Meet George Jetson

I haven't yet posted a thing this year, and I really wanted my first post of 2006 to be spectacular. But as the weeks slipped by, brilliant thoughts eluded me like trick or treaters past the Neverland ranch. This morning I realized that March starts tomorrow, and perhaps I should post something less than monumental just to get the ball rolling again.
I ran across something that made me think back to my childhood. Growing up, I loved the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, because it was optimistic. Rather than living in a well appointed cave, the Jetsons lived in a marvelous glass saucer high in the sky, that resembled the space needle from the 1963 Worlds Fair in Seattle. They had a flying car, a robotic maid, and a dog that talked just like Scooby Doo.
Whereas the Flintstones needed to have stinky animals around the house to take care of things like can opening and vacuuming, the Jetsons accomplished everything with the push of a button. As a child, I would wonder how many of these marvelous inventions I would see in my lifetime.
Now it is 2006. In the perspective of time, we are as far from the Jetsons, as the Jetsons were from the end of World War I. There are no flying cars, no talking dogs, and only one glass saucer house out in California that has been used more as a movie set than a domicile (and was actually built BEFORE the Jetsons aired). The closest you can get to a robot maid is the Roomba®, a battery operated sweeper that crawls across your living room like a turtle.
But there is one other thing that we do have: Treadmills. The last scene of the Jetsons was George Jetson walking Astro on a treadmill outside of the house. I believe it was meant as irony; that walking the dog, a simple task most people find pleasant, would be done on an expensive, monotonous. stationary rubber belt.
I remember thinking of this, several years back, while I was walking by a fitness club on a lovely spring Day in Chicago, seeing a dozen people walking on treadmills, and a dozen more waiting for them to finish so they could take their turn. I wondered what was so attractive about walking in place inside of a sweaty building, on a day when sunshine and fresh air was plentiful. At least half the joy of walking is being outside, and seeing the scenery slowly pass.
The last straw was this article today in Reuters. Apparently the Jetsons prediction has finally come true:
For those who do not remember the cartoon, the belt malfunctions when Astro starts chasing a cat, and George gets trapped, begging for his wife Jane to "Stop this Crazy thing!" I couldn't agree more.