The Future is Now! And it's underwhelming...

So I just finished a delicious lunch consisting of left-over jumbalaya (God bless you, Zataran's) and a perfectly ripe Sunkist orange. My only complaint - the orange forced me to wash my hands for 5 minutes and clean the monitor on my computer screen. What's my point? We now live in the 21st century and science can't even make a stinking orange that peels easily.

People used to have such high hopes for the future. Cartoons told me of the 'House of the Future!' that would have self-configuring rooms, would be build on retractable stilts in case of flooding, and would have a live pig under the sink instead of a garbage disposal. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanly Kubrick thought we would've already sent multiple, human-carrying spaceships to Jupiter by now. If we're to believe James Cameron, Skynet has now been online for almost ten years. And by Ridley Scott's rationale, we should have flying cars, robots that can't be differentiated from humans, and should be speaking some strange hybrid of Chinese, Spanish, and English. Instead we're stuck with bogus "advances" like dual-core processors, hybrid cars, laser eye surgery, and spaceships that blow up every third take-off - although Ridley was close with the language thing. It's an embarassment.

So where did we go wrong? My guess is we lost enthusiasm and interest around the time the Soviet Union collapsed. With the good, old USSR it was always a race to the latest and greatest between them and us. Once they were gone, we just got complacent. Who needs an array of satellite lasers in low orbit around the Earth, poised to shoot down enemy missiles if we don't have any enemies with missiles? So by my stellar, irrefutable reasoning, we can blame this one on the Russkies, along with Stalin, poor hygiene, and Yakoff Smirnoff.

According to calculations I made when I was seven, I should be dictating this blog entry (there's a life-altering advance right there - the blog. Woo Hoo, Science!) while on a shuttle to my vacation home on the moon to my robot slave, who I will have named Daneel. Forget the whole HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray debate - I should be watching life-like holographic representations in 3-D! But if I can't get the flying cars, spaceships, and robot servants, can someone at the very least get me an orange I can eat in public?