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OMNI Magazine Remembered
An anonymous reader noted that Slate is doing a bit of a retrospective on OMNI. If you're anything like me, reading it was a treat. At home I suffered through Popular Mechanics, but OMNI was what I wished I had. There's many interesting things in the article, like the fact that OMNI is the place where William Gibson first coined the term "Cyberspace."
OMNI had the coolest illustrators of the day - about the only one of my longstanding favorites that I don't recall ever seeing
in the mag was Frank Frazetta.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It was more on an entertainment magazine than a science magazine really. I always prefered to get my Sci Fi straight up via publications like Analog, but I found Omni to be entertaining often enough in my youth. It really was more Sci Fi than a true science mag though.
It was like National Geographic and Heavy Metal had a baby. I used to love that magazine.
THL phish sticks
It lived with a solid core of futurism. Futurism is kind of dead now, now that we're using phones to surf the web and cops are using sonic weapons against crowds. The future's here and Omni guessed a lot of it right in the 70's and 80's.
Only if Letters to Penthouse could be this accurate. BRB. Pizza delivery girl is here.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
and global warming will mean no more shoveling of snow.
Tell that to my driveway!
I cut and pasted the top of the page here, go to the link to read it in all its glory.
http://www.deepscience.com/justsilly/fun006.html
Results of a contest for "theories" sponsored by Omni magazine.
Back -- Next
GRAND PRIZE WINNER:
When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet. And when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago. [see below for further info on buttered cats - Ed.]
RUNNERS-UP:
#1 If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.
#2 Why Yawning Is Contagious: You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they must yawn to even it out.
#3 Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.
#4 The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.
HONORABLE MENTION:
The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
My parents didn't allow me to subscribe to OMNI because it was a Penthouse publication.
Unlike my friends, who all had stashes of porn that they hid, I had stashes of Omni.
It's sad to grow up as a geek.
Yes, those Alien Chicks were hot.
You can melt snow in your driveway just by looking at. It may take a few months, 'tho
rewriting history since 2109
Careful, with attitudes like that, you may get deported to Cyberia.
rewriting history since 2109
I probably shouldn't reply to your post but here I go way off topic. I grew up as kid during the Vietnam war. I had friends with older brothers that had been to Vietnam and some that did not come back. When I was in college I was very anti-war and anti-military and never considered it for a split second. As a matter of fact your comment sounds like something I would have said back then if someone mentioned the idea.
After finishing my 3rd year of college I was thousands of dollars in dept from tuition and going nowhere. Friends that had graduated where taking jobs as school teachers and making no money. This was in 1981 and believe me the economy sucked and there were no decent jobs. I had a friend in about my same situation and he talked me into looking into the AF. I ended up going in and it was a great experience. I was in four years and it was total peacetime. No action going on anywhere that I was aware of.
The main reason I got out was that the air force eliminated the flight simulator technician job and it became a civilian contract position. My post is not recruiting anyone for that job because it no longer exists in the air force as far as I know.
No, it died because they replaced Ben Bova (An actual SciFi writer) with Kathy Keeton (Who was some kind of penthouse writer) then it got all about frilly style and such crap.
Later that year, I was at a trade show in Dallas. His other publication, Penthouse was present as well as his competitor - Playboy.
The contrast between the two companies could not have been more different. The Playboy booth was marginally tasteful and people were laughing and enjoying themselves with the pretty 'girls-next-door' - OK, 'fantasy-girls-next-door'.
The Penthouse booth was full of wary, pouting sluts who paced from side-to-side as they were beeing leered at by the mostly male passers-by. It looked more like a zoo enclosure than a booth.
Omni was somewhat similar in that it wrote in a style that was condescending and often trite. Here or there, I enjoyed an article, but most of it was so fanciful as to be disengenuous.
In short, I don't miss it.
*** Don't be dull.***