JAMES LILEKS: Like Olden Times.

Seen on Twitter-X the other day: “How did people get airplane tickets before the internet? Did you call the airline and they mailed you the tickets physically?” The author’s bio said she was a neuroscientist. Apparently there’s a difference between knowing how the brain works and using it.

Well, miss, lemme tell you. We’d crank up the crystal radio set and see if we could raise anyone down at the aerodrome. “Hello, Hank? You got a seat on the midnight pond-jumper there? Put me down for one.” They’d mail you a key, and you used it to open the plane door. In those days, you know, you could smoke on a plane. In fact it was mandatory. Couldn’t take off unless everyone’d lit up. There were no in-flight movies, but the back of the seat had a pamphlet glued to it, and it described something funny Charlie Chaplin did. For dinner they had a pig on a spit, and they’d roll it down the aisles and carve off a piece.

Okay, I’m kidding. It went like this. You went to the travel agency, which was an office with posters of places you’d never go, and you’d ask —

Ick, seriously, like, talk to people?

Yes. You would tell them where you wished to go, and they would call you up later and give you options. You would write a check, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp — am I going too fast for you here? — and a few days later a ticket would arrive in the mail. Then you would get on the plane and be skyjacked to Cuba. Simpler times, and by gum, we liked it.

You see tweets like the neuroscientist’s all the time from the young and the baffled, the generation who grew up with the internet all around them like a benevolent god who asked nothing of them except watching five seconds of an ad before the video starts.

When you like drove from one state to another state, how did you know where to go??? Were there like signs or things?

Well, you know that word, “maps,” below the icon on your phone that calls up a strange abstraction of lines? We had actual maps. You’d unfold a map, refold it into a rectangle, and then follow a line to the end of the rectangle.

Unlike today, where the vast majority of today’s hit songs are but a few clicks away, the music world of the past would be utterly terrifying to the Gen-Z world:

this would kill a gen z child pic.twitter.com/vBmflvlnGY

— “paula” (@paularambles) March 15, 2024