I enjoy old things and using them today.

I have a watch from WWI that is filled with some sort of radioactive material so people could see what the time was in a trench.  I wear it too.  I am not sure if this is a good idea.

Did you know that in Medieval Europe that spices were used in such a way that the food was more akin to Ethiopian or Indian food?  We were taught that spices in the middle ages were used to cover up the taste of rancid meat, but how did a culture live  for over 1000 years on a diet of rotten food?  The answer is it didn’t.  If you recreate Medieval European food like I do you will find it is delicious and the spices and herbs were used for flavor, not obfuscation.

That is why I like using old things today, you learn about the past and the present.  Sometimes the cost might be wrist cancer in the future but the rewards are immediate.

I also like the old terms for the internet.  Like Cyberspace, Information Super Highway (actually I hate that term) and Virtual Reality.  I like them because they are so optimistic.  Virtual Reality at its peak was text hosted by some student on a University computer talking about “Smart Drugs”. I still like using them when I can because of that optimism.  Never mind that smart drugs like Piracetam taste like the smell of burning plastic and doesn’t make you smarter or that at best Virtual Reality was a cumbersome glove that showed up as a robotic hand when you wore expensive goggles and at worst it was nothing like reality at all but we still felt like smart people with narrow sunglasses and short hair would be the protectors of the world someday.  It did not happen exactly that way of course.  But I would love to some “old” ways of communicating come back again even if just for the use of understanding our recent past a little better and explaining how we got where we are today.

Odd how I am speaking about 1990 to 1995 like it is the steam era before Brunel.