Tuesday May 28, 2013  Mail:  Lofgeornost #111 from Fred Lerner.

"What I am proposing is A History of the Future in 100 Objects -- an attempt to identify and describe the hundred most significant imaginary artifacts from the science fiction literature."

***At Muddsuckers Coffee, there was a newborn baby in the employees' area.  One of the baristas had been very, very pregnant the last time I'd seen her.

***Met with my ACA sponsor.  (ACA:  Adult Children of Alcoholic and Otherwise Disfunctional Families Anonymous.)

We met at Sporty's Bar, which claims to be "the original dive bar."  This is inaccurate:  it's not a place of low resort, but a respectable college bar.  And it's several thousand years too young to be the original.

***1993 predictions on the future of news, from a Compuserve forum:

"...One JForum member even offered a detailed description of how the tyranny of news only being delivered once a day would be upended by on-demand updates sent to color laser fax machines, rented from newspapers, along with 'rolls of newsprint (purchased) from the grocery store.'

"But on the whole, the views on news-yet-to-come share a characteristic that afflicts much technological prediction: almost-unavoidable blinders created by what one already knows exists. The prognostications of two decades ago were right as often as they were wrong, but not always in the ways anticipated by these news media pros.

"It’s one thing to extrapolate and posit one revolutionary change, but it’s a lot harder (and a lot more likely to lead to failure) to try and correctly speculate on two or three changes that, interacting, create cross-currents that enable something entirely new. Like, say, WiFi plus smartphones plus Twitter."
Frank Catalano http://www.geekwire.com/2013/digital-future-news-1993/

Alfred Bester's 1952 novel The Demolished Man had newspapers printed out by vending machines, with hourly updates.