Metamorphosism

Living in the future

Did you know that there was an episode of Space:1999 called The Metamorph? Not to mention the whole "Moonbase Alpha" thing. Driving to work today, after the fog cleared, I saw a pedestrian, a woman in her late forties with a savage red dye-job and a hairdo just like the sort of fluffy page-boy do's that the women on some television science fiction show had; I think it was Space 1999, but cannot find any images online. As a boy, that sort of defined the ideal woman for me. Dressed in silver, with a haircut like that, wow.

[Correction: As pointed out by Eeksy-Peeksy in the comments to this post, the show I was thinking of was UFO. So just forget all the stuff I say about Space:1999 except that Barbara Bain is pretty hot too. But really. The girls on UFO were something, weren't they? And look, their hair was purple!
I never knew that -- we had a b/w set.]

There was an article in the editorial pages of a newspaper I read. It was about robots and how they're doing our work for us. And how we'll have all this leisure. What it didn't mention was that said leisure will be consumed in the form of unemployment, unless you happen to own a robot. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, we were told that increasing productivity would mean greater leisure, more time to educate ourselves and pursue hobbies. In fact, those of us with jobs, some of us at least, are working longer hours than before. If you don't own the means of production, improved productivity does not help you.

Other than that, the future is pretty cool.