Originally published at: Helen Mirren: "It's so sad that Kurt Cobain never got to see GPS" - Boing Boing
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“Here we are now,
Navigate us!” 
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Weird… bless her, but… weird.
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REM, on the other hand…
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Cobain would have been a teenager when practical use of GPS was publicly known (1983). It was promoted as a way for commercial flights to avoid being shot down accidentally during the Cold War.
But maybe Cobain would have been more interested that GPS was built on the foundation of mathematician Gladys West, one of the few black women in her field at the time.
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Um… I suspect everyone here (and Helen Mirren) agree. 
Not sure why the hostile response…
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It’s a comment that would make a lot more sense if he had publicly expressed interest in the area. There’s quite a lot of people who didn’t live to see GPS, so why Cobain?
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For more information on Evgeny Two Beards Lebedev, who will have managed to shoehorn his name into the article more frequently than Mirren’s, refer to Private Eye (ad nauseam).
A suitable unit of measurement?
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you totaly right. its deleted. and much appreciated.
It reminded me of a deeply stoned kind of conversation, not negative at all, just a bit out there, embracing the weird.
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It’s certainly… a choice to use Cobain as a subject. It’s not offensive but it’s weird. If anything i would be more interested to see how Cobain would’ve felt about streaming and similar developments as far as music goes, which is more relevant to his background.
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I love Helen Mirren, but I’m not sure how I feel about a lot of modern conveniences. I would be like a fish out of water for a few days/weeks if suddenly there were no internet or cell phones, but then I’d adjust.
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from the Guardian piece on this conversation:
“A now-iconic photo from the early 1990s shows Cobain grinning broadly while talking on a brick-like mobile phone, suggesting he might well have been enthusiastic about Google Maps.”
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I saw a meme once, it went something like “so sad Princess Diana never got to experience meme culture.” This was years ago and if i ever come across it again I’ll post to Odd Stuff.
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She’s not wrong.
We’ve been going for daily walks in a strange town, it’s so nice just to call up the map and look for different routes to see different things.
Old cemeteries are fun.
It’s weird that she wonders about Curt Cobain and GPS specifically.
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There are so many things that are sad about the untimely and tragic loss of Kurt. If I was asked to list them out, I’m pretty sure I would end up several pages in before I landed on, “he didn’t get to see GPS”.
This is kind of like saying the thing that’s really sad about losing Buddy Holly was that he never got to experience a microwaveable burrito.
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A longtime friend of my BF’s is in town visiting, and fuck if Nirvana and Cobain didn’t come up in convo both during lunch and on the way home.
Curiouser and curiouser.
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This could go on all day, would make a fun auto-generated thingy.
“the thing that’s really sad about losing Jimi Hendrix was that he never got to experience a McRib.”
“the thing that’s really sad about losing Natalie Wood was that she never got to experience playing a first-person 3D shooter”
“the thing that’s really sad about losing Richard Harris was that he never got to experience riding a Segway.”
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Yeah, I’m fairly randomly, listening to Pattern Recognition by William Gibson when walking/running and the lack of smartphones is the biggest jarring thing. They have mobile phones but they use them as telephones.
The absolute savages.
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