A DC comic morality tale for the iPod era?

I had this comic in 1971 (Amazing New Adventures of Superman #236) and it is one of the few story lines that stuck in my head. The original comic got thrown away during one of the occasional, catastrophic  tidy ups of my bedroom, but I am now so old and rich that I can lavish 100 times the original price (5p) in order to satisfy this nostalgic whim and I just have. And I'm glad I did too, because it seems just as astonishingly prescient as I had remembered.

So, what's so special about this story?

• A population that is bewitched by the music of the Surrus flower to such an extent that the wander around with the flowers stuck to their ears and listen to nothing else
• Looming environmental disaster that they have only a narrow opportunity to avert
• Mass distrust/denial of science (Dr Mo-De's warnings fell on deaf ears)

Can you see where I'm going with this? 

Denny O'Neil wrote this in 1971. Never mind the iPod, the Sony Walkman was not invented until seven years later and the term global warming was not coined until 1975 (Wallace Broecker, "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Science, vol. 189 (8 August 1975), 460-463.) Mind you, he was a bit off the mark with his fashion predictions wasn't he? I love old Gregory Peck there with his hippy head band and Star Trek costume. Probably jeans worn with a waist band 18 inches from the ground were beyond O'Neil's imagination and I'm not going to criticise him for that.

And the moral of this story? I don't know what lessons you'll take from it, but for me it is clear.  

If I had only hoarded this away for 39 years I could have saved a fiver.

Planned obsolescence

UPDATE - It turns out that I can rename my blog so I have changed it from 'This is England 2010' to 'This is England', being as how it is 2011 and I'm still finding things to say...
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I just responded to someone else's blog for the first time in my life, but had to keep on trimming my words down as I exceeded the word limit for comments. I've taken that as a clue that I should start a blog of my own rather than creating one in other people's comments boxes. So if you are reading this piffle, blame Kathryn Daley who has written very intelligently (i.e. I agree with her) about guys, girls and friendship.

As soon as I chose it, I realised that putting the year in the name of your blog is probably rather dumb. On the other hand, I am in England, it's 2010 and after finishing watching Shane Meadows' devastatingly gruelling but outrageously good four part TV serialisation This is England 86 yesterday evening, a tribute seems appropriate. 

So beyond being a tribute to Meadow's extraordinary ability to portray English working class culture, I'll pretend this is planned obsolescence and that this blog is just a test to enable me to learn about the practicalities of blogging here. 

And if I'm still writing this blog in England 2058. Well, frankly, I'll be surprised as I'll be a 100 years old, which will make me a centenarian, unless I can get a hat like this...

...which would make me a centenarian centurion and the envy of every pensioner in the queue at Eccles' Post Office.