Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: Face to Face "In Between Days" ::
I feel old. I don't feel old in the physical sense, really. My joint don't ache and I don't glaucoma or anything like that. I feel old emotionally. I feel old in the way that I have to now explain things which were commonplace in my youth to the youth of today.
Example.
I teach a little of art to youngsters on the side. We put together our own comic book and things like that. Well, every year I have to explain to the littlest of them (third graders) about a superhero's secret identity. The first sample I give them is Clark Kent going into a phone booth to change into Superman. Classic, right? Everyone knows Superman. Well, as they gazed back at me blankly, they asked, "what's a phone booth?" My first reaction was "are they serious?" but then I thought about it and realized, bloody hell, they're aren't any phone booths left are there? The idea of a little room so people could use the telephone when out on the town seemed silly to this group in the age of the mobile phone.
Do you know what else? When I was a wee laddy, we actually got milk delivered to our house via the Milk Man. We had a little tin box on our porch and once a week my mum would fill out an order list and leave money in an envelope. Then around 6 in the morning, the Milk Man would come to our house, leave the requested dairy products, take the money and leave, similar to a mail man. This all stopped sometime in the mid 1980s, and I don't know why. I guess it was deemed the Milk Man was obsolete somewhere along the way. Do you know how odd it sounds to tell little children about how we used to have a Milk Man deliver dairy to our house? Even I think I'm making it up.
I still can't get over the almost non-existence of recordings on tape, be it audio or VHS. These days it's all digital and there really is no "master" recording because every copy is of the same quality as the original! I still haven't got a means to record television digitally at home, so if there's a program I'm going to miss I have to set my VCR to tape it, and I still have old taped-off-the-TV VHS tapes in a trunk I watch every once in a while (that's the best way to view old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, don't you know). Eventually DVD and CD will be phased out in this way, won't they? It's all going to be USB port compatible stuff in mp3 and MPEG format, isn't it?
The evolution of the world and technology isn't what scares me. I mean, if you take something we've already got and make it one hundred times better, go for it, right? Flat screen monitors, fuel efficient automobiles, it's all good. It's when something is beyond saving, beyond the evolution, so out-of-date that it ceases to exist that I start to hyperventilate. Of course, I don't always notice right off. It's only when I stop to think about it and say "hey, didn't making home movies used to mean carrying around this heavy bit of machinery on your shoulder until your arm fell asleep?" that I realize how old I feel. That's when I realize, my god, I'm going to be that old guy who tells kids "back in MY day..." stories. I don't have too far to go, do I?
William (old timer)
