Whatever Happened To...

Hi there! And welcome to this extra special programme tonight. A show about life itself. A show entitled “whatever happened to?”

Now these days in the 2040’s it’s hard to imagine what life was like back in the late 1900’s and how anyone from that dark and troubled time ever survived – but here we all are.

Have you ever wondered what ever happened to some of the people and things of the 20th Century? Our parents and grandparents talk about all kinds of stuff. Stuff that has little relevance or meaning to us today, that had a huge impact on their lives at the time. Remember Movie Stars? Rock Stars? Television? What about mobile phones? Petrol? Prohibition? Censorship? Cats? I’m sure your oldies have told you about Real Estate and the Stock Market. But what about keys, or CD’s? It was a different world back then, with entirely different values, a completely different culture and many icons that were household names that perhaps you have never even heard of, so tonight I will reveal some of these people and things to you as we ask… ‘What ever happened to?…”

Before the world became fully wired-up and switched on, the early days of technological discovery saw an explosion of mass media devices – radio, television and movie theatres, where a small number of content producers would access the entire population, as they were the only ones who could afford to do it, so they gained huge market share and hung onto it like a hungry lion protecting a deer carcass.

The way they did this was to keep the masses stupified, appealing to their primordial urges, and programming their minds with an endless supply of shows about murder, sex, war, ritualised war, as in sport, and comedy. Basic psychological principals dictate that the ones on television would become rich and famous as a result of such mass exposure and hence we even know about some of them today. So where are they now?

Well most of them, of course, were killed in the great LA earthquake of 2004, but some were fortunate enough to be on promotional tours or on location in other countries at the time. Naturally the whole mass media phenomenon has all but disappeared, so the stars of yesteryear eek out a living like anybody else.

Tom Cruise, now 81, lives in the L Ron Hubbard home for the aged, after spending the last years of his working life as a cyber sex booth performer, charging $4.95 per minute for people to watch him perform missions impossible with a pair or gerbils and a roll of gaffa tape.

Some of you who like to browse the deep web for archives of old audio recordings, might see the occasional appearance on the download listings of a certain tune called My Sharona by a band called “The Knack”. Yes it is still getting a few hits with it’s infectious riffing, sexual undertones and strong rhythmic human beat, and you would be amazed to know that The Knack are still touring! Yes, with the average age of the band now 86, and none of them able to afford good healthcare, they hobble from club to club, playing ladies days and senior citizen’s concerts and are especially big in the town of Sharona, Arkansas, named after their song when the town was established by www.retromusic.com as a housing estate for fans of 70’s rock. The Knack play the annual Christmas Pageant there every year, without fail, as they get paid very well, a free meal and their own change room, with disabled toilet.

Of course you all know Oprah Winfrey, the great religious icon of our time, but few of you probably realise that she used to be a Television Personality. Yes, she established her network via mass media, before shifting her business to the franchised multilevel marketing spiritual empire and manufacturer of dieting software and virtual psychotherapists that exists today. Next time a hologram of Oprah appears in your local park for the Sunday morning jogging ritual, you can now say you know where it all started. Yes – Television.

And here’s someone who has come out of the woodwork after a long hiatus. Max Rowley, Doyenne of the Australian mass media. Max moved into education with his own Max Rowley Media academy in the latter 20th and early 21st Century. Little did he realise at the time when he was training a handful of keen students to be media personalities, that the onset of the new technologies would force EVERYBODY to have to learn media presenting techniques!! When teleconferencing, then mobile video phones, then full free-range human virtual meetings took off, it became a case of have good presentation techniques or lose your job, your friends, your family and all contact with the outside world. Demand for max’s course went from a mere few dozen to the entire population of the world. Max franchised his system, by building a Supercomputer Artificial Intelligence Max simulator and deploying it on servers around the globe and became a trillionaire. Lucky for him, he could now afford to pay for any medical treatment he wanted, and I am pleased to announce that Max has reinvented himself, with the help of some breakthrough technologies, and at the age of nearly 120, he has launched a new magazine, AND a new look. Take a look at this.

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Voice over:
What do you think? Eh? What a transformation! MAX, legend, king, richest man in the world… you’ve done it again!

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Now I know it seems second nature to all of you watching tonight, to accept that I am sitting here with a 200 gigabyte per second net connection hard wired into my brain, downloading porn straight to my hyperthalamus, while my watch here is injecting me with a constant stream of hallucinogens, amphetamines, ecstasy and steroids, and I have a butt plug inserted that is being operated by an entire community of fetishists who have logged onto my website. But back in the late 1900’s they used to use all kinds of strange devices. I was fortunate enough to have dug up this incredible relic. This massive great lump of plastic they used to call a mobile phone. A Phone!! Look at it! It’s huge!! And all it is, is a bloody phone!! These were mainly used by drug dealers and buyers to set up their purchases in the time of prohibition, because you couldn’t as we do today, just get whatever you wanted home-delivered along with your groceries.

What ever happened to mobile phones? Well after the new technologies took off, the phones were sold donw the line to poorer and poorer countries who were playing catch-up to the richer countries. First they all were sent to China, then Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, down through Africa, then across to South America, where finally most of them were used as bricks to build new cow sheds and chicken coups. Rumour has it that there is still a digital phone network operating deep in the Amazon Jungle, but reliable sources report that nobody paid their phone bills, the network went down, and everybody uses the devices to play solitaire, tetris and Snake, or as they call it – Anaconda.

Now I bet none of you would know what these are… yes they are KEYS. Keys were invented some time in the middle ages and were used right up until the early 21st century. Cumbersome little buggers aren’t they. Researchers calculated that overall human productivity went up 3 & ½ percent once keys were made obsolete. No more searching for the right one, no more losing the whole bunch, no more locking yourself in or out, or fumbling for them while trying to hold ten bags of groceries. We take for granted the simplicity of spitting or urinating on a door and getting an instant DNA recognition. So Spare a thought for our poor ancestors who didn’t have such luxury. They used to get arrested for urinating in public! We do it as part of our normal everyday routine. How times have changed.

I hope you have found this programme both fascinating and informative, as I asked the question “whatever happened to…?” I’m sure that in the future people will be asking the same things about the stuff we take for granted now. Until then, lets appreciated our sour cream and chives flavoured bananas, our six legged chickens, our intravenous watches, and our New Look Max Rowley. Here at the Surry Hills MRMA franchise, this is Stefan Sojka the third, saying good night to you all, have a pleasant evening and I’ll see you on-line! www.mybuttplug.com!! Bye!!!