I got today to live out one of the things I always associated with a science-fictional future, and I'm glad for the experience. It's a small thing: eating on a dinner table that's lit from within. This looked cool yet impractical in Star Trek: The Next Generation and about two hundred interchangeable dull movies from the 70s. In this case I got to live it by accident, when the Yoshinoya Japanese restaurant (featuring, their ads claim, Japan's most popular big bowl of beef) turned out to have a table with a nice long strip of orange fluorescent bulbs hidden in the center.
It didn't affect my eating habits -- I tend to eat all the food I have, about as quickly as possible, with the part of the meal I like least eaten first and the best part last (it seems odd to me anyone would do things any other way). But I'll linger on the drink, and in reading whatever book I have, and the light wasn't so bright as to cast distracting odd shadows or anything. At no time did Counselor Troi enter to notify me of the hostile feelings of the aliens who just fired at us.
Trivia: The faculty at Rutgers first wore academic robes for the June 1906 inauguration of president William Demarest. Source: Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, Richard P McCormick.
Currently Reading: Unto Zeor, Forever, Jacqueline Lichtenberg. After a new subspecies of humanity evolves, with wrist-tentacles to suck energy out of the other humans, society undergoes upheaval as old humans protest their place in the new order. But a thousand years of peace in the new equilibrium is threatened when one of the vampires wants to become the first vampire doctor ever, and discovers future hospitals have exactly the names, cultures, and operating procedures of an episode of Trapper John, M.D. Now that's classic 70s science fiction, big and chunky. This was part of a series that had fanzines. The author identifies herself as a Trekkie.
