Whipped Cream Difficulties

So Cormac McCarthy isn’t dead.

However, Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler is.

“No serious futurist deals in ‘predictions,’” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.”
He advised readers to “concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail.” That theme, he emphasized, was that “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”

(I’ve never actually read Future Shock. When it was first published, I was distracted by other things, like my binky: when I reached the age where I might have been able to appreciate it, it seemed…quaint. Perhaps I should fix this.)

I find this obit for Phil Parker oddly touching. Son of a Baptist preacher, drank for the first time in grad school at Harvard, ended up an alcoholic living on the streets of the Bowery, finally went to AA and got sober…

In 1974, just a few years after he stopped drinking, Mr. Parker founded a supported work program that over the next several decades would help countless other homeless alcoholics. And as the derelict population became disproportionately young and black, Mr. Parker, who was black, became a social worker himself, supervising the program at the city’s East Third Street Men’s Shelter just off the Bowery.

He stayed sober for 48 years. Cancer got him in the end.