SOMETHING QUITE AMAZING

SOMETHING QUITE AMAZING

About two months ago, quite by chance, I made an amazing discovery. By coincidence, I was searching for something amazing to help a nine-year old complete a piece of creative writing entitled: ‘Something Quite Amazing’.
My discovery – sadly unusable for her homework - was this: that it you use a really good quality toilet paper, it is possible to fold it over – carefully - and use the other half, thus reducing waste and providing a smooth finish with minimal ecological damage.
I made this discovery, not when I was in a relatively relaxed mode, chilling out on the toilet with The Times crossword, but when I was in a state of considerable urgency.
And quite often, it has to be said, this is exactly how the human race advances itself. Progress is made, not because it can be, but because it has to be. Take war, for example: either you come up with something better than the enemy, or you lose. This is why the first World War lasted a good four years when it could have been all done and dusted in a couple of hours, and why an entire generation died gradually and horribly when it could have been vaporised in one fell swoop. And that is why the Atomic Bomb put an unceremonious end to proceedings in the Second World War.
Fashion is another thing; trends tend to go in cycles; progress – if there is such a thing in fashion – is non-linear. Flares, turn-ups and even tank tops re-appear with monotonous regularity, foisted upon us by the kind of people who thought that ‘going over the top’ was actually going to change anything. And this brings me to the point: there is very little you encounter in this life that is either original or amazing; even ‘Old Spice’ is making a comeback.
I doubt very much if I shall be around in 2050, but if I am, I would envisage that there will only be three songs in the charts; each will be sampled, re-mixed, re-sampled, covered, re-cyclo-mixed and re-covered hybrids of everything else that has preceded them in the last fifty years. After all, that’s pretty much what the charts are now. With luck, none of them will have originally been written by Bono.
And unless we have another World War, that, I predict, is the way that technology is going to ‘progress’: Wombling along aimlessly with glitched-up new generations of icrap and countless reincarnations of Playstation, and Windows 150,000, none of which ever work properly.
But hang on a minute. There is something, however, which I came across recently, which I actually did find quite amazing; so amazing it actually made me gasp. All right, it’s unlikely to speed up the resolution of war, cure cancer or make either poverty or Bono a thing of the past, but at least it makes the cinema visit a damned sight more interesting than it has been since the days of the Key Stone Cops. And what is this amazing revelation? Why 3D of course.
One Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks ago, I accompanied a friend to the cinema with a posse of cyclonic four-year-olds fuelled up on the over-priced and over-sugared bounty on offer in the foyer.
Having paid about £237.98 for tickets, 3D glasses, popcorn and a tiny but heavy and therefore expensive bag of ‘Pick & Mix’ we arrived at our seats to find the had film started. This was due to some mis-information regarding the start time from the appropriately name-badged ‘Badger’, a hairy mono-celled drongo , whose job was clearly to inspect everyone’s ticket so officiously that we all missed the start of the film, and had absolutely no idea where to sit.
The film in question was Shrek 4, and I must confess that I had been looking forward to catching up with some sleep considerably more than catching up with what old Shrek had been up to since I last watched the first film in about 1982.
I was just about to conclude that this was precisely what I had expected from a modern day cinema experience, when we were ushered to an empty row of seats and I put on my 3D glasses.
Within thirty seconds, I was hooked. Leaving aside the plot, which was actually quite good, I had the strange and fascinating experience that things were flying at me from all angles; they were! I wasn’t watching the film – I was in it.
Now, if you’ve experienced 3D before – and I suspect that most of you have, then you will know exactly what I mean. Simply put, it takes the cinema experience to a whole new dimension. By the time Old Shrek had got his life back, I was ready to watch the whole thing over again, whereas the 4 year-olds, who were largely unimpressed by the experience, were ready to resume World War 3 in the back of the car.
I’m told that there will even be 3D televisions available to us well before a cure for cancer is discovered or Bono shuts up.
As you have probably deduced, I know very little about state-of-the-art technology; but I would suspect that we are not far off the arrival of the first all-singing, all-dancing 3 dimensional hologram. And when that day comes, like the toilet paper, let’s pray that it is of a good quality; and not a pale projection of Bono.