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it's all about..................................... timing.

2007-06-20

Good morning Boys and Girls!

The California Gold Rush took place in 1849.

Thousands, no millions... no billions of people went West to seek their fortunes in hastily dug mines and along the dusty shores of streams digging for and/or panning for gold, or better yet... platinum, no, make it diamonds.

Out of the trillions of people out there, a few lucky ones found what they were after, while the rest built expressways and began building sets for movies in anticipation of Thomas Edison inventing the motion picture camera forty-five or fifty years later.

A decade later in Michigan, my great - great - great - great - grandfather, who didn't live here yet, was waiting in one of the chairs to get his hair cut at a local barbershop. One of the papers at the bottom of the stack, yellowed with age, was from January of 1849 and told of the riches to be had if you simply showed up in California with a sack and a screen and a little determination.

He knew disappointment well, having just missed out on inventing the steam locomotive and the telegraph each of which he'd said, upon seeing them for the first time, "Aw shit! That was my idea!"

Unfortunately, there is no record of him after he left to go out West, but his son, Willard surrogate Junior, went on to not invent the Gatling gun, the phonograph record or the electric light bulb, all of which he'd been working on, sequestered in a lab, only to find, once he'd announced the inventions to great publicity of his own making, that he'd been a few years too late.

The press conference for the introduction of the light-bulb was especially embarrassing since there were incandescent spot lights used to illuminate him at the event.

My own Grandfather, Willard surrogate the fourth, was two years late with the automatic transmission, five years late with the atomic bomb, and just before he died in 1997, was very excited about something he was calling "the radiation oven," which he said would revolutionize cooking. I had to excuse myself at that particular dinner at my house, to go get the recently frozen, but now piping hot Lasagna from my microwave.

"See," he said, as I served him a slice from the plastic tray, "in my radiation oven, this would have cooked in fifteen minutes!"

"Uh huh," I said, knowing better than to argue, "That's great Grandpa!"

Personally, I'm working on an idea to make pictures and sound travel across space and into a box-like receiver device that would decode the signal and display an actual moving picture on a screen of some sort.

I'm going to call it "the pic-t-viewer." And after it's released? -I'm going to get up the nerve to ask Anna Nicole Smith on a date.


Be good to everyone.

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crazylady (2007-06-20)
There is another saying a day late and a dollar short. My husbands grandpa had the opportunity to buy into McDonalds before it was McDonalds, but his grandma told him not to said no one would ever go to those hamburger joints as she called them, guess what those hamburger joints are all over the place, think of the money he would have inherited if his grandma would have said yes. Sometimes we have to take a chance and go for it. Day late dollar short. Great story.

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