BoomerZoo Almanac for May 6-12, 2007: Slow down! We're moving too fast!
I have a theory that the earth is actually spinning faster than it used to. That’s the only logical explanation for how short the days, weeks, and years have become. Looking back on this week in Boomer history, it’s not surprising that the world seems to be spinning out of control.
The very first Baby Boomers were just popping out of the womb when the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company was founded. We all know this little firm by its current name, Sony, a company which has long given us immediacy in media entertainment.
Polaroid, the company that delivered instant photos in the analog age, sold its first instant camera in 1949. The price tag? $89.99. Translated into today’s dollars? $777.00.
That same year, the very first launderette opened in Queensway, London, so by the time Dacron suits were produced 1951, a guy could get off work at 5:00, zoom to the Laundromat, take off his suit, wash it, dry it and put it back on in time for dinner! Of course, the suit might have shrunk, since the fabric for these suits was a polyester and worsted blend. And I’m not sure how many men actually knew about the launderette in the 1950s. Plus, standing around a Laundromat in your undies in those days could get you arrested.
Then came something Dummer—Geoffrey Dummer. In 1952 Mr. Dummer published the very first concept for an integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers. I’m sitting in front of the result of that right now, still wondering if I love this machine or despise it. It certainly uses up a lot of my precious time. Plus, computers are getting smarter, and I suspect I’m not. Some of them can already outsmart me, and I’m not just talking about the confusion of the so-called User Manuals. Nope. It’s already been 10 years since Deep Blue, the IBM computer, defeated human chess master Garry Kasparov to win a six-game chess match in New York.
Bill Haley, along with his Comets, made music a 24/7 proposition with the release of “Rock Around the Clock,” the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the Billboard charts. ("Rock Around the Clock" released)
That same year a mild-mannered medical student, Roger Bannister, dashed into the fray when he became the first known person in history to run a mile in less than four minutes. (First four-minute mile) Even the foot traffic is picking up speed! These days the speed isn’t just in the feet, unfortunately. In the first week of May in 1989, Canadian Olympian Ben Johnson admitted having used anabolic steroids to “enhance performance.” He wasn’t the only one, of course. Lots of athletes think they can’t perform without help. Take Seattle Slew, who won the first of his Triple Crown races on May 7, 1977—that poor horse really had a jockey on his back!
In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow condemned TV programming as a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. Only two years later, AT&T’s Telstar II communications satellite was launched, so we could get to a now much vaster wasteland much more quickly—and in living color! But bouncing color TV signals around the earth’s atmosphere doesn’t seem like that much of an achievement when you compare it to shooting the moon (literally) with a laser beam, which was done by MIT scientists in the year between Minow’s speech and the launch of Telstar II.
For those who don’t want to run, ride a horse or wait for a laser beam to make the trip between Great Britain and mainland Europe, there’s the Channel tunnel—referred to playfully as the Chunnel (because we’re in too much of a hurry to have to use two words, when one will do), which was officially opened by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and France’s President Francois Mitterrand on May 6, 1994 [English Channel tunnel opens]. Here we are flying through the sky and digging tunnels under the sea in order to KEEP ON TRUCKIN’! Maybe those holes are what’s making the earth spin faster. Hmm…
What with TV and the moon so easily within our reach, print media is really having a hard time keeping up. During this week in 1971, the Daily Sketch newspaper closed its doors. It was Britain’s oldest tabloid, having been founded in 1909. Trees just don’t grow fast enough to keep up in the digital age. More bad news for the laid back crowd when Bob Marley died just 10 years later. In a world where things seem to be picking up speed by the second, another slowdown occurred—and I really got a kick out of this—when in 2003 fifty-nine Democratic lawmakers brought the Texas House of Representatives to a standstill by going into hiding in a dispute over a Republican congressional redistricting plan. Of course, slowing down a legislature probably doesn’t really count. That seems to be one of the few areas of our universe that has remained stubbornly hard to get moving at all.
Well, here I am looking at the clock and completely stunned at how long it’s taken me to write less than 1,000 words. You know, these days we don’t even have time to watch our weight—May 6 is now International No Diet Day. We’ve designated a day of awareness for not maintaining our diets! Oh, wait (weight?) – this appears to be a day when we are to purposely not diet in honor of the natural human form. I don’t think I have time to not diet, do I?
