"We
never stop investigating. ... Every question we answer leads on to another question,"
wrote Desmond Morris in his 1967 best-seller, The Naked Ape.
The course of human
life on this Planet today is the result of a chain of events which resulted in human events which took place yesterday, which is why we are
using the past to reach the future. After all, if we don't know where we have come from, how can we possibly know where we are going? The
trouble is that many people assume that they know, only to end up at an unexpected and often disappointing destination.
Predictions
about "the future" are often heralded with great fanfare, only to be debunked as a future date becomes a current reality. A classic
recent example of missed prophecy resides within the series of movie scripts (1985, 1989 and 1990) called Back to the Future. They overlooked the dawn of the
Internet when the U.S. National Science Foundation withdrew funds to be replaced under a privatization policy which culminated in April, 1995. (According
to the NSF, it is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote
the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense...")
But today we now know that event back in April, 1995, proved to be a major turning point in the
advancement of human existence on this Planet, which Back to the Future missed. However, there were pointers along the way, according to the
Internet Society, that could have been observed since "(t)he first recorded description
of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing
his Galactic Network concept."
In Orwell's 1941 work
titled Lion and the Unicorn which we cited on a previous page, he gave a nod to the union between the two kingdoms of England and
Scotland in the title to his book; but in its text he dismissed Scotland by casually accepting and promoting the idea that Britain means England,
which includes Scotland. Yet it is not as if Orwell was unaware that Scotland was a co-partner with England in the formation of the political entity
known as the United Kingdom. Scotland is a geographical area whose domestic governance is still legally based upon a totally different system from that
of England, and Orwell must surely have known that because he wrote his blockbuster called Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Scottish
island of Jura. When Orwell wrote in 1944 that "... history has in a sense ceased to
exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted"
; the "our own times" to which
he referred, should really have been "at any time."
The monolithic BBC
often tells stories about the past, but they are politically doctored. British and American history about the same events are often poles apart in their
reinterpretations of the same events and the same time periods. BBC polemics also tell stories about its own past, but they are filtered replays which
avoid raising legal questions not only about the way in which BBC was created, but the reasons why it was created, and the reasons why it continues to
exist, under a royal charter. It is for these and many other reasons that we refuse to accept without question, that record of the past which has been
"officially" branded as "history". Therefore we also avoid accepting these "official" versions as the last word on the past, and consequently we are
constantly asking questions about many of the answers that we have already received.
Our experiences to
date are based upon a quest to unravel threads which join together the story about human relationships.
As you can tell from
this brief overview, our own quest has followed a path that had a beginning, but which has forked off in many different directions. Maybe one of those
supplemental paths leads in your direction?
In order to maintain
a sense of logical interconnectivity, the threads we are following are already joined to the fabric of our story. Somewhere along the line it does connect
to you and to your own story. Perhaps you have already found the connection? If you have, please contact us and join our existing team.
Our sources of
inspiration
include Salvatore Albert Lombino (pictured right), who legally adopted the name
Evan Hunter, and then became a successful crime writer known as Ed McBain. It was under the name of Evan Hunter that he penned a novel based upon his
experience as a teacher, and it became a best seller as both a book and a movie called Blackboard Jungle. The title song to that
movie was Rock Around The Clock, and it in turn helped to launch the commercial success of rock and roll music.
But there was
a lot more to the story of its author, because as a crime writer he also coined the word 'gonzo', which another writer picked-up to describe his
own form of 'shock' journalism. But originally Hunter-McBain used that term to describe a misunderstanding. Our intention is to abandon the word
'history' for the word 'yester' in order to create understanding, and by writing about subjects we have had personal contact with, we will be
adding authenticity to the process of biographical story-telling.
Our primary
"storyboard" is YesterGuide, a series of 500 x 450 pixel word-picture slides grouped within subject matter around a timeframe. Although these slides have
been programmed to automatically move, they can be still be stalled by placing a mouse on any frame, and the moving sequence can be restarted by
merely removing the mouse. The idea behind YesterGuide slides is to make them as interesting and as quickly communicative as possible. Links are in
the process of being installed to assist with documented research, but YesterGuide slides provide a quick overview of "contents within contexts" without
ploughing through an encyclopedia to gain a grasp of the topic in question. Right now we are concentrating upon creating a timeframe overview, but
there is absolutely no reason why specific subjects cannot be addressed in the same way. The guide to all this is finding various biorgraphical links
because without human beings, there is nothing to document concerning human activity. However, we do not have a "hidden agenda". We are not attempting
to satisfy conspiratorial polemics. We lack any form of theological or political directive. In short, nothing is directing this project other than
curiosity. This is a work about individualism and it is guided by individuals interested in finding answers.
We
