5 Cool Things We Didn't Have in 1981

All this hoopla over The Royal Wedding is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to 1981, but at least this time a few members of the media are speaking out on how ridiculous this whole business is. A tiny step in the right direction; who knows, maybe in another thirty years we'll have wised up enough to ignore this dumb shit completely.

But it got me to thinking, although I do tend to go on and on about the glories of the past, there are some elements of the present that make life much, much better for those of us alive right now. So much better that they deserve their own blog post.

I'm going to start out by saying that I'm not including The Internet here, because obvious stuff is obvious. And then there are things like Debit Cards and Cel Phones, which did improve people's lives but also brought in a whole new set of problems. Debit cards make people overspend, and cel phones make people stupid.

What I'm talking about here are the little everyday things that make life more livable. Things like:

1. Toothpaste in Plastic Tubes

If you remember the days when all toothpastes came in metal tubes, you remember how you had to carefully squeeze from the bottom. You probably also remember that every household had at least one moron who'd squeeze from the middle, thus trapping a bunch of toothpaste at the bottom of the tube and wasting it. You could get one of those little keys that you clip to the tube and wind up, making it easier to squeeze from the bottom, but that only worked if the aforementioned moron wasn't squeezing from the middle.

Plastic tubes eliminated that problem, something for which I thank the gods of technology every morning and every night.

2. Flat Screen TV's

Flat screen TV's are one of those things that I love for no other reason than that we were supposed to have them. We were told that in the future, there would by flying cars, meals-in-a-pill, and flat TV's. The future is here, we still don't have flying cars and meals-in-a-pill, but we do have flat TV's, so that's one thing that worked out as planned.

3. Electronic Billboards

In a perfect world there wouldn't be any billboards, but if we must have them, why not have the ones that light up, change display, and generally make cityscapes more interesting and less dreary? Yes, I know they're an energy sink. I still think they're pretty neat.

4. Digital Compositing

(geek on) OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME! (/geek off)
Movies look better without matte lines. Period, end of.

5. Home Video
(Technically, this was around in 1981, but wouldn't become ubiquitous until much later).

You know what I don't miss? Movie theaters. Sure, there was some magic to the days of Going To The Movies, but I'm quite happy to sacrifice the magic if it means not having to deal with crying babies, drunken adults, gross floors and idiots in the projection booth who forget to change the focus after the previews. In more recent years we've also had stupid people on cel phones and commercials before they even start with the previews. Why put up with all that when every other person has a huge flat screen TV, and a movie's video release comes just a few months after the theatrical release? I look forward to the day that groups of people form private movie clubs, and just rent out a theater to watch the latest release. If that doesn't happen, movie theaters can just die.