RTW: where would i live?

The Road Trip Wednesday topic this week is: If you could live within the universe of one book, which would you choose?

Hm, okay, I'd have to say -- purely because I'm obsessed with this book right now -- the world of A.J. Jacobs's novel The Know It All. And yeah, it's non-fiction, which makes it kind of weird, but I would just like to live in the hilarious humor of A.J.'s life.  Clarification: I would like to be as hilarious as A.J. It's the kind of book that you can sneak little bits of throughout the day, because it's in short essay-ish form, so I've been snatching pieces of it for the last couple of days. Not that I technically have the time...but I can't help myself. He is so. funny.

words for chewing

I am bursting with words -- other peoples' words. Like Steinbeck's. Like this:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

...

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise -- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream -- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals, there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book -- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves. 

From Cannery Row.

unpredictable 2011

Last night, my dad and I were laughing at some old, silly predictions people made for the future. We found them here, on a technology blog by Cody Willard, and I thought I'd share the best.

In 1876, the Western Union said in an internal memo: "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."

Also in the 1870s, a celebrity scientist: "Do not bother to sell your gas shares. The electric light has no future." 

In 1943, the chairman of IBM said: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

And in 2008, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO), said about the future of apps: "Let's look at the facts. Nobody uses these things."

Hilarious, right? The Western Union had no idea. That celebrity scientist just looks crazy now. And...okay, I'm definitely an Apple person, so I have no qualms about saying that Steve Ballmer is obviously no visionary.

But I'm not, either. Neither are you -- probably. We have no idea, absolutely no idea, what the future's going to hold, and I'm not just talking technology here.

This is good and bad. Bad in that we can make all the resolutions and goals that we want, and nothing will go as planned. But good in that there's hope. And endless possibilities, and endless question marks, and endless new starts.

It's like that Tom Petty song: "Into the great wide open..."

2011 is wide open. Happy new year.