio stations play music from the 70’s and the 80’s, top grossing films are continuations or remakes of old tried-and-true movie formulae. What does growing up look and sound like to a kid today?

In conclusion, and in the words of one such remade character, “Throw me a bone here people, it’s not like I’m asking for sharks with frikkin laser beams on their heads.”