What happened to the flying cars, talking robots and teleportation chambers?

Forget holograms, three-dimensional video and all the other wonders television promised us we'd have by the year 2000. I'm still looking for a cordless that won't pick up AM radio instead of my conversation.

The future, at least the one promised in cartoons and comic books, has been a dramatic disappointment. Sure, everyone has computers, and the Internet has brought people the convenience of catalog shopping without the pesky catalogs, but most of the cool stuff remains theoretical at best. All of the major developments that seemed guaranteed for the turn of the century have yet to occur. I'm pretty sure no one teleports to work, space colonies remain limited to two Russian men floating in a rickety closet and very few of us own anti-gravitational belts.

Even the most obvious high-tech development, the one everyone expected would be here by now-robots that perform household chores, assist with various personal hygiene tasks and otherwise handle the crap humans would rather not deal with-have yet to appear. I would never have thought that the giant "happy birthday Paulie" robot from Rocky III would represent an unattainable ideal that would not be common by now.

When that movie came out in 1982, it seemed odd that Radio Shack wasn't already selling them. Unfortunately, it appears that robot technology stopped with 2XL, a plastic toy that was really just a tape player in the shape of a robot.

Since the techie crowd has become distracted either trying to get in on the next hot Internet IPO or discussing whether Mulder and Scully should hook up, some of us have had to take the future into our own hands. This has met with mixed results, as my tube-based citywide transportation system currently consists of a covered slide stick out my living room window.

Even my best efforts at creating a video phone-plugging an old Commodore 64 monitor I bought on E-Bay into my AT&T slimline-has met with total failure.

I remain confident, however, that my next car will either have the ability to fly or will fold up into a briefcase at the touch of a button.

My current vehicle, a 1995 Mercury Tracer, has a decided lack of flying ability. Even working up a lot of speed and driving it off a cliff produces only an extremely short-lived flight experience, and driving with the doors open seems to help keep me on the ground.

It's only a few days until the year 2000, and even my wardrobe remains decidedly unfuturistic. Though I do own a lot of solid-colored shirts from the Gap, I have exactly zero silver jumpsuits. While these do seem to have caught on with background dancers in rap videos, it looks like it will be a few years before we'll all be wearing them.

January 1, 2000 looks an awful lot like January 1, 1986. Sure, we have better cable, an abundance of PokÄmon products and the ability to cook rotisserie chicken in an apartment, but other than that, not much has changed.