Science, Travel

Sputnik Again

75 Comments

Today’s post comes from Tamara Kant-Waite, past president pro-tem of the Future Historians of America.

All the hubbub about last Friday’s meteor called attention to an alarming video documentation gap.

We are losing the dash cam race to the Russians.

It seems that dash cams are rolling constantly in many Russian automobiles because drivers are concerned about being victimized in crashes, scams, and road rage. Video proof of the actual sequence of events could be your only insurance against careless and unprincipled fellow travelers.

I hesitate to embed any of the actual images here because they could be disturbing for some of our more fainthearted readers. But if the sight of reckless driving, fistfights, and cars crashing into one another is your idea of great entertainment, you can spend quite a long time looking at it courtesy of the Russian dash cam fad.

Sputnik I

Now we know why our parents taught us to be afraid – clearly Russian drivers are unhinged. Or at least a surprising number of them are going down the road with their doors swinging open and their hoods up, unable to stay between the lines and mad as hell. Not that we don’t have our own highway problems – we do. But they’re beating us silly in raw footage.

As a Future Historian, I must sound an alarm. The undocumented peoples of the Earth will surely be forgotten. And among those whose activities are recorded, the ones with eye-popping antics are most assured of a lasting place in the great story of time. Right now, the day-to-day video record of life in the United States is tame compared to the smash-bang wild west rodeo going on in Russia.

Who knew that when Khruschev said “We will bury you,” he meant they would bury us under hours and hours of high speed slapstick and real-life mayhem? Are you going to stand for this?

And if you ARE going to stand for it, could you at least stand for it in the middle of a busy street with tape rolling? Historians who have not been born yet are already hungry for raw footage, and the most compelling stuff being produced today has a distinct Russian flavor!

Yours in the fullness of Time,

Tamara K-W.

She could be right. Perhaps we need something akin to the space race to inch back ahead of the Russians in the video race. Would you put a dash cam in your car if it meant we might close this growing clip gap between the American Eagle and the Russian Bear? Would you wear a helmet cam? Or consider this – with current trends in miniaturization and personal adornments, the most ubiquitous camera of the future might be mounted on a nose ring.

How are you documenting the story of your time on Earth?

75 thoughts on “Sputnik Again”

  1. I’m a big time recorder of life as it unfolds. I rarely leave the cottage without my little digital camera “just in case” my infrequent outings may encounter a special moment. Usually, this just means capturing hundreds of images of dancers at Motown band venues or sequential shots of the handful of out-of-town trips I’ve made. Beyond photos, the most arduous, detailed record I’ve ever kept was during my cancer ordeal starting three years ago. I intuitively knew that establishing a Caring Bridge web page would be a critical link or lifeline between this deeply personal internal journey and the outer world. I poured out my heart daily, chronicling every scary, funny, enlightening, or transforming part of the process. In all those days for about ten months, I only missed the two days in ICU following my nine-hour esophagectomy. I somehow knew that writing it all out would allow me to avoid carrying the trauma inside. Some stories are so compelling that they simply must be told, especially when they may very well be the last story told.

    Because every story has an organic beginning and ending, I had all 365 pages of these journals bound in hard cover and titled it “Dancing With Cancer”. I had copies made for each of my three children and plan one day to read it myself…………I’ll know when the time comes.

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  3. Morning all. I’m getting better at remember that I have a camera on my phone, but I’m still not great at it. You’d think with such a good example in front of me all the time (Teenager), I would be better at this.

    My only chronicle will be my reading list. For much of my adult life, I kept a cloth-bound book (OK, a few cloth-bound books) in which I wrote down books that I wanted to read. Every now and then I would go back through it and check off anything I had read recently. In 2007, I started my spreadsheet – title, author and type. Over the years the spreadsheet has evolved and now includes the date that I finished the book and where the idea for the book came from. BBC is Bleven’s. TBB is the trail. There are a few others and then there is the big category of O&A – Out and About, which is translates into “I can’t remember exactly where I got the idea”.

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      1. Agreed. It was a huge turning point for me to realize that there was no law that said I had to finish a book, except some internal law of my own. It’s been hard to banish that internal law, although I’m getting better at it. I tell myself that I’m freeing myself up to read a better book that’s out there waiting for me!

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    2. Do you have ratings on your spreadsheet? So you can tell others (who ask) whether or not they should read such-and-such a book? Or do you remember them each so well that you can spout off details and your evaluation? Or is that not a purpose of the list?
      A friend keeps such a list and recently added a newly read book to the end of the list. For no particular reason, she read through the list that day and found that she had already read that exact book a few years ago and had NO recollection of having read it.

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      1. Hmmm… purpose of list. Initially I started the list as a reminder of books I wanted to read. I was working in receiving at the bookstore and as I unpacked books that looked interesting, I’d add them to a mental list of books that I’d like to read some day. This got ugly fast and it was actualy keeping me up at night, trying to remember everything. Writing it down got it out of my brain. I started checking them off as I read them a few months after that.
        I do not have a rating, although I might add that — can’t hurt. Unfortunately I do not have the best memory on the planet – there are titles on the list from earlier years that I don’t remember AT ALL, although I hope that if I started reading them again, I would remember them. That has happened at least twice (that I remember)– gotten fairly far into a book with a strange, deja vu feeling that turned out to be just that – I had read the book before.

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  4. To as large extent as I would wish my novel does
    All children the age of my grandchildren already have a massive digital record.

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  5. After going through a minor debacle with a Barney Fife in Jordan, who insisted his dash cam proved things that I do not think were true and then getting caught in the offensive system of paying my fine, or trying to with a citation that faded to blank paper a week after Barney printed it up in his car, I want a dash cam to protect me from the other Barney’s out there.

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  6. I often fear that the s&h will be dubbed a space alien, as there is so little photographic record of his existence after about age 2. Neither of us are big on cameras and I have never been able to keep a journal, even when my grade depended on it.

    I also regret that I have almost no record of my work in theatre.

    Given how much I enjoy digging up genealogical information, I suppose I owe it to the FHoA to get with the program and start proving my exisitence.

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    1. I’m with you MiG. If my son hadn’t had an interest in taking pictures, there would be none of my lads. It’s one of my regrets that there aren’t more. My problem is that i don’t want to spend my time behind a view finder.

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      1. See Renee’s response to Steve’s comment about unpictured women :)!

        Neither of us like to have to be the camera custodian (unless we are going on a picture taking expedition), and like Sherillee, I often forget the camera has that ability (and I also don’t seem to have a cable to connect the phone to the computer for the purposes of posting those pictures).

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  7. As I’ve mentioned several times before, I get up each day, pour a mug of ink-black coffee and then write an email letter to an old friend named Marilynn. I’ve done this daily since some time in 1998. I just sampled my recent letters and found that they are about 1,300 words long. They used to be longer, but my friend is aging (she is days from her 90th birthday). I sense that Marilynn prefers this shorter length because it is easier for her to answer a short than a long letter, and she doesn’t have nearly as much energy as she did when we started the correspondence. The letters several years ago were usually 2,000 words long.

    These letters are crafted to amuse Marilynn, of course, but they have a secondary function of documenting my life. I can’t write that much every day without discussing my daily activities (such as they are!) and whatever is on my mind. I’ll comment on Mark Dayton’s tax proposal, a good movie I just saw, some thoughtful commentary on Minn Post . . . things like that. I sometimes quote passages from Trail Baboon to her, so you folks are well known to my friend. (Marilynn is particularly fond of Clyde.) I add digital images to my letters when that seems useful.

    Marilynn prints my letters and returns them to me in boxes. After all the years of writing, he boxes are piling up around me, as I haven’t decided just what to do with them. I’m not vain enough to think that documents of my life carry any special value. Our letters are candid and honest–often painfully honest. She knows me better than my daughter; I know her better than her sons.

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        1. That’s nice too, but I meant your daily ritual offering. A fine way to journal with double bonuses.

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    3. the daily documents of your life dont carry any special value. poppycock. that is the stupid steve. there is humble and there is ridiculous. ge tthe damn tings looked after. if not bound then at least labeled and organized so your daughter can pass them on to liam. we will all need his address so we can get copies.

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  8. Morning–
    I watched a PBS special on ‘The pioneers of aviation’ last night. It was pretty cool.
    I was born in ’64 and spent much of my childhood preoccupied with space travel especially the Apollo program. So when the show got to that point, it felt like a trip home; I know all those missions and the massive Saturn V transporter almost intimately.
    Pretty cool.

    I have been keeping journals, rather sporadically, since an 8th grade English assignment. I kinda chuckle; they are filled with teenage angst and wailing and gnashing of teeth right up to June of 1986 when I met Kelly. Then they stop abruptly for about 15 years… then I started writing bits again.
    So who ever gets to reading them, I hope they get the full set and don’t stop in the mid-80’s or you’ll get a very skewed view.

    We have a diary from Kelly’s (non- blood) Uncle’s mother. She wrote a few lines every day from 1925-1930. Basically, she did laundry, cleaned the apartment, mended clothing, and every time they went somewhere they had to fix the car. ‘Starter on car went out’, ‘flat tire on car’, ‘car wouldn’t start’. cook, clean, repeat.
    But it is fascinating reading. A lot of mail (twice a day!) lots of visits with friends and neighbors. And her euphemism for not being pregnant, ‘Fell off roof today’. The last entry is scribbled in the margin of the last page about Daughter Anne born in 1931.

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  9. A friend bought a bunch of odd stuff at a garage sale, including five calendars from the 1940s. When he studied the calendars, he found each day had a number (in a tiny script) written in by the date. After some study, my friend figured out they were some woman’s record of her weight as it varied day by day. She never missed a day. As I recall, her weight mostly bounced within a narrow range in the 180s. After five years, she was seven pounds heavier than when she started. Take from that what you will. To me, this is a sad and touching set of documents.

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  10. Greetings! We returned from London last night. The trip was great. We took photographs to record our experiences, but our efforts to document our story were nothing compared to those of our traveling companion. She is a most congenial fellow traveller, but has a mania for photography and a brash, somewhat entitled manner that drove my daughter crazy. She insisted on a photo of us ever time we left for a venue, arrived at a venue, were at the venue, or left the venue, and that meant that she was always asking other travellers, waiters, store clerks, or any other warm body to man the camera. Daughter died with teenage embarrassment whenever this happened. Daughter commented that she realized she and I are quiet travellers who try to fit in and not draw attention to ourselves, but our companion was a crass tourist, and daughter never wants to be a tourist like that. She said “Mom, it’s like she’s just pillaging London as she goes.”

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    1. True. Some events are by some people seen only through a viewfinder. Will we see what your finder viewed and hear about it, too?

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  11. so glad the trip went well. welcome back. its nice that you got to travel with an obnoxious person who was picking up the bill. that makes it more tolerable. its the pits to be traveling with someone like that and not having to bit e the bullet for anything but tasteful reason.. the ugly american is something we all recognize but even when we do it in what we consider tasteful vs those maniacs the europeans know we are americans. i ask how and they never explain fully but they certainly know.

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    1. Daughter was tickled that she was mistaken at least twice for a German National by other German Naionals who asked her for directions in German.

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      1. That’s cool; good for her!

        I got that in a little red-neck gas station in Tennessee but I think it was my sleeveless shirt that fooled them… 🙂

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  12. the blog is my journal. i will have to go to the records and have them downlaoded to save for the ages. internet stuff is going to be interesting. conversations with n real begining middle or end that are like slop thrown on the wall mixed in with intricate and delicate grammarical wonders put out by wordsmiths sitting side by side in the ethernet colud waiting for rediscovery. space men will receive this over radio waves in ten thousand years and wonder why
    wouldnt it be interesting to have shakespears notes while he was getting up each day in addition to the finished product? maybe, maybe not. sometimes its better to keep your fingers off the keys and let people assume you are in idiot than to type and prove to them for sure.

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  13. Yikes, I just watched 5 minutes of the dash cam. Getting nauseus, had to stop! OMG – who gave the Russians cars????

    I have the typical photo collections, and a shelf of journals starting 1974. They are mostly excruciating to read, largely because the same things that were plaguing (that’s the spelling – I looked it up) me then are still there). For the gaps (years when I was unusually unhappy, i.e. first marriage) I managed to make copies of the meatier letters I sent to friends. Then I started writing the annual Christmas letter when the boy was born, and these make kind of an interesting record, telling at least what you wanted the world to know about your life…

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    1. In 1993 we had two Russian’s visit for a week as part of a Farm Bureau exchange program. There were 20 in the group and they split up amongst the host farms. We didn’t get the interpreter but they did have a Russian / US dictionary so we made do.
      One of the things they wanted to do was drive the car. And they drove from the house to the barn – a distance of about 150 yards – very VERY Fast! Slam on the brakes, turn around and ZOOOOM back the other way. It was scary and funny at the same time.

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      1. the chinese are a funny culture the other way. they are very careful never to get caught doing anything wrong but the culture also say puch your way to the fornt of the line. what we would get angry at for butting in line is the only way of thinking over there. driving is the funniest thing of all. i started going over there when it was cars for business men with drivers who were kind of special guys and many bicycles and work vehicles like an atv with a small truck bed that they would load down with piles of brick rocks bags of empty pop bottles stacked 10 feet tall it was a riot and the walkers. the streets were so busy you were watching a constant flow of a mass of humanity all going by with their heads focused on the person in front of them and the direct thought process of how to get around in front of them. no speed demons but lots om maniacs for sure and lots of people who were being caught in the middle of the cultural change. 90 year old elders hobbling along with one eye on the cars bicycles that were about to run them down. the area off the main roads is set up with tents where the masses are taking driving lessons to havve the toyota corolla to go with the cell phone to make life complete. what have we taught the world about priorities? coka cola, mcdonalds marlboro drive phone and 100 dollar tennis shoes. life is good

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        1. I was warned by some friends who had been to China the year before I went (2001) that crossing the street as a pedestrian was a challenge. I didn’t believe them. Well, I have never been anyplace where my life felt more in jeopardy than crossing the street, just about any street, in Beijing. Yet, despite the craziest traffic I’ve seen anywhere, I never saw a single accident in the 14 days there.

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  14. My father wrote two unpublished books about the first “two quarters” of his life to gift Steve & me in 1985. They were meticulously hand written in small block print and flush with his cartoon illustrations which depicted, along with his words, an amazingly detailed recounting of his early life. I’m ashamed to admit that I never read them from cover to cover until after he died in 1999, at which time I devoured them and admonished myself a thousand times for only taking all this in AFTER it was too late to have the “dialogue which never happened”. I learned much more about who this man was after his death than in the half century before it. I regret having so little curiosity about such an incredible human being, but mostly feel heartache for the missed opportunity to enjoy a sense of relatedness with this strong, silent man of few words. It makes me weep to realize that this man of few words did indeed put great effort into providing them while he was still alive, but I was too bound up in old wounding to take it in or act upon it.

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    1. My conclusion is that most of us have a small window of opportunity to appreciate our parents, to truly know them. Obviously, this varies enormously. We can’t see our parents as they are when we are adolescents. Then when we begin our adult lives, we are (naturally and rightfully) absorbed in the day-to-day challenges of life: launching a career, establishing a marriage, raising children, etc. Most young folks are self-absorbed and limited in their ability to actually see the lives of other people until they are into their middle years. With luck, there comes a time in our middle years when we know something of life and have outgrown most of the tensions with our parents; this is a time to get to know them. If you are lucky!

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      1. but only if they will talk about it……

        A lot of the old Germans in my family have no interest in that whatsoever.

        After my grandmother died, Grandpa would tell me some stories. Of course, the aunts were quick to point out that those were just his stories and should in no way be considered factual.

        Telling the world what you want them to know indeed, BiR.

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        1. ill bet those aunts had great stories huh.
          my irish heritage is dripping with story telling. my dad would call the radio the conversation killer. stut it off and lets talk. this is when i was alittle kid. what do you want to talk about. oh i dont now did i ever tell you about j.b. and the wolverine when he was out deer hunting by duluth?…..

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      2. watch out what you wish for. my kids have none of the abstract distance i had form my folks at their ages. its like they understand we are just folks and i happen to be the elder bozo in the group. i know some tricks of the trade and have fun along the way but also keep making the same bumbling mistakes that cause me to wonder if i will never learn. them too. maybe more than me. i dont think i was as adult in some ways as they are at their adolescent age but in other ways they are never going to get there if they dont wake up and smell the coffee. 2+2= here let me check my calculator…

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  15. Documentation of my life is rather spotty, at best. From my childhood there’s the annual photo, taken at a local photographer’s studio, featuring me, my sister and my mom. These were my mother’s annual Christmas offerings to her family in Ireland and my dad. These ended rather abruptly when I was six due to the demise of the photographer. In addition there’s the occasional, usually poor quality, black and white snapshots. My mother was forever tossing stuff, so no drawings, notes, or other written documentation from my childhood survived.

    My teen years are almost too painful to consider, and I have the odd photos to prove it! From this period I have my Youth Hostel Passport to document some of the bicycling destinations around Denmark with several girl friends. The photo in that passport is hilarious! What the heck was I thinking?

    My traveling years, 18 to 22, have more bad photos, and more stamps in my regular and my Youth Hostel Passport. Most of the photos from this period were slides, and they faded so badly that I tossed them long ago.

    From my arrival in the US on November 24th, 1965, the documentation is equally sporadic. Photos of early years of first marriage in Cheyenne, Wyoming to college years in Carbondale, are a hodgepodge of snapshots residing in a shoebox. I have saved, don’t ask me why, some of my college papers, complete with corrections and the feedback from the teacher in red. Comma splits and split infinitives abound, and as you know, I still have no idea what that means. Some of those notes I relish, some not so much.

    I did attempt writing a journal early on in my current marriage. For some reason I’d write only when I was thoroughly miserable or pissed off. After a few years of that, I burned my scribblings. Now that I have plenty of time on my hands I find that I have little of interest to write about, so my contributions here on the blog, the occasional email to friends, and Facebook postings will have to suffice.

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    1. makes me think of people sorting through all my crap. rose bud as the fire engulfs all the meaningful artifacts i forgot to share the story behind

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  16. When I was in my Match.com years, I dated women in their 50s who were almost all divorcees. I was intrigued–and ultimately saddened–to discover that many of them had not one photo of themselves. Quite a few of them had only been photographed in family groups, so to present a photo of themselves they had to cut themselves out of one of those family pictures. To me, this represented the fact that nobody had been very interested in them as an individual for many years. Their identity in the family was limited to being a mom and wife. I saw them differently, and that sometimes showed up in the photos I took of them. Amusingly, when those women and I decided we were not meant to be partners, they often used my portraits of them when they went back on Match.com and needed photos to show what they looked like.

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    1. Perhaps the reasons they had no photos of themselves was because they were the family photographer when they were married. There are very few photos of me at home, since I am the one who is usually behind the camera. No one else knows how to use my camera, and husband doesn’t like taking photos of much of anything, and detests having his own photo taken.

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      1. That’s a good point, Renee. I jumped to conclusions because I knew that some of these women had not been encouraged to have any personality beyond “mom” and so the photos showed them as people saw them. But there are many reasons people don’t get photographed, including hating to have a picture taken.

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    1. really . i was wondering why there were so many dashboard cams in russia. i assumed it was a deal like a drunken driving deturrant or something like that. it is to stop lawsuits huh? i have one of those going on right now where my son was scamed over by his college by a guy who waits in parking lots and then has you back int him with a friend int e car next door to write down the facts. in russia they can make a good living that way too

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      1. That may have happened to me a couple of times. I’m so trusting that I figured that I must have backed or turned in a way that I have never done before or since. I’d be too timid to call someone on it if it happened again and I realized/suspected right away.

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    2. The NBC Evening News addressed the issue of why so many dash-cams in their report tonight. Dale gave several explanations. Additionally, Russians fear they will fall into the clutches of a crooked cop, so they want to be able to document that they were driving well. Similarly, it is common in Russia for the rich and well-connected to get away with lousy driving that leads to accidents, hence the need to be able to prove just what happened.

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  19. I always mean to do a combination writing/drawing journal but never really pull it off. The closest thing to it is the blog I started.

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    3. Thank you, you two. Yes, Pinterest.
      And tim (Bill also), I am dropping off the travel books at Barbara’s tomorrow afternoon.

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  22. You could reconstruct a lot of my days by studying my credit card statements. There’s the charge for taking a cat to the vet, a restaurant tab, the purchase after the wine tasting, something from the bookstore, another restaurant tab, the bread sale at St. Agnes, the boiler repair bill, trip to Cheapo, prescriptions, dentist bills, travel, theater tickets; it’s all there. Discover knows things about me I don’t admit to anyone. Like how much I really spend at Godiva.

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    1. 🙂
      I have a small tin (1.5 oz) of Godiva Pearls: Dark Chocolate with Mint, which my sister gave me for Christmas. Little beads of heaven.

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    2. that’s why i – as much as possible – use cash for purchases. it’s much easier to cover up things like chocolate and book purchases that way.

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  23. I sold for a company in Russia that used to be a munitions plant that made beautiful stainless steel garden tools. We couldn’t ever get them shipped out of the country because they would be hijacked on the way to the port. The truck would be stopped and they would disappear every time. Culture of corruption

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