Living in the future, for real

Something I saw on the Web today gave me a real "living in the future" chill: Al Gore speaking via hologram to an audience in Tokyo. This is exactly the stuff of the science fiction I read in the 60s and which was in many cases written 10 or 20 years earlier.

But nobody told me I could watch it via the Internet and learn a few words of Dutch at the same time!

This brings to mind a previous time I had a similar, but more joyful and profound feeling. It wasn't July 20, 1969, though that was a great day. It was at the time of the Nagano Winter Olympics of 1998 (I think) when the centerpiece of the opening ceremonies was various choirs around the world, including one in free South Africa, a South Africa not suffering from genocidal civil war, singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Man, somethings are better than science fiction.