Today, Wednesday 21st October 2015, is the future day that Marty McFly travels to in Back to the Future Part 2. I think we all can agree that the actual future 2015 sucks compared to the imagined future 2015 from the 1980s. In the imagined future we had flying cars, hoverboards, fossil fuels had been replaced by portable fusion reactors, clothes adjusted and cleaned themselves and things were just generally cooler. In the 1980s it was confidently predicted that in 30 years time space shuttles wd be taking off every week, we'd have a base on the moon and people wd have walked on Mars. Cancer wd surely be cured by now and with detente happening between the USA and the USSR the future wd have fewer wars. The actual 2015? Uhm, none of that. Sure we have smart phones (or at least you do as I don't have a mobile phone of any kind) but I think we'd be willing swap those for antigravity devices and emission free fusion reactors, right? ...
By the time BTTF came out the DeLorean Motor Company had already gone bankrupt, John DeLorean's final attempt to save the company by becoming a major international cocaine smuggler (!) having failed miserably. In 1984 my dad took me and my little brother round the Belfast docks where we saw hundreds of gleaming DeLoreans sitting in limbo while the bankruptcy courts decided what to do with them. Most of the DeLoreans were unlocked and you could sit inside them as me and my brother did. Back To The Future came out the next year and the DeLorean became something of a cult car - two years too late to save the Belfast factory. What happened to all those DeLoreans in the Belfast docks I don't know but a good condition DeLorean today sells for about 30,000 USD.
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If you're interested I wrote a book sort of about the DeLorean scandal in Belfast called I Hear The Sirens In The Street. It begins, of course, with a quote from Back to the Future...
... Thursday update: ok this was pretty cute:
