The Nicholsons. Studio Photo, 1893.
I have a friend of a certain age who just bought a new laptop. She uses it only to play card games and to keep lists of, say, the books she has read and the wine she has drunk.
I like to poke fun at her. I just bought a new laptop, too, because I am writing this blog about writing a novel, Flo in the City, based on my 2005 website http://www.tighsolas.ca/ (which I am going to get revised by a professional, or 10 year old, some time soon).
I use the laptop to download public domain material for background, and to conduct other research. (Yesterday I took a Google Earth Street View tour of Framingham, Massachusetts, where Flo went in 1908. ) I usually have a BBC Radio Four play or documentary playing in the background as I work.
Anyway, back in 1982, I worked in a radio station as a copywriter, banging my ads out on an IBM Selectric, well, actually, that machine took a light touch. (Only a couple of young men in the office were into computers, whatever computers they had back then, and they tried to sound very smart as they discussed computer business in front of the rest of us.) In 1984, I quit my job and was looking for my own typewriter to do some freelance work. In those days, you could buy ‘word processors’, machines just for typing! (One of the many technological dead-ends existing in time.)I ended up buying a PC, on my husband’s sage advice. I had actually bought a 500 dollar electric typewriter for myself in 1984-which was a total waste, so this time I deferred to him.
(We tracked down one of the few places we could buy a computer in Montreal and trekked out to St. Laurent. (Where I stumbled on a street named after my grandfather, Jules Crepeau.) I recall the sales guy was very snooty. You see, we knew nothing about computers and people who bought computers were nerds.) Anyway, I’m just getting to my point…At about the same time, I recall talking to a friend who was a scientist at McGill. He told me that home computers were ‘an invention in search of a use.’ Most people back then were using computers to, say, keep recipes or play solitaire. Like my friend, today.
Flashforward.. they have found a lot of uses for the computer, haven’t they? And now we have to keep upgrading our computers just to keep up with the exponential growth of programmes. (Well, the Internet was the clincher. In the 90′s, the Powers That Be told us parents to get wired or our kids would be left behind. We believed them, big time. Too bad our kids’ every word and action, from birth to death, may be tracked by those very same Powers That Be, as an inadvertent? side-effect of getting on line, but, hey, who needs privacy?)
OK. So there’s another invention that was sold to homes before it had a use. The microwave. The first microwaves were sold to housewives in around 1967. An advert in Chatelaine magazine shows a lovely Laura Petrie style housewife, with a 15 inch waist, draped in a flowing but dainty sleevless number, you know the image, standing in front of a complete turkey meal (pretty gross looking because food photography wasn’t what it is today)cooked on a microwave.
Well, today, we all know that microwaves are useless for cooking tasty meals. (My father in law, in the late 1980′s, bought a 1,000 dollar microwave, that came with a huge recipe book, and used it to warm coffee. He was typical.) Only lately have they found a use for microwave ovens, other than warming food and drink. They created microwaveable meals. You eat them. I eat them. They are salty and vastly overpriced, terrible for our arteries and the environment but great for the economy.
I have a theory that the reason we all have become so enamoured of Thai and Indian food is because the heavy spices compensate for the fact that fast cooked food tastes like crap.
Montreal Steak Spice for instance. This combination was used by a coterie of Eastern Europeans on cured meat that became a local specialty, Montreal Smoked meat – which isn’t pastrami. Now the company that sells this product has come out with myriad combinations of peppers and garlic, so there must be a demand. I have them all. We over-spice our food because our meat, vegetables are tasteless to start with and we don’t have the patience or the time to slow cook meals.
So we’ve gained some and lost some in 100 years. The computer allows us to check out the Internet for any possible recipe at any time, and as I live in a metropolitain area, I can get any food I want very easily, even if it’s frankenfruit and veggies, (and because I live in Montreal I can get it at a good price, but modern technology can’t carmelize carrots quickly, can it?
