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Today, I had to watch a fashion show.  That is not my idea of a good time.

Unfortunately, my two kids were participating, along with our nephew and a few friends’ kids.  It was at the mall where my wife works and she was sort of organizing the event, and my mother-in-law and her sister came in from out of town for the event, so I really didn’t have much choice.

Of course, there were adult models too and I suppose that watching a bunch of good looking young Czech girls walk around looking good is not exactly carrying buckets of hot tar, but I could see good looking young Czech girls looking good just by walking down the street or riding the metro.

Come down to it, I just don’t see the point of fashion shows.  Yes, they were modeling clothes from stores in the mall, but I couldn’t see any difference between the clothing on offer from one store and the clothing on offer from another, or the clothing I was wearing for that matter.  The shirts looked like ordinary shirts, the dresses looked like dresses.  If they’re trying to convince people to come into their shop and shop, they should have had price tags hanging from them or something.

Maybe it’s just me.  I’m a pretty intelligent guy but I’ve been told many times, by many people, that I lack taste.  Could be.  I never could tell the difference between wines beyond just red or white, I very often like cheesy, crap songs that my musician friends disdain, I get nothing whatsoever out of abstract art although I’ve tried, really, I’ve tried and if I order chicken kung pao and get beef  I am very often halfway through the meal before I notice.  And I can’t tell the difference between designer clothing and something from the 2^nd hand store.

I guess it’s important to some people, the kids enjoyed it and got a 500 crown gift certificate apiece, and it didn’t last too long.  But I hope it’s a long, long time before I have to go to another one.

Let’s take another look into the future.  June 5^th, 2010.  Crime has been eradicated.  The invention of the picot-polygraph nipped it right in the bud.  There were reservations about violations of basic human rights, of course, because the method is intrusive as hell.  Never mind the head shaving and the sedation and or strapping down, never mind the needles piercing your skull or the chemicals you are fed, the idea that someone can actually look right inside your mind and SEE what you are thinking is a scary, scary thought.

However, police departments around the world got around that for years by either deception (routine medical test, we do this all the time or routine polygraph, with the detectives actually watching the screen from a remote location) or by not being in a country where human rights count for much in the first place.  The results were so staggering that it soon became accepted.

Pickpockets were given the exam and not only were their mentors, accomplices and fences immediately identified, but police also learned about every illegal thing all of their relatives and friends had ever done.  Child molesters were administered the tests and the molesters who molested them, years ago, were finally caught.  A whole bunch of 80 year old men were sent to jail.

The flood of new cases meant that the police couldn’t possibly enforce the anti-marijuana laws any more.

People became wary about committing any crime at all, for fear of simple embarrassing incidents coming to light.

Some people began to view it as a prerequisite for dating or marriage and some employers began insisting on it.

Primitive versions of this already exist.  They can actually film your thoughts and dreams.  We did a piece on it in Watson’s World News about 6 months ago.

I love oatmeal (porridge, if you talk like that), with bananas and a little bit of cinnamon and sugar on top.  Now that my wife has discovered an instant brand that the kids like, I’ll get plenty of it.  Except she puts cocoa on top, which is also pretty good.

The in-laws are arriving today, which makes for a boring, socially awkward day for me (and also gets into the way of my pot smoking) but the kids love them, they love the kids, they’re really very good to us in many, many ways so I should just shut the fuck up and count my blessings – which is pretty much what I do.  I’m just venting here.

The reason they are coming is that the kids are going to be in a fashion show today.  I really hope we don’t get into the Little Miss Sunshine thing, but I’m nervous.  This is Isabel’s 2^nd time up on the stage.

It’s a fairly harmless event, a fashion show for the mall where my wife is the event coordinator.  So, she could hardly get away with not volunteering her own kids who are, after all, extremely cute kids.

I’ll go and watch it, of course, we go to all of  Sam’s football games.  I’ll probably even enjoy it, a little bit, although it will go on a bit long, I won’t understand most of the MC’s jokes because after 12 years in this country, the language is still beyond me.  (If someone is speaking directly at me and saying something very simple, I can usually figure it out in time to make a response before they start ignoring me again, but they hear the accent and start ignoring me again anyway, so I no longer try as hard as I used to and it’s a self-defeating, self-perpetuating vicious circle.)  In any event, given the atmosphere, their jokes are not going to be terribly funny and I know I am not missing much by living in my oblivion.

Perhaps I am being too hard on the Czechs, though.  When I go, once a month, to my English language poetry readings, there are a great number of the readers (over 50%, easily) who I tune it in the middle of their recital.  It’s not intentional.  I try to pay attention to them but at some point what they are saying is so incomprehensible or so uninteresting that the words just start to roll over me like a light breeze and I wait until the end and applaud along with everybody else.

I feel a little bit guilty about not paying attention to everyone else, especially as I’m writing a blog and the thing I want more than anything else is for everyone in the world to read it.  So, I’m an egocentric, vain, arrogant attention whore.  Sue me.

Yesterday, I tried to take a look into the future, and examined some of my personal possibilities.  However, no man is an island and all that.  The world 10 years from now will be a very different world than the present.  Or will it?

Technology will continue to advance.  Robots will be all over the fucking place.  There will be robot receptionists, robot doctors, robot manual labors and migrant crop pickers.  Sex robots will be very popular, with both sexes.  Couples will go to brothels on dates.  Sabotage and vandalism against robots will be serious crimes.

Global warming will continue to get worse.  There will be numerous breakthroughs in clean energy production, but they will still be blocked by the big energy corporations.  Desalinization has become cheap and portable.  Artificial islands are springing up all over, sprouting like lilies.  Although they are meant to be a green alternative, they bring some problems of their own.  They are so prevalent, they disturb the migration of whales.

We have looked deep, deep, deep into space and found no signs of other intelligent life.  Sci-fi  nerds around the world are starting to get depressed.  On the positive side, the space elevator has made travel within the solar system relatively easy.  There are even mines on a couple of Jupiter’s moons.

Since robots took all of the jobs and something had to be done about the unemployment problem, many people now stay in University until they are 30 or 40, there are far more people who list their profession as “artist” and the government of the European Union (which now includes Russia, Canada and Japan – the United States had it’s 2^nd Civil War, which was amicable, with the Northern States and the West Coast joining Canada, while the others formed the “United Christian States of America”) is shipping all of the indigents off to the Martian colonies just as fast as they can build ships.

The world’s primary language is still English, but it has changed almost beyond recognition.