xtcian

the immeasurable clarity of rear windows

4/8/09

My esteemed old friend and colleague Andy referred back to this entry in mid-2005 where he predicted that "the Heels will win another National Championship before the end of this decade." Job well done, Mr. Bagwell! But how did the rest of us do? Did our prognostications from nearly a half-decade ago come to into being?

Let's take mine first:
A current box office star will die of un-natural causes. Someone near the height of their career, like Carole Lombard. It will make them timeless and immortal in that James Dean/Janis Joplin fashion.

Heath Ledger certainly counts for this one, yes?

A woman will be stalked via her own blog, with a violent crime ending. It will lead to parents not allowing any of their kids to keep blogs...

I recall something like this happening soon after this was written, but can't find any details, and it certainly did not lead to any national stories on blogstalking. If anything, the Facebook revolution raised intimate detail-sharing to such a fever pitch that personal disclosure has actually lost most of its power. To paraphrase "Metropolitan", why play strip poker with exhibitionists?

Karl Rove isn't going anywhere.

This was back when he was subpoenaed, or something, but it's clear he didn't, in fact, go anywhere - and the mumfucker is still easily found on talk shows to this day.

There will be some robbery/assault happening at drive-thrus across America once the bad guys learn that your car is stuck between two others with concrete barriers on both sides. Someone will try to pass a law requiring an "escape route" for drive-thru patrons in bad neighborhoods.

Why do I still think this is going to happen?

An accidental breakthrough in hydrogen production will make it easy to come by, without electricity or any other fossil fuels being used.

Not sure about this long-term, but I know there had already been a breakthrough on this - I just hadn't heard of it yet. But it looks like new battery storage technology will really be the revolution we're looking for.

There will not be a Democratic president until 2012, and that will only be because of a completely-unforeseen fluke.

Obviously wrong, but curiously right as well. The fluke was this: nobody could have predicted how fucked-up Bush's reaction to Katrina would be, and the Iraq war imploded so badly that Americans actually turned against him in droves so virulent that they elected an African-American man with the middle name of "Hussein" to the Presidency. It all happened quicker than I could have imagined (thank god).

A Category 5 hurricane will strike American soil, but not a big city, and while the pictures will be stunning, there won't be a huge loss of life.

Not terribly correct in detail, but spot-on in overall soothsaying. Just six weeks later, Katrina devastated New Orleans, which isn't a huge city, but big enough. It was a Category 5 hurricane, but downgraded to a Category 3 just before landfall. The pictures are indeed heartbreaking, especially those from inside the Superdome, and the families waving to choppers from their rooftops. The loss of life, contrary to my prediction, was huge: 1,836 died, and 705 are missing.

How about some of your predictions? First, LFMD:

Osama bin Laden will be captured by the end of 2005.

Obviously still not true, which in and of itself remains mind-boggling.

The person responsible for the anthrax mail will be identified by the end of 2005.

Incorrect only in date - they did indentify the guy, but three years later, and only after he committed suicide by overdosing on Tylenol. How weird is that?

kjf said:

Condoleeza Rice will be the first female (and first African American) Vice President of the US.

I believe she had to publically demur, didn't she? But good call on an African American running and winning office (I am a very lenient grader).

Mr. (The) Budster said:

I predict a relentless rise in oil prices, temperatures, sea levels and international tensions.

I don't know about relentless, but at least three of those have come to pass, especially oil prices. We'll have to have a few more years to declare temperatures as officially rising, but it seems pretty obvious you'll be right about that as well.

Claudia said:

I predict that food in America will continue to improve... more and more people will genuinely grow to prefer the taste of a fresh, real food to its canned or processed equivalent. Consumers will demand better.

Not sure about the first one - perhaps food overall might be better, but with the salmonella scares from peanuts and spinach, and the melamine-tinted milk, it looks pretty horrible. And thus, the second part of your prognostication will probably come true!

Just Andrew wrote:

...phone usage will change dramatically in the next 5 years... making a 'home number' obsolete.

I'd be interested to see the stats on that - dedicated home phones must have plummeted since 2005. In Venice, we can't even get a regular phone line anymore; it's all piped through the internet connection. But cell phones still fucking SUCK, which is why we still need a "land line" even if it's not technically an analog phone.

tregen wrote:

In 2009, the first major... environmental disaster occurs in ANWR.

Does Sarah Palin count?

me and the Lulubeans in July 2005

Posted by Ian Williams at April 8, 2009 9:57 PM