Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

These days, many things are not what they seem and things have changed.

What once would have been considered very odd, is now commonplace.

Even compared to 18 years ago, when I started writing this column, the world has become a more complex place.

I guess every generation thinks that, from cavemen onwards. And the moment you catch yourself musing that, or saying it out loud, you are immediately identified as An Old Person.

For starters, it's inappropriate to actually talk of cavemen - they are more correctly referred to as gender-irrelevant persons with subterranean dwelling preferences.

And rightly so.

Even the pictures on the wall of the cave illustrate this. You can clearly see there's male cave people and female cave people and some indeterminate characters.

There are some stick figures depicting gender re-assignment and others that look like the result of a nasty accident at the mammoth riding rodeo.

Too specific

These days, girls can be boys, boys might be girls and some of them are somewhere in between.

The song about a Boy Called Sue is no longer politically correct. By the time you read this, a Girl called Sue will probably be too specific to mention and it could all end up in court. Sue will sue.

Meat isn't necessarily from animals, and just because the Americans have pictures of men (persons) on the moon doesn't mean they actually walked on it.

And speaking of dastardly meat, I heard a story this week that the volunteers
at an SPCA fundraiser sizzle served vegetarian sausages, because some PC do-good customers whinged that real meat was perceived to be cruel to animals and therefore against the principles of the organisation.

Something fishy

Now the latest weird world wonder: fillets that don't contain any fish.

An observant reader in Countdown Papamoa forwarded these revealing photos recently… Fishless Filets, tender and flaky in a light golden batter. The photo was taken with a telephone. Even that was unheard of a couple of decades ago, yet oddly enough, no-one has invented a camera with a telephone in it.

That I know of.

Once it was a big deal to own a scooter. Now, they're lying around the streets for anyone to use. Prospective riders simply wave their phones (or was that a camera?) over them, they bounce into life and voila, as they say in Remuera, you have an instant scooter.

Better than that, you don't risk ripping the strap out of your jandal, because they have magic motors inside. Gone are the days when you'd have to stand still on one leg and run like hell with the other leg to make the contraptions go.

Electric blue

These days, everything is reliant on a screen, including these fancy new scooters.

Even people are reliant on screens.

In fact, the average person spends so much time staring at these artificial light sources that science people believe it is damaging our health.

Particularly nasty, they say, is the blue light emitted from artificial light sources, and as well as affecting the persons on the earth, it's upsetting wildlife and the night sky. Heavens above, that will include the Person on the Moon.

Back in the day, the only blue light a person needed to watch out for was the local constable.

Apparently, the problem is that lights don't have bulbs any more. They have light-emitting diodes, and these LED- gizmos emit a higher proportion of light energy at the blue end of the spectrum than other lamp devices.

Blurring the coastline

Boats used to be boats, and only drove in the water. Now, thanks to Sealegs, we have boats that drive on land.

I'm looking forward to the version that can also fly. That can't be too far away.

Very soon, apparently, we will have cars that drive themselves. Ironically, this was not a problem for horse-drawn carts, because the horses knew their way home.

In fact every horse I have ever ridden has taken it upon itself to decide our course. My relatives all had these autonomous horses.

I'd give it instructions and it would go wherever it damn well pleased (if I'd been a cowboy, I would have ended up in the Wild, Wild East).

But the point here is that it's taken car manufacturers about 100 years to catch up with technology that was naturally built in to the family nag.

Dates and mates

Finding a partner in the old days was quite a process – with the exception of the cavepersons, who simply knocked one on the head and dragged it home by the hair (which, I should point out, is not acceptable these days on several levels).

Some marriages, of course, were arranged by the parents to suit their political or economic aspirations.

Those who actually got to choose a spouse had to go through a romantic but sometimes exasperating ritual known as ‘courtship'.

It involved dance cards, church picnics, copious flowers and generally a lot of politeness.

These days, love is merely a click away on Tinder; or for the adventurous, the Animals Lost and Found website. You can organise a new partner on your telephone/camera, while riding a scooter to your lunch date of fishless fish and meatless sausages.

The wonders of the world!

What will personkind think of next?

brian@thesun.co.nz