People of 1972, you’re living in the past

If you invented a big, shiny red time machine and traveled back in time to 1972 to show everyone your futuristic PC, they would say “wow, cool, so it’s like a… what, a TV?”

And you would have to say no, it’s more like a really fancy calculator plus a picture-phone for sending and receiving funny pictures of kittens with ungrammatical captions. And they would say “oh, that’s… kind of cool, I guess. But you can’t watch North Stars games on it, hunh?”

And you would just say no, because it would rupture space-time itself if you told them that the North Stars moved to Texas in 1993. But you could tell them about video games; they could probably handle that.

The people of 1972, we bet they would still be plenty impressed with your calculator-cat-picture-mail-machine. But that question—is it a TV?—would gnaw at you. You should have shown them a PC with the Monsoon HAVA Platinum TV Streamer hooked up, is what you should have done.

Hey, you’ve got a big, shiny red time machine, don’t you? Do it over! This time you can answer their TV question by saying “you bet your bell-bottoms I can watch TV on this bad boy. I can even pause and rewind live television, or record my favorite shows to watch later, or skip through the commercials, or whatever! It’s much, much simpler than firing up my big, fancy red time machine every time I want to see a replay of an exciting play, or catch some plot development that I missed on LOST. That thing has a nuclear engine, you know. Its exhaust is a highly carcinogenic, radioactive gas, which just wafts through my whole apartment building every time I use it. So I only time-travel for important stuff, like to try different lines on women who reject me in bars, or to try to kill Hitler, or to show ‘70s people my computer. Check it out:”

And then you can show them a clip that you’ve recorded from 2009 TV, and it will be some Tila Tequila thing, and it will freak them out so bad about the future that a bunch of them will decide to join their nearest Mennonite community.

And then you’ll return to your own time, but you’ll be surprised and horrified to see that everything is different, because apparently you dropped a packet of gum or something in the past, and some clever 1972 kid has parlayed the ingredients list into a multi-billion-dollar empire, and transformed your hometown into a sleazy dystopia.

Which goes to show you that if you want to mess with time travel, you should probably just stick to pausing and rewinding live TV on your HAVA whatsit.

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