Monday, August 27, 2007

Can anyone point me in the direction of a museum?

Friday night I wanted to watch a movie, but I couldn’t find any DVD to my liking. Bummer, I though, why is it that you can never find a movie your in the mood for, when you are desperately want to do some mindless movie watching?
But I wasn’t willing to give up that easily, and dived into my old video collection…..how ancient! While I was going through my archive a strange thought entered my mind: pretty soon there going to be kids who don’t even know what videos are. Funny, how life seem to keep changing faster and faster. Anyway, that thought reminded me of a little story one of my friends told me some time ago.

One day her cordless phone wasn’t working and she had to make an urgent call. So, she rummaged around in the attic and dug up an old rotary dial phone. Down stairs again, she plugged it in and hooray, a dial tone. She made her call and asked one of her kids to call her at work later that day. Sure, the kid said, looking quite uncomfortable from his mom to the phone, and back again. Sure mom, the kid continued, I’ll call you, but you first have to explain to me how that phone works.

Makes you feel old, doesn’t it? Almost as if you were born in the pre-historic era or something. Other things and memories that can make you feel very antiquated too, things like:
  • You remember black & white TV’s
  • The remote channel changer in your family was you…..
  • Your first computer system is now a museum piece
  • You wore leggings when they were around for the first time
  • You remember that Twix was called Raider (in some parts of Europe)
  • Peanut M&M’s were called Treets and all had the same colour….brown! Chocolate M&M’s were called Bonitos and they had smiley faces on them (oh, and they did melt)
  • You played records and cassettes instead of CD’s
  • You were around when Sony launched the Walkman, Atari released their first game console and later on we were introduced to Nintendo
  • You can also remember the 5¼ floppies and cell phones as big as refrigerators
Okay, enough of that! All those things make me feel like I should be in a museum myself now.

Back to the video. I ended up watching Sliding Doors, almost 10 years old and still fun to watch. About the movie:
We probably all have asked ourselves this question at one point in our life: What if? Well this is a movie about just that. A London woman's love life and career both hinge, unknown to her, on whether or not she catches a train. One split second sends her life in two completely different directions and in this movie you can see them both, in parallel. Very interesting to watch and above all very funny.

On Saturday I watched another, more recent, movie: Stranger than fiction. Also very funny, extremely interesting and above all utterly brilliant! Thanks for bringing it to my attention KJ’s Muse.

Now, I am off to the museum, see if they’ll have me ;-)

7 comments:

Lord Hutton said...

I won a 1970s BT Trimphone off ebay. It has buttons, not a dial (but the early ones had dials). click, click, click, click, click; click click click....... etc

qaminante said...

I've been feeling the same recently as I just converted to digital TV and the guy who installed the "digicorder" cut off the VCR. Also, I've now got most of my CDs into itunes, but have had to buy software to record stuff I still have on cassette - which I haven't actually felt up to tackling yet!
And, a young intern at my office recently asked me why one copy of texts bearing the initials of the various people who have to approve it, normally known as the "minute", is often called "the yellow copy" and may even be marked on one corner with a yellow highlighter. I explained that in the days before computers, texts were typed on a typewriter (electric, mind) using CARBON PAPER with different coloured flimsy copies, so this particular copy was actually yellow, and the expression has stuck even though now they are all white. She looked at me as if I was from the stone age.... (well, carbon is one of the most primitive materials)!

Dakota said...

Wow, Lord Hutton very retro :-) I have old phones too, not because I want to be retro or anything, I just don’t use them so I don’t want to invest in high-tech equipment.

Oh, I remember the carbon copy era, Qaminante (and the black (or blue) fingertips you got from the carbon paper). It was hell, but it was also much more colourful with all the yellow, pink, blue and green copies. See, I am ancient!

b o o said...

ah yes, the "what-ifs" in life :)

Dakota said...

It can be very interesting to wonder about them from time to time, Boo :-)

KJ's muse said...

Love the colour of that phone. And glad you liked the movie!

(As you can see, I'm a little behind on blog reading.)

Dakota said...

A long, long, time ago my parents did have that exact phone, KJ’s Muse. Must have been in the orange/brown period.

Yeah, you are a bit behind on blog reading, but that’s okay. You’re too busy playing with your new toys, I guess :-) Thanks for stopping by.