The coma guy

You know the guy who came out of his 19year long coma? Well the BBC have a useful crib sheet for him on what he's missed - Catching up on two lost decades.

Makes me feel old to see a pile of this stuff in one place - in 1984 I was eight, had a Commodore 16 computer (thats 16Kb of memory!!), climbed trees, played Lego and my brother wasn't even born yet.

I've made a bigger list of things that Terry Wallis (that's the coma guys name) missed out on (in loose chronological order, and by no means comprehensive...):

  • Bush I & Clinton (and all that went with that - the stained dress, whitewater etc.)

  • MS Windows was yet to be 'based on' Apple's GUI

  • Chernobyl happened

  • Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie

  • the Berlin wall toppled after 28 years

  • 2000 students were killed by the Chinese Government in Tiananmen Square when demonstrating for democracy

  • Nelson Mandela was released and later became president of South Africa

  • the Soviet Union collapsed

  • A Coalition of countries evicted Iraq from Kuwait

  • Margaret Thatcher was succeeded by John Major as Prime Minister of the UK, and later he was suceeded by Tony Blair

  • Linus Torvalds released the Linux Kernel which went on to not quite challenge Microsoft (yet)

  • The Maastricht Treaty was negotiated bringing about the European Union and the Euro

  • Intel shipped the first Pentium chip

  • The Waco cult thing happened

  • NAFTA came on stream

  • Lorena Bobbitt severed her husbands penis, although she was found Not Guilty (Temporary Insanity) when brought to trial.

  • The Channel Tunnel (which took 7 years to build) was opened under the English Channel between the UK and France

  • 16 children and 1 adult were killed in the scottish town of Dunblane by a gunman

  • Dolly the Sheep (the first mammal cloned from an adult cell) is born, she died this year.

  • OJ Simpson found not-guilty of murder but civally liable for the death of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman

  • The UK gives up sovereignty of Hong Kong

  • Scotland got its Parliament back!

  • Timothy McVeigh found guilty of Oklahoma City bombing

  • Apple unveiled the iMac making home 'puters look cool

  • California bans smoking in bars and restaurants - New York follows suit 5 or 6 years later

  • NATO attacked Yugoslavia

  • The drunken Russian President Boris Yeltsin is succeeded by ex-KGB supremo Vladimir Putin

  • A fire in the Mont Blanc tunnel kills 29 and closes the tunnel for 3 years

  • The classic Star Wars films were augmented by new Star Wars films

  • Y2K paranoia grips the computerised world, lines the pockets of Y2K consultants and fails dismally to be disastrous in pretty much any regard

  • AOL and Time Warner get into bed together in a massive corporate merger.

  • Microsoft is charged with Antitrust violations

  • Concorde crashed and after returning to service for a short while will soon be decomissioned

  • Hanging Chads and Dimples deliver George Bush the Younger to the White House

  • September 11th, 2001 saw a massive attack by al Qa'ida on the World Trade Centre precipitating a "War against Terror" which is coming soon to a theater near you; Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Civil Liberties restrictions yada yada yada

  • Corporate Scandals: Enron, Worldcom etc. blah blah blah

  • The Quartet Road Map published possibly opening a route for peace between Israel & Palestine

What have I missed? Amazing films, music and art, The Human Genome Project, China gradually becoming more friend than foe? Michael Jackson turned white. All that (and lots more) happened in the last 19 years. Gee whizzzzzzz.

Posted by Paul at July 10, 2003 04:40 AM |
Visitor Feedback

I would like to walk up to all these strangers cheap and offer to switch headphone jacks for ticket a minute or two, the idea being that each lowest of us would suddenly know a lot more about generlogies the other past what they look like, which discount is all you can really know about a stranger flight when you meet them (aside from maybe cues low you get about where you see them at, and airfare inferences based on how they're dressed, cheapest

Posted by: cheap flight at October 16, 2003 04:26 AM