I’m not the man they think I am at home

Or, jetpacks.

You see, last night I saw The Rocketeer on tv, for the first time in years. It’s a good film, not amazing, but pretty solid, and it was fun to see a very young Locke-from-Lost playing Howard Hughes, of all people. (Now there’s a conspiracy plot they could use – The Island was constructed by Hughes as somewhere he could withdraw from the world)

But I digress. The main point is jetpacks. I remember seeing King of the Rocket Men, a serial from the forties also about jetpacks, when I was little. The idea of being able to just strap something onto your back and then fly around freely is really quite wonderful. Especially if you can wear a cool helmet while you do it. I’d love that, or even just to learn to fly a plane or something.

The forties and thereabouts were full of things like this in stories, futuristic devices that would make life so much more fun and interesting. The trouble is, we’re in the future now, and we just don’t have any of these things. Where are the jetpacks, the ubiquitous airships, the cities in domes on the moon, and the robots? We have jetpacks of a sort, but they’re all big and bulky and can only fly for twenty seconds, making them largely useless. All we’ve really got are mobile phones, and frankly, I’m a little disappointed by how they’ve turned out. They’re all very useful and everything, but I would have hoped that future technology would have given us something better than txtspeak and a frog that makes motorbike noises.

Maybe that’s it. We just don’t use all the cool stuff properly. Another classic dream was the videophone. We can do that now – we’ve got webcams, which largely get used for making myspace photos and the links I keep getting ent to dodgy porn sites. It’s very depressing, really. If we did all have jetpacks, we’d probably jst end up using them as a funfair ride, and then building a mobile phone into it so you could text people in midair.

Ah well.

I should build a robot. It’ll have laser beams in its eyes and be able to fly. Then it can fight Godzilla or something, and I’ll be happy.

Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone….