It would be a wonderful thing to have the ability to predict the future. I’m not one to predict anything because my range of knowledge on many things is severely lacking. In the past I’ve taken the lead from science fiction writers whose ability to predict many future things is scary and all too accurate. These following seven items from Time magazine are a little bizarre and show that any of us can make ridiculous predictions and be as wrong as everyone else has been.
In 1992, TIME magazine offered up an article predicting what to expect in the new millennium. Lance Morrow, a writer, quoting political scientist Michael Barkun, wrote, “The human mind abhors a vacuum … Where certainties are absent, we make do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance in a future of our own imagining.” Here is a roundup of some of the looniest predictions since the advent of TIME — the magazine, not the concept — in 1923:
The future human will be a Cyclops. “In distant centuries or millenaries man will be a Cyclops, a Polyphemus, a being with one eye only.” So said Dr. Thomas Hall Shastid in a 1933 article.” This future eye, explained Shastid, would be in the center of the face, below a high forehead, where the bridge of the nose once rested.
Grandchildren of the television age won’t be able to read. TIME addressed the potential downsides of a newly television-obsessed culture. “By the 21st Century our people doubtless will be squint-eyed, hunchbacked and fond of the dark,” the writer predicted. “But why am I carrying on like this? Chances are that the grandchild of the Television Age won’t know how to read this.”
Every medical malady will be treatable with a miracle pill.
“Frogmen” will live in underseas bunkers and tend to kelp farms. One way to address food shortages of the future, according to the RAND Corp. in 1966: imagined that “Huge fields of kelp and other kinds of seaweed will be tended by undersea ‘farmers’ — frogmen who will live for months at a time in submerged bunkhouses.”
Spouses will be able to secretly control one another’s moods with “grouch pills”. RAND predicted that if one spouse is in a particularly cantankerous mood, his or her partner, “will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee.”
Tomatoes will be square. The mechanization of agriculture during the middle decades of the 20th century will drastically change the face of farming. “Another phenomenon in the not-too-distant future,” envisioned the Research and Development Chief at Deere & Co., “is square tomatoes, which, after all, could be more easily packaged by machine — and fit better in sandwiches.”
We will be able to feel and smell whatever’s on our television sets. According to Nicholas Negroponte, then director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, the 21st century will bring “full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output.” The images on your TV, in other words, will be feelable and smellable.
It boggles the mind that trustworthy publications and think-tanks would dare to put these crazy ideas into print. I suppose some people insist on getting their names and ideas out there for the public to ponder over. Any publicity is good publicity and helps them to attain their 15 minutes of fame.
First of all, I’d like to wish all of you out there a Happy New Year. I’m also going to pass along some information concerning deaths that occurred on New Year’s past due to excessive alcohol consumption and the misuse of fireworks and guns. This information was collected from numerous sources in the USA and Europe. Enjoy the holiday but don’t become famous as another stupid-death statistic.
During the study period (2020), we found that over 1,000 people were killed in fatal collisions across the United States on New Year’s Eve or Day. In fact, there were:
916 total fatal crashes
1,004 fatalities
341 fatal crashes involving drunk drivers
377 people killed in drunk driving crash
In terms of total crashes, Texas (188), Florida (167) and California (154) had by far the highest number. However, these three states are also the states with the highest population. When looking at fatal crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers, the safest and most dangerous states were much different.
The five states with the highest crash rates (most dangerous states) were:
Mississippi
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Wyoming
Texas
Without a doubt, the hours between 1 am and 3 am are the most dangerous during the New Year’s holiday. These hours were numbers 1 and 2 for total fatal crashes involving a drunk driver. Interestingly, fatal crashes drop significantly during the midnight to 1 am, as people everywhere likely stay where they are to enjoy watching the ball drop.
The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates that 384 people may die on U.S. roads this New Year’s Day holiday period. Holidays traditionally are a time of travel for families across the United States and many choose car travel, which has the highest fatality rate of any major form of transportation based on fatalities per passenger mile.
If celebrating and dying on New Year’s Eve in the USA isn’t scary enough, read the following. Europeans are just as crazy as we are. They apparently prefer killing themselves with fireworks rather than vehicular homicides. New Year’s Eve data from 2020.
In Germany, at least one death was reported early on Friday of a 24-year-old man in the eastern town of Rietz-Neuendorf, who died when homemade fireworks detonated shortly after midnight.
Another case of improvised firework’s explosion left one man’s life in danger and two others injured near the western German city of Osnabrück. They were working with explosives, trying to create a pyrotechnic, when there was an explosion shortly after midnight.
After they were barred from setting off fireworks in public spaces, some Berliners instead tried to launch them from their homes on New Year’s Eve, leading to dozens of fires across the German capital. Between midnight and just six minutes later, the Berlin fire service said it was called to 18 fires, with more following deeper into the night. No one reported any immediate serious injuries.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention those fun-loving Arabs in Iraq. What’s New Years without mowing down a few of your fellow citizens with meaningless gunfire.
At least one civilian was killed and 25 injured in celebratory gunfire and fireworks marking the New Year in different parts of Iraq, a health official said on Friday. Fireworks were set off in several parts of the country despite a government ban on mass gatherings to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
PLEASE HAVE A HAPPY AND SAFE NEW YEARS CELEBRATION
With Christmas now in my rear-view mirror, I can get ready for the coming New Year holiday and celebrations. I won’t be out-and-about myself, but I will have a toast at midnight with my better-half. That being said let me move onto something else that I happen to enjoy, limericks and Isaac Azimov.
I have always been a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I’ve been reading his novels and articles for most of my adult life. Fortunately for me most of them are science fiction which is my absolute favorite material to read. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers in history. If I recall correctly, he wrote more than 200 novels and thousands upon thousands of novelettes, short stories, and articles in many areas of study. In short, he was amazing.
It wasn’t until 10 years ago that I discovered that one of his hobbies was writing rude and bawdy limericks. After finding that out, I was determined to obtain some of his limericks. I found a thrift bookstore online and after some searching through their inventory discovered a book published in 1978 that contained dozens and dozens of limericks by Azimov and his friend John Ciardi. The book is split into two sections, limericks by Asimov, and the other half are limericks by John Ciardi. It’s a battle of the limerick monsters and makes for some really enjoyable and hilarious reading. I’ll offer up for your entertainment today four of Asimov’s more sexy limericks. I hope you enjoy them because I sure did.
😁😁😁
Sex need not be at all conversational,
Without talking, it’s still inspirational.
But mind you’re not burned
For many have learned
The act can be baby-creational
😜😜😜
Said the husband, with smiling urbanity,
I possess penile super humanity.”
Said his wife,” But the score
Of his inches is four.
The rest of it’s just his insanity.”
😉😉😉
There was a young woman named Cora Lee
Who said,” I will do it immorally
On top and on bottom,
Any way that I’ve got’em,
Vaginally, anally, orally.”
❤❤❤
There once was an eager young nurse
Who felt that she had to rehearse
Every sexual joy,
Every hot little ploy,
To succeed in becoming perverse.
What better way to prepare for New Year’s than a few raunchy limericks? There’ll be many more to come in the new year.
After posting my resolutions yesterday I found this list on a website (www.ba-bamail.com) that’s loaded with all sorts of humorous jokes, gags, and limericks. Their list of resolutions was funny, but I thought it needed a little of my tweaking. Here is my modified version of their list, a list I know I can really accomplish. I’ll try to complete yesterday’s list, but it’ll be much more difficult than this one.
Put on at least 30 pounds, more if someone pisses me off.
Start buying lottery tickets at a luckier store.
Go commando at all times.
Stop exercising forever.
Let the hair in my nose and ears grow unchecked.
Shave just twice a week, the face is optional.
Watch more pornography.
Never again load the dishwasher.
Procrastinate more.
Do less laundry and use more deodorant.
Drink more – my liver needs the exercise.
Buy more on-line junk from China. I need to be scammed more often.
With all the hullabaloo around the holiday season, I thought a little dose of weird and odd trivia would be just the thing. Trivia is always good for taking the mind off of stressful activities and might even give you a reason to laugh a little. Here we go . . .
Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails.
The first of the five senses to go with age is smell.
More boys than girls are born during the day; more girls are born at night.
The strongest muscle in the body is the time.
If you yelled for eight years, seven months, and six days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
When we blush, I stomach lining also turns red. Women blink nearly twice as often as men do.
On a square inch of our skin, there are 20 million microscopic animals.
If you fired continuously for six years and nine months, enough wind would be produced to equal the energy of an atomic bomb.
The average human eats eight spiders in his or her lifetime at night Erie it
It takes just 1 min. for blood to travel through the whole human body.
Volleyball is the most popular sport at nudist camps.
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
Only one person in 2 billion will live to be 116 or older.
The average person’s heart beats 36 million times a year.
Right-handed people live on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
Well, there you have it. A little weirdness to add to your holiday spirit and possibly distract you for a little while. I hope all of you are prepared for Christmas because there are only:
I’ve never been a person plagued with any major allergies except for ragweed in the summer. Prior to puberty I was haunted by any number of allergies, but they went away at about age 14. Jump forward a few decades and all of a sudden, my allergies have returned with a bang. It appears that I’ve been around just long enough to go back through puberty in the opposite direction. That being said it’s a given that I’m sneezing a lot more than I’ve ever sneezed in my life. There are many reasons for sneezing and I’m not about to try and list them all. Let’s just agree, sneezing is sneezing, everybody does it, and that’s that. Since I come from a German background all I’ve ever heard when there was a sneeze going on was the German word gesundheit. It’s an automatic response meaning “good health”. I honestly never had any idea what it meant and only found out just recently.
I decided to check out a few other cultures to see if there was anything unusual about their responses to sneezing.
In many Muslim countries it translates out to “May Allah have mercy on you.”. Pretty cool but way too long.
In Serbia, they use the term pis maco, with children, which means “Go away, kitten”. Cute, I guess.
In Vietnam, cơm muối, is offered and means “rice with salt.” Thats a real puzzler.
Latin America’s is a little more interesting. The first sneeze earns a response of “health,” the second “money,” and the third “love.” I like this one the best.
A common story holds that around the year 750, Pope Gregory believed that a sneeze was an early sign of the contraction of the bubonic plague. Saying “God bless you” was a sort of deathbed prayer: ‘May God see your worth and help you, because you’re definitely about to die.” Isn’t that just heartwarming?
And “God bless you” seems to be very popular response with many cultures but of course not for those pesky atheists. They’re a little touchy about the “GOD” word.
So much for my sneezing trivia. Now that I’ll be housebound for the next four winter months breathing all of this unhealthy stale air, I suppose I’ll be hearing “Gesundheit” way too many times for the foreseeable future.
We are deep into the Christmas season now and I’m sure that the great majority of people everywhere are spending and spending and spending. The holidays tend to put a strain on everyone’s purse especially those people with children. I thought I’d like to lighten the mood a little bit and tell you a few facts I happened upon in a book I was reading recently. As you also know I love writing about celebrities and alleged celebrities and all of their quirks and odd behaviors and that’s what I’m going to do today.
For those of us on the not-so-famous list, the following items might seem a bit much. Apparently in Hollywood their personal budgets are a touch higher than ours, and their interests are totally different. I insure my 12-year-old car, my house, my smart phone, and a sizable annual cost to protect all of my computers, tablets, and laptops. Let me now give you a list of some of your favorite celebrities, present and past, and the things they insure, it’s mind-boggling. Here we go . . .
American country and western singer and actress, Dolly Parton, insured her legendary boobs for $600,000.
Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, insured his right index finger for $1.6 million.
Australian cricket hero, Merv Hughes, insured his mustache for $38,000.
In 2006, soccer player, David Beckham, insured his entire body for $190 million.
German supermodel, actress, and singer, Heidi Klum, insured her legs for $2.2 million.
American actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, insured her legs for $1 million.
Lord of the Dance, Michael Flatley, insured his legs for $47.5 million.
American rockstar, Bruce Springsteen, insured his voice for $6 million.
I hope you don’t think this is anything unusual, because it isn’t. The habit of celebrities insuring body parts goes back many years. The numbers were a little smaller “back in the day” but at the time it was still a great deal of money. Here’s some oldies but goodies . . .
American dancer and film star, Fred Astaire, had his legs insured for $75,000 each.
British stripper, Frankie Jakeman, insured his penis for $1.6 million.
20th Century Fox film star, Betty Grable, insured each of her legs for $1 million. Hence the origin of the phrase, “million-dollar legs”.
German cabaret artist, singer, and film star, Marlene Dietrich, insured her voice for $1 million.
American actress, Bette Davis, took out a $28,000 insurance policy against putting on weight.
American singer and actor, Jimmy Durante, insured his nose for $50,000.
Hungarian food critic, Egon Ronay, insured his taste buds for $400,000.
In 1964, the Beatles, were insured for $1 million on their first US tour.
There you have it folks. Be glad you only have to insure your house, car, children, smartphones, computers, and those pesky life insurance policies for you and your spouse. As you can see it could be a lot worse if you’re one of the famous people. I certainly don’t feel sorry for them and I’m pretty sure you don’t either.
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