The Future Is Now

We became interested in Dippin Dots in 2002, when, at a game in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, a young man eating some near us exclaimed to his buds, "Dude, it's from the future." This exclamation was based, of course, on the Pavlovian fact that the Dippin Dots carts were all emblazoned with the phrase, "the ice cream of the future."

Anyway, I'm here to report that that future is necessarily now. We, friends, must be the people who are sending Dippin Dots back into the past, so that our compatriots in earlier eras can enjoy the freeze-dried magic of days yet to come. I know this because these days, as the photo above shows, Dippin Dots is no longer billed as "the ice cream of the future." It's just plain Dippin Dots. We have caught up with Dippin Dots. We are finally living in the future. 

The irony is that Watson and I spotted this—and I should clarify that Watson noticed the vanished slogan, not me—today at Turner Field in Atlanta, which if all goes according to plan will be the next stadium consigned to the dustbin of history after the 2017 season. And Turner Field itself is in the nominal shadow of its predecessor, Fulton County Stadium, whose walls still shape the parking lot, much as that now obsolete Dippin Dots slogan shaped that young man's wonderment. The past is everywhere with us, too.