Here's a real treasure trove for you: Paleo Future

Don't even bother to read what I have to say about it.

Go immediately to Paleo Future and prepare yourself for a good, long browse.

What Matt@paleofuture has done is assemble all sorts of goodies on what folks in the past though the future would hold. You can check things out by decade, starting with the 1880's and moving on up through the 1990's.

I have by no means exhausted this site, but the gems that Matt has pulled together range far beyond the flying car. (Although there are, of course, plenty of them, as you can see from this nifty picture of the family helicopter as envisioned in 1947.

If I have any view of the future, I'm afraid to say that it's a dystopic one.

The earth will warm, the ocean waters will rise, and the flat of Beacon Hill - where I live - will be reclaimed by said ocean waters.

Extra taxes will be levied on non-Christians, with an extra-extra levy on non-churchgoers, who will not be allowed to vote. (In the words of Willard (Mitt) Romney: "Freedom requires religion.") Us pagans will, however, be given the option of accepting repatriation to decadent, secular humanist-run Europe.

The only books that are published will be those of Timothy LaHaye. Literary works will circulate a la Soviet era samizdat, and if the authors are caught, they'll be banished to an American gulag in the Nevada desert.

People will be jailed for uttering the sentence "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle."

I have spent so little time envisioning the fun aspects of the future.

So let me make up a bit of all that time lost fretting, and do a little imagineering about what might be available in the year 2020.

• Complex, interesting, tasty and healthful freeze-dried meals will be available that take less than 30 seconds to prepare.
• There will be a harmless hair coloring pill that you take once a year that produces the same natural, multi-hued impact as expensive every 8 weeks foils.
• Clothing will automatically adjust to your body, so that you don't have to buy your pants a size or two larger than you need anywhere else when you really just need to get them to fit in the waist.
• Cars will fold up into light-weight, wheeled carrying cases that you can easily tuck into your hall closet when you can't find a parking space.
• When someone is talking on a cell phone in a public space, you will not hear their end of the conversation. ("I'm, like, walking down Charles Street right now. Like, where are you?") Or you will have the option of hearing both ends of the conversation.
• Television - or home entertainment paradises - will be voice activated. No more searching through long and tedious online guides. You will be able to say, "I'd like to see the Dr. Kildare episode where he falls in love with Yvette Mimieux," and there it will be.

Hey, I could really get into this futurist stuff big time. My dystopic days are over. In fact, I'll be able to go into a book store and say, remove all Timothy LaHaye books from my sight, and they'll be gone.

Yep, I am so loving the future. Bring it on!

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Thanks to my brother-in-law John for introducing me to Paleo Future.