The future is finally motherfuqyng here, people!

One word: hovercars!

Since the time of the Great Depression, a majority of conjectures about the future used to involve flying or hovering cars. Then we got through the Twentieth Century and all we had to show for it were the Jetsons and hydrofoils.

Oh sure, we've made it faster to get from England to (the rest of) Europe. It turns out a better track and signal system (and shinier platforms at the grand cathedral of trains, Saint Pancras Station) are what it will really take to turn London and Paris into the terminii of the next BoWash. It's about time the UK (soon just to be England, Scotland, Wales and Friends But Never Again Lovers much like when the Beatles broke up) admitted 26 miles of swimmable sea are no longer a logistic nightmare. Still, it doesn't mean we all wouldn't like frickin' hovercars.

So yeah, ninety large and you'll soon have your own hovercar... maybe. I have this joke where I will dismiss an uppity person my senior by saying "when I was your age, we had hovercars!" I am glad this will soon be true instead of disappearing from us the way lunar vacations have. Let's face it: wouldn't a honeymoon on the actual Moon be stellar? You'd have every day and night under a canopy of stars and no weather problems. Granted, you'd be sick as a dog when you get home from the resumption of normal gravity but the nuptial sex in one-sixth G would never be forgotten.

Which news item would you rather ponder: hovercars, or crazed and soon-to-be-skullcrushed dictator of the former Rhodesia announcing wage hikes are illegal when inflation is at six thousand percent? Zimbabwe is soon going to immolate because he won't be paying the cops that keep him from being long pig fricassee. No one wants to think about that as we head into Labor Day weekend -- it's all hovercars now! Well, maybe dobrovolets and I will ponder Mugabe for you.

I'm fascinated by Zimbabwe. Then again I'm fascinated by North Korea in a completely CIA-sanctioned way: how long will it take the last James Bond villainreich to hit the self-destruct button, will it destroy Seoul in the process, what will we find that defies logic when that is over and how many frickin' tunnels are there underneath Pyongyang?

I read about North Korea the way Cronenberg and Ballard fans study car wrecks or other instances of the new flesh: it's a slow-down of an event that will zoom by when it happens but boy is it gonna happen! Maybe by then I can take my hovercar out to the Taeddong River and watch the wrecking crews topple the Juche Tower or that unsafe hotel near it.

-"it's inevitable!", Ps/d

I never thought I'd be writing to your magazine with my own story...

I thank metahacker for linking to james_nicoll's coverage of the bee-ess factor for the BBC hovercar story. It turns out there is a history of such coverage, previously in their Science section but today in the Business news.

I got annoyed with having my hovercar heart strings plucked so fervently by the BBC that I decided to compile my findings and send a formal complaint through their site:

I am a long-time fan of the BBC and its World Service going back to the days when Americans could only receive you by shortwave radio. Today I am pleased to receive you on WBUR-FM here in Boston several hours of the day, on BBC America and here on your otherwise incomparable web site.

I find it unfortunate that I must complain about the repeated posting of coverage of the Moller International Skycar on your site, as evidenced by these links:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/354129.stm (dated 1999);
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3676694.stm (dated 2004);
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6970031.stm (dated today).

Each time the Skycar is presented as if it were being unveiled in the near future. In reality, there has been an official complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission about Moller International's repeated fundraising practices without tollgated results: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp17987.htm.

My complaint is not that you give Paul Moller coverage but that you give his claims veracity when he has been under investigation for fraud. It would be similar to presenting a lead story that cancer had been cured and finding the details to be about a scam shaman pretending to pull entrails out of a body.

When you have the resources to cover the world's news and have the power to unveil modern atrocities (your excellent research on Mugabe's horrid empire in Zimbabwe, such as today's http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6972393.stm, being a stellar example), why would one give credence to a scam artist? It gives them equal weight.

I would appreciate a public response. I know the English-speaking public is discovering this tale in Slashdot today (see http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/31/0218202), thus your reputation unfolds in front of you as a bastion against legerdemain.

Thank you for your time.

I included my city and state, land phone number and email address. I hope I was formal enough. Was I too snooty?