As ubiquitous as the internet.
On this date, in 1943, Los Angeles witnessed its first
smog attack. Apparently, until then, even the by-now ubiquitous term smog
hadn't yet been coined. I still remember that the term was a contraction for smoke
and fog, though I trust that with over a generation of research done since
then, scientists have discovered that the ingredients are very different than
simply a mix of those two.
Over sixty years later it's perhaps hard to fathom that smog (or smog attacks
- the stuff itself had been around much longer) was something new. But new
and novel can very quickly become old-hat and second nature. For me,
as a child growing up in Los Angles, not very long after that first attack, smog
was almost an element, a given, a fact of life. I didn't know it's history, and
pretty much assumed that it had been around since the creation.
Come to think of it, that's sort of the way that my kids relate to the internet.
Go to: Repeating myself.