Pushing Daisies and Pattern Recognition

Ok, ok. I know. I've been posting a LOT less this past week, but I have a good reason. I've been busy with a) school and b) THE NEW TELEVISION SEASON!!! And of course my wife and children are spattered throughout there as well I think.

But regardless of that.

Two things I wanted to post on tonight.

First of all, Pushing Daisies. It's great. It's on ABC Wednesday nights at either 8-9 or 9-10. I'm not sure which and don't feel like looking it up right now. It's really fresh and different from most of the other crap you'll ever see on t.v. and honestly, after watching an episode of it, I feel about it almost as strongly as I feel about The Office. It's going to be one of those shows that will just make your life happier because its in it. The website is here and apparently they are rerunning the pilot episode this Friday at 9PM. TAPE IT. WATCH IT.

The second thing I wanted to write about is a quote I found today in a book I'm reading. The book is Pattern Recognition by William "Neuromancer" Gibson. It's good so far. For you readers, it's an SF-ish Crying of Lot 49, heavy shades of Pynchon throughout, but not quite as PoMo. Good stuff though. Not very dense. But here's a quote that I found that rather struck me:

"Of course, we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile."

It's a modern day, post-9/11 SF novel - I can't sum it up any better than that without giving plot details - but there's something in that that rings very true to me and speaks toward our current condition. Maybe we all thought Y2K would just wipe us all out, but does anyone really have a clear sense of where we're heading in the next 50 years? Most of my ideas of what the future is going to be like are rooted in the 1950s vision of tomorrow. . . .