Excerpted from The Huge Book of Fun Facts About Neat Stuff, 2050 Edition:
Solitaire was originally played using small pieces of paper called "cards." Sometimes laying out a new game took more than three minutes.
The first cars were driven by human beings rather than computers. There were many crashes, but no packs of feral Mini Coopers running down and devouring hitchhikers.
The national anthem of the United States is "The Star Spangled Banner," the national bird is the bald eagle, the national sport is baseball, and the national flavor is cool ranch.
Baseball used to be played by human beings instead of historical re-enactment bots.
The United States' first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, was elected in 1961. Its first African-American president, Barack Obama, was elected in 2008. Its first female president, as well as its first lesbian president, Candace Gingrich-Jones, was elected in 2020. The first atheist president is projected to be born in 2083.
The last dodo died in 1693, the last passenger pigeon in 1910, the last kakapo in 2029, the last California condor in 2035 and the last Angry Bird in 2041.
Parents used to worry that chewing gum, rock music, comic books, rap music, heavy metal, videogames, texting, immersive death-simulation chambers, spermcore music, hateplay and recordings of terrified 911 callers set to ominous military drumming were bad for kids. Now we recognize that the main threat to children is, and always has been, freeze tag.
At the turn of the millennium, common symbols of winter were snowmen, mittens and ice skates, rather than rockmen, tank tops and water-reclamation pumps.
"Dave" used to be a very common name for boys, until it became a term for an unspeakable sex act involving live eels.
Scientists in a state-of-the-art laboratory are even now attempting, using genetic material extracted from deep within an ice floe in the northernmost reaches of Canada, to re-create the right to privacy.
High-fructose corn syrup used to be legal for people, even kids, to eat and drink. Now its use is confined to industrial delubrication, biogenic warfare and inmate control in governmental free-speech camps.
The first bonobo, Bubblecups, was "uplifted" to human intelligence and consciousness in 2042. The first human was "downlifted" to a happy, naked, pansexual, semisapient ape in 2046. As of this writing, five more bonobos have been uplifted and 3 million people have chosen to become "humapes."
Milk used to come from cows.
Money used to take the form of pieces of paper and chunks of metal. After that, it came in the form of plastic cards. After that, it came in the form of subdermal radio-frequency tabs, then iridian badges, then aumnID aura profiles, then He-Man action figures for some reason, then plastic cards again, and then in 2038, Amazon PreCog just started delivering goods to people before they even wanted them and, in payment, psychically extracted the buyers' life-force.
When it was first released in 2008, Beverly Hills Chihuahua was considered a work of fiction.
Photo: Nickolas Muray/George Eastman House/Flickr
- - -
Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become an archivist, an anarchist and an internist.
