Reading the story “The Rocket Man” in the Ray Bradbury collection “The Illustrated Man,” I was struck by the following passage. You’ll quickly see why:

“That night we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a wind upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession. Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he was a boy in the year 1997.”

Ha ha! Bradbury came up with earbuds and wall-filling flat screen TVs in “Fahrenheit 451,” but envisioning the future is tougher than it seems. Be grateful you don’t need to don a “special hat” to read this blog!