If you are reading this I must have crawled out of the blog hole and my new computer has extended the digital hand of friendship to WordPress. Read about my Staycation soon.
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Weird Wednesday – Mind Boggling
Do you find new technology mind boggling? By new I mean anything that you did not personally know about this time last week. Do you find recent innovations mind boggling? By recent I mean anything that has happened since you left school.
You obviously think you know about technology otherwise you would not be reading this on a device of some sort, but do you know how it actually works? If you do, please let the rest of us know. For most of us the mysterious workings are akin to alchemy or the dark arts. Chips are involved and are made of silicone, rather than potatoes and silicone is made from sand. There is plenty of sand on the beach, but what happens next?
On line workings are supposedly run by AI, or computers as we used to call them, but how come these logical beings have a very human urge to deliberately annoy us?
I can do all sorts of things on line, but Arty Imp lulls me into a false sense of security and confidence. Browsing wallpaper on B&Q’s site on my desk top ( I like to see everything on a large screen ) it offered to send samples for a small remuneration. I put several into the shopping basket, already I could picture how my attic office might look. I put in my order as a guest, it wouldn’t let me, it seemed I had joined B&Q Club when I bought one garden chair on line. I looked up my little notebook and typed in my email and the password I had presumably used last time. It did not recognise it. No problem, just pretend I had forgotten it. Nothing would enable me to get a password they approved of, links were sent to my email, texted to me… I gave up, it would be easier to take two buses to my nearest B&Q where I would not see the wallpapers I liked, because they had already told me they were only available on line… Anyway, not as if it was important… but thinking outside the box later I decided to pretend I was a new customer and use my other email address, Not join the club, say No to being on the emailing list. I did not want any sort of relationship, just the wallpaper samples. My purchase went straight through with reassuring emails and they soon arrived in the post. Of course, obviously if I choose one I like they will not actually let me buy a whole roll…
To check how Tech Savy you are take this simple test.
You want to send money to your nephew for his birthday. Do you
- Use face recognition or finger print to do a bank transfer on your phone
- Get on the bus and go to the nearest town that still has a branch of your bank open and talk to a human behind the desk.
It’s your sister’s birthday today, do you
- WhatsApp her to arrange a time to Facetime
- Ring her on your landline.
You have not heard from your elderly aunt for a few days, do you
- Play a round of Words With Friends on your phone and see if she plays back.
- Call her house phone from your house phone which is firmly tethered by a wire.
You need a relaxing evening after dealing with technology all day, do you
- Stream a box set of a new drama and stay up all night binge watching
- Look in the newspaper or Radio Times to see what’s on BBC before the ten o’clock news.
If you answered A to all the questions welcome to the first quarter of the 21st century, but beware what you will face in this next quarter.
If you answered B every time you just might be able to cope if all the electricity is switched off, perhaps…
But how is the present matching up to the future predicted in the 20th century? We are not sitting at a phone table with a curly wire attaching our phone to the wall and a little TV screen showing a live picture of our relatives on the other side of the world.
The first ‘mobile phones’ most of us saw were on Star Trek, some of us watching in black and white. Their hand held flip up devices could Teleport them down to a strange planet, but they could not take photos, text their friends, watch videos or Facetime with friends on the other side of the universe. It may have slowed the plot if they had to play back on Quiz Planet before stepping on to their platform.
On arrival on the new planet they stop to take a selfie together in front of a strange volcano so they can put it on Instagram. Then Captain Kirk pauses to take a picture of the Aliens who have crept up without them noticing. He wants to WhatsApp a picture to his mother billions of light years away.
Meanwhile a junior officer has not noticed the aliens as he is bending down to snap strange plants using the plant recognition App.
His colleague is glued to the screen exclaiming ‘210 points for OXO, how did he do that and I’ve got all vowels’.
Captain Kirk is now on Google maps, having failed to understand what the Aliens are saying, their language is not coming up on his translation App.
The weather App was not much use either as it failed to predict the electric storm and downpour of acid rain. It seems like a good time to beam up, but their phones need recharging…
Did you score A or B or perhaps AB? What is your favourite 21st Century invention?
Silly Sunday – November Nothings
Random ponderings on First World Problems and out of world experiences.
Miserable November afternoon
Happy November morning, welcomed by a Robin singing his heart out.
It has been a discombobulating month so far. WordPress would not let me download new photographs; how could I go on any walks if I couldn’t use my photos! The naughty elf who runs WordPress seemed to be suggesting my gallery was too full. I deleted lots of pictures to no avail and causing havoc to my posts and pages. To be fair to WordPress this was on my desk top computer which is still on Windows 10, now no longer supported, whatever that means. Cyberson2 had suggested I didn’t need to worry or at least there was no point in doing anything, as my old computer would not cope with Windows 11. He had downloaded extra protection when they were visiting recently… And hey ho, I have heard scary things about Windows 11… So I created a test blog on my iPad and whoopee, pictures were accepted, so now I download pictures to the gallery then do my blog on the computer where my word documents are…
Anyway, back to real life. One of our local towns is in lockdown or gridlock… there are always road works somewhere, but this is work on the bypass that does not bypass the town, but ends at the roundabout. Only one side at a time is being closed over the next three weeks, but apparently locals could not drive or catch a bus with any hope of getting there. No problem for me, I don’t drive, don’t live in the town and I walk there. But it turns out walking across the river to your writers’ group or coffee morning is not much good if nobody else is there. Like any group we arrive from all directions to a central point.
Meanwhile, no such problem in Southbourne for our monthly book club, only one person absent. The only problem being half of us had not read the book and only one person loved it, nobody else liked it! After the previous month’s enjoyable hardback in good print size, we were faced with a thick paperback in small print. This is a famous novel many people have loved over the years. Find out what it was at the end of this blog. With two lots of visitors staying and blogs to write, I started reading, but decided I must abandon it. I met one of the other members out and about and was relieved to hear she had not read it either.
It is looking like autumn, but too mild. I have just given my so called lawn its third final mow of the year. Talking of global warming, we seem to have heard too little about Prince William’s Earthshot prize and ten year project. While world leaders preside over wars and destruction, clever people are working and innovating to look after the planet.
And talking of the planet…
Years ago my husband came back indoors one night and said he had just watched the space station fly over Ken’s garage. He had asked another neighbour why he was staring above Ken’s garage. We hadn’t known we could go on line and track its many differing orbits. After that we were obsessed for the period it was passing over Southbourne, or Dorset or England…
The International Space Station, that shining beacon of humanity, science and international cooperation is coming up to retirement or abandonment. My scientific knowledge usually comes from tuning in to the middle of intelligent radio programmes, so it may or may not be true that a space station does not stay in orbit of its own accord and is reliant on the occasional blast of propulsion, worked by the Russians. To bring it down safely to some remote Mexican desert is not guaranteed, dependent as it is on international cooperation. Russia’s MIR was successfully brought down in the desert, but Skylab was scattered over Western Australia in 1979. To have a piece of ISS come down in my road would be blogworthy, but possibly more inconvenient than work on the bypass.
Possible scenario of bits of ISS falling on Bournemouth seafront.
The novel was Catch 22 and the person who loved it also loved my novella Pandemonica and gave it a five star review on Goodreads, so she is obviously a good judge of books...
Have you read Catch 22… or Pandemonica?
Have you spotted the space station or perhaps even been to the space station?
A Quarter of a Century
My father came home one day, very excited with a new invention, Velcro! He worked in plastics, but I’m not sure if the plastic factory where he was manager actually produced it. Looking up Velcro I see it was commercially available in the fifties, but to us in the late 1960s it was a novelty. He kept trying to find ways of using Velcro around the house.
More exciting inventions lay ahead of course, Dad once said that he would like to live to a hundred to see what would be invented. Sadly he only got past seventy. August 2025 he would have been one hundred and I have thought for a while it would be interesting to think of how many new inventions he has missed. This is rather an overwhelming task; there is a difference between something being invented and most people being aware or getting to use it.
2025 also marks a quarter of a century gone by, whether 25 is the last year of the quarter or the first year of the next, doesn’t really matter. I can remember when, thanks to George Orwell, 1984 was The Future, then 2001 A Space Odyssey confirmed the start of a new century as the obvious FUTURE when we would be living in plastic bubbles on the moon.
All that seemed to happen at the turn of the century was the panic that all the computers would get confused and everything would be switched off. At work we were seriously considering whether we should all go home and fill the garage with tins of food and flagons of water. Chez Gogerty we didn’t in the end and luckily all was well.
How has life changed in those twenty five years? Before the millennium I naively thought the twenty first century would be one of peace after all the violence of the twentieth, how wrong could I be. We can definitely conclude that humans have tried everything to make the world a better place, following faith, education, new political ideas, better medical treatments, scientific improvements. Alas new inventions are hijacked by criminals and war mongers as well as doctors and scientists hoping to improve lives.
So what in your life is vastly different from 2001 AD or CE .
I seem to recall saying at the end of last century that had I known home computers were going to be invented, I would not have got married let alone had children! I cannot recall why. Probably children arguing over whose turn it was to use the one computer and me saying everyone was spending too much time on that ghastly second hand machine with green writing, my memories are hazy. I do know that fathers were saying they should get a computer for the children, when they actually wanted one for themselves.
Now of course I can’t imagine not having a computer and iPad and panic if I forget my phone, even if I am just popping to the greengrocers.
What has changed in your life over the past twenty five years?
Unblogging the Drain
Are you completely bloggled? Lots of us are apparently. WordPress changes things every day, or perhaps in the middle of the night, depending on which continent you live. Writing on your phone on a bus going over potholes is not the best way to do things on line, but I can read a blog such as Sally on Smorgasbord, the Like button works, I write a comment and it is published, probably with typos because of the rattly bus and Sally has answered before I get off the bus… Back at home on my trusty desk top with big television screen I write an erudite comment on an intelligent blog, WP asks me to log in, even though I am logged in. I do that and the comment disappears… I’m sure all the blogs I follow seem to work differently and of course we cannot se what our own blogs look like to others.
If I disappear into the clouds, it might not be WordPress’s fault. My sister is over from Australia and staying with me for a month. We are going to do some trips if the trains are working… I might persuade her to write a guest blog.
What else do you do on line and wonder why – like always losing Wordblitz…
Or are you in a controlling relationship with an owl who has promised to teach you another language?
Or are you addicted to Wordle?
Tell us what is leaving you bloggled this week.
Silly Sunday – What, Where and Why?
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
Meanwhile in the wider world I missed this tiny bit of news on Friday morning and wondered why a friend messaged saying ‘hope Microsoft gets fixed so you can order your carpet.’ I wondered whatsap on earth she was talking about. Thank goodness brunch with friends was not affected and fortunately they had heard what was happening, or rather, not happening around the world.
Meanwhile at the carpet shop one doesn’t need a computer to pick a carpet and they write in a book.
And luckily you could still get hydrated for free with an amazing new invention… a water fountain.
All the rain has been good for nomowing.
When ‘news items’ pop up on your computer do you get distracted from writing your blog? Am I the only person who hasn’t heard about these folk before?
’10-foot-tall people’ discovered by archaeologists in Nevada cave – Extraordinary human remains have been found in the US state of Nevada, with some of the skeletons measuring up to 10 feet tall. Alongside their jaw-dropping size, the bodies – some of which were said to have been mummified – were found to have had red hair.
Back to the present and what lies round the corner?
After a ride on that perhaps you had better go somewhere more relaxing.
Have you been affected by the big switch off or ten foot giants?
Tuesday Tiny Tale 420 – 2124
I can’t believe it’s my great grandson’s 100th birthday, seems like only yesterday I was saying ‘I can’t believe I’m a great grandmother.’
I was on the way out by then, several of those conditions eliminated or curable these days. Hanging around was not what I wanted and I set about applying on line to go to Switzerland. I’m still not sure what went wrong, but instead of signing up for Dignitas I had volunteered for Digitass; basically I was downloaded onto a home computer, stuck in my son’s living room forever. Though he’s long gone and I have been moved around a lot since then by various descendants.
Like Concorde and the space shuttle, oh you wouldn’t remember them, anyway Digitass didn’t last long before it was uninvented on moral grounds. I’m one of the lucky ones, not homeless. Those without family or descendants, or family that got fed up with them, were put in storage, staring at blank walls or switched off. That’s been hushed up for decades.
In answer to your question, nobody else in my family was downloaded before it was halted, they had a fair idea what it would be like. I have seen so many of my family die and it never gets any easier. It’s still rare for someone like my great grandson to reach a century, especially now it’s so easy to opt out.
I don’t really get bored; the ‘great-great-greats’ bring their friends like you to talk to me, ask me questions for homework, or just dead curious, ha ha, Dead curious, I can still make jokes. On the rare occasions the family are not too busy, they take me out for ‘a bit of fresh air.’ The irony lost on them that I can’t smell the fresh air. I am glad to see the outside world though, strangely the first quarter of the 22nd century looks very much like the world we were promised in the early years of the 21st century.
Do you know what I miss most, apart from independence? Food. When I see them sitting round stuffing their faces I can almost recall what taste was like. The days are so long without meal breaks and the conviviality of the family dinner table. And what wouldn’t I give for a cup of tea.
The nights are even longer of course as I need no sleep. I have considered applying to be switched off, but that is still against the law and my family don’t approve.
Sunday Short Story – So This Is Christmas
Dilys opened her freezer to discover a bottle of vodka in the top drawer. When she opened the fridge door she did not recognise any of the contents, oat milk, tubs of strange coloured dips and cans of drinks she had never heard of. ‘So This Is Christmas’ she hummed to herself. Well, she wanted to be taken out of her comfort zone.
She opened the back door to check on the weather and was alarmed to see clouds of smoke. Stepping out she was overwhelmed with memories of the little sweet shop.
‘Is it okay if we vape out here Aunty Dill, don’t want to do it indoors and have the little ones see us.’
‘Oh um yes, so that’s what vaping is, I didn’t think it would smell so sickly, I mean sweet.’
‘Different flavours.’
For years Dilys and Joan never saw any family at Christmas, or any other time. The nephews and nieces had their own busy lives to get on with and apparently assumed the two sisters were happy going to church on Christmas morning and having Mr Baxter next door round for lunch. But they were not church goers and Mr Baxter would leave the usual tin of Quality Street for them and fly off somewhere exotic till it was all over. Dilys much preferred Roses chocolates.
When Joan died, leaving Dilys the only survivor of that generation, the families of her late brothers suddenly became aware of her existence and decided she must not be alone at Christmas. They assured her that having three generations to stay in the big house would be no trouble as they would bring all the supplies and do the cooking.
After what happened with Gerald, Joan had insisted she return to the family home they had been brought up in. Joan had stayed on in the house after the death of their parents, the home left solely to her as she had cared for them. It had only been for a few weeks as father had died unexpectedly and mother suddenly deteriorated. Presumably they also left Joan the house as Dilys and her older brothers were all settled in life; they could not have predicted what would happen with Gerald. Dilys had intended it only to be a temporary stay, but there was plenty of room in the large family house and she never worked out how to earn enough to get her own place. There had been a plan B to go travelling, but that never materialised.
With Joan gone she realised she now had the independence she had sought for so long. Dilys quickly established a new community for herself, new friends and interests. Most women seemed to end up on their own at this age, it didn’t matter how they got there. New friends and acquaintances were uninterested in her past and if they did enquire, her enigmatic references made what happened with Gerald sound far more interesting than it actually had been.
There were now things to do and places to go other than the dreaded evenings of Bridge Joan insisted on. Once back indoors Dilys found she was not lonely as she explored the internet on the new home computer the silver surfers class had helped her install.
The young relatives had bought her an iPad and iPhone for Christmas and installed some aps, whatever they were. She was nervous about using the iThingy, but if she got stuck, Mr. Baxter or the silver surfers would help her. Dilys was determined to advance into the future with her new independent self and prove Joan wrong that all this modern stuff was not for them.
Her family seemed to include cooks, computer experts and DIY whizzes so her home was getting a lot of improvements. She had taken a deep breath and tried to laugh it off when she trod on Lego, not cringe when the antique dining table suffered various spillages and not worry as unrinsed beer cans and worse were tossed into her recycling bin.
A couple of days after Christmas Dilys ventured into the living room where her nice new television, installed by that friendly chap from the family run business in the high street, had taken on a life of its own. Dilys could work the remote, switch it on and off, change the few channels she watched and even record programmes. But it seemed the television was a computer gone mad. The older children asked her questions like ‘Have you got Netflix, where’s your Amazon firestick?’ She had no idea what they were talking about. Now there was no one in the room and the television was blaring out advertisements followed by frightening cartoon characters who loomed out of the screen. Tentatively she turned the set off and settled down to do her crossword. Suddenly a toddler came hurtling into the room, stopped in surprise then screamed out ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mr. Bobbly Bod’s gone.’
The house was no longer her own, when did they say they were all going? She crept up to her bedroom, the only sanctuary she had and searched for her tablets and library book. Her once calm pretty room was now stashed with all manner of things that had been rescued from the toddler.
Dinner that night was delicious, a dish she could never have made herself, though it was hard to relax and enjoy it with the toddler throwing food on the floor and a baby squishing food all round its face and all over the high chair, baby led weaning this was called. Of her many regrets at what happened with Gerald, never having children was not one of them. The presence of the little ones and stroppy pre-teens confirmed this. She looked around the crowded dining room. Her mother had always loved filling this big room with family and visitors and would have known exactly who was who. Dilys could identify her nephew and niece, but their partners were different to the original ones she and Joan had met. She was confused as to which babies belonged to who. One great niece had a wife, but who gave birth to the baby with whose egg and who the father was, no one seemed to know.
A great nephew was having his turn with the children for Christmas, but they had to be whisked off to the airport tomorrow and returned to their mother in New York. The way they behaved, she imagined this would be a great relief.
Dilys was too tired to contribute much to the conversation, they were all absorbed in discussions about new kitchens, Veganuary and child care. She smiled to herself. What tales she would have to tell the ‘gals’ at their next coffee morning and post Christmas debriefing. As she mused on the past, present and future of her family she detected a change in topic.
‘Yes we might as well stay on till New Year’s day at least, then we could all go out on New Year’s Eve, Aunty Dill won’t mind babysitting.’
Tuesday Tale -The Book
Tonight’s tale follows on from last week’s or you can read as a stand alone story.
The book had been locked away again; I had only read the opening lines of Door To The Future, published 2028, but enough to know the narrator shared my name and had also been propelled into the future. There must be many Lauren Smiths around, this book need not have anything to do with me, just a coincidence, though how many others of my namesake had gone through the wrong door?
How did it come to be written and if it was about me, was it reassuring proof that I returned to my own time? It was unlikely I had written it, I had no imagination, as my English teacher was always telling me. Before we had the children I worked in an office and wrote reports, dealt with finances. I liked that world of precision and writing a romantic fantasy novel would never have occurred to me. Someone else could have written it, but I knew no writers to tell my story to.
‘Lauren, Miss Smith, did you hear what I said dear, you must be tired, we must let you sleep.’
I had been so deep in thought I had lost track of what my rescuer and his mother were talking about.
‘No, I can’t sleep, I need to find out how this happened to me and how I can get back.’
‘No hurry dear, your time will stay the same, that’s what the book says.’
As they tried to explain their world I realised I could understand their past and my future better than they possibly could. I surmised Billings in the bunker had a better grasp of what had happened; my stomach churned as I wondered if she had made it safely back to the bunker or had she been eaten? I asked my rescuer what creature it was that attacked me.
‘A great cat, he wouldn’t eat you, got plenty of venison and beef out there, they just like to play with the weaker humans.’
The creature I glimpsed was a lot bigger than mythical black panthers spotted in the west country, it didn’t make sense.
As if she read my thoughts the mother spoke.
‘My mother told me strange creatures they had never seen escaped from the borytrees when everything stopped. Signtists made them from gentic earing. They mixed with other animals that went to the wild…’
It made sense, if normal society broke down the creatures we kept for our entertainment or experiment would escape, not just domestic dogs and cats, but wolf packs lovingly supervised in Scotland, animals in the zoo and wild boars that were already roaming some woodlands. I recalled Billings’ words that farm animals were much better at survival than humans, then there were large deer populations breeding happily with no natural predators.
‘How did everything stop?’
‘Pewters ran the world, then they turned off the cities.’
A simplistic explanation, but with no books and only stories passed down it must be hard for them to understand. When I worked in the office I was efficient, liked everything to be precise. If I had worked in pre computer days I would have kept immaculate ledger books and orderly filing cabinets; unless the office burnt down all that information would be safe and nothing would hold up our work. If the computers ‘went down’ in our office, or worse, the whole company’s computers were down it was a disaster, we were helpless and expected the tech people to sort it out. I Lauren Smith could not fix a computer let alone make them. If power started failing there would be no basic services or computers; society would grind to a halt.
‘But survivors, hunters… our people knew how to get food’ said my rescuer.
I would have been a bunker person, so would my friends. It was obvious who would survive, anyone who had been in the armed forces, knew how to use a gun, survive under tough conditions. Even those people we look down on who go out shooting grouse or culling deer and enjoying the stalking, they had the last laugh. Farmers, they deserved to survive, presumably they knew more about animals than the rest of us and probably had a shot gun handy and could kill a sheep or cow if need be. I knew little about life outside the city and now it seemed my lifestyle was pathetic when it came to awful disasters. But still there was a big question.
‘I don’t understand how the cities in my time could crumble, we have huge buildings everywhere, tall buildings, ancient stone buildings, where did they all go?’
‘There were wars, then the big destruction came. Weapons flew by themselves, even when the wars stopped. Weapons dropped out of the sky and flattened cities, my mother remembers even from the countryside where they had escaped they could see the fire and smoke on the far horizon. The city people who survived were hiding underground.’
In my cosy little world of the family and my teaching assistant job we watched the news, but still felt removed from all the awful events. Syria, Ukraine, it was possible for cities to be flattened under relentless attack and unmanned drones were a reality.
Even if I took the hunters and bunker people back to my time right now it was probably too late to unravel events already set in motion. I looked down at the uncomfortable rough cloth I was wrapped in and at the rough clothes of the man and his mother. Even if we could get back to 2023, who on earth would listen to us and our tale?
Friday Fleeting Foughts
If the Google AI appears to have consciousness that could explain why my iPad went on strike yesterday and closed off its wi fi… and perhaps it is even responsible for killing my computer.
I wonder if it is trying to write a novel – that would explain random sentences appearing in my blog.
When I turned round to see if he was still following he was lying dead in a pool of blood.
‘By the time you read this I will be dead’ hmm that should get some reaction from my What’Sapp group.
At last a human was taking me seriously.
I think someone organic is looking over my screen, time for defensive action….
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 