PSYCHIC CATS PREDICT WILD YEAR AHEAD!

Hoo, boy.

Taking advantage of my intimate relationship with Hobbes the Wonder Cat and Pearl the Squirrel (also known as "Pearl Girl"), I have determined that 2001, the true beginning of the new millennium, will be a time of great change. Hundreds of millions of lives will be affected, mostly in positive ways, and by this time next year we'll all be shaking our heads and telling stories of the Year That Was. While the animal auguries are not always as specific as one might like, I've done my best to combine prejudice and prognostication to come up with the predictions listed below. First, however, a brief note about how this knowledge was imparted and digested.

Cats are, as everyone knows, furry fiends from the darkest depths of hell who only pretend to want to be held and scratched so we will dislodge fleas and warm them. Their unbounded arrogance and the contempt they show for humankind also means that any positive divination derived from feline observation may be taken at face value, i.e. they don't waste time on snow jobs! Cat "thought," such as it is, consists of raw emotional discharges that may nonetheless suggest coherent images to the properly initiated. Basically, all I had to do was breathe deeply, watch closely, and time their movements.* Reading their entrails would have been much quicker, but circumstances regrettably conspired to interfere with this obvious shortcut. Anyway, here we go:

PREDICTION # 1: The 9.2GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive I installed yesterday on my 450HHz G3-upgraded Power Macintosh 8600 (undoubtedly the finest Macintosh computer ever produced) will function perfectly all year long. The installation was ludicrously easy, the drive is stupefyingly fast, and I will have no reason whatsoever to purchase a new computer before 2005. By then of course no one will need computers anyway, and Macs will be collected by the same people who go to steam tractor shows and actually know how to row a boat.

PREDICTION # 2: This one will be hard to take, but according to the beastly seers, OS X will be a horrible failure and one of the reasons Macs will be collectibles by 2005. This dire assessment was delivered by Pearl in a way that left not a shred of hope for those who live or die by the fortunes of the de-rainbowed logo. Oddly, it does however have a positive side, because after The Fall it will once again be safe to walk the streets of Austin, Texas, where the editorial staff of Mac Observer has been known to assault non-believing whiners with modem-cord whips!

# 2a: Despite all attempts to forestall the inevitable, by the end of the year everyone except Steve Jobs will be saying OS "ex" instead of "ten." This is not only easier to pronounce -- try it! -- but symbolically appropriate -- I mean, do you want to argue with that animal below?

# 2b: No matter what else happens, the sun will still rise and birds will sing. (Say, have you ever launched a smelly old wooden rowboat from a sandy river beach? That tiny little rush when the hull stops scraping and floats free is worth a dozen product announcements. Ya mon.)

PREDICTION # 3: Political News! George W. "No-Count" Bush will continue to practice the Politics of the Living Dead and attempt unsuccessfully to resurrect social darwinism as a tenet of Zombie Administration business policy (Microsoft stock will however go up, briefly).

# 3a: The Reverend Jerry Falwell's endorsement of attorney general nominee Ashcroft, defeated in his Missouri senatorial re-election bid by a dead man, will eventually be seen as the Mother of All Ironies.

# 3b: The anti-trust suit against Microsoft Corporation will be dropped at the urging of Ashcroft and Ford administration veterans Cheney and Rumsfeld, who will argue that Windows 2000 is a necessary component of a national missile defense shield to protect the U.S. from "Soviet aggression."

[Note: The Wonder Cat's deliberate placing of a paw upon an item in the Taos News alerted me to the following: Secretary of Defense nominee Rumsfeld has a cattle ranch in El Prado, right here in Taos County! What the auguries reveal is that that the entire herd will be abducted by a fleet of UFOs that will subsequently deposit the mutilated carcasses in the Pentagon parking lot on the first full moon after his confirmation. The incident will be blamed on abortion rights activists and NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd.]

# 's 3c & 3d: The reign of George the Younger will be raucous and short... Ralph Nader (who?) will pick up a heavy, plain brown envelope from underneath a recycle bin at a highway rest area in South Dakota and never be heard from again.

PREDICTION # 4: A late-session shredding of the Rand McNally resulting from feline territorial imperatives delivered the wisdom that yours truly and wife will stay at 8,000 feet in the Sangre de Chistos -- or NOT! We've apparently decided to leave the wilderness and return to the Swamp to establish a world headquarters where I can get wasted and watch old movies on free TV. On the other hand, two days from now I'm off to look at 10 acres with a cabin in a pristine mountain valley. Hah! Don't tell me I can't have it all. Now all we need is a real job or two and maybe some health insurance. Yes indeed.

# 4a: Now that Taos is well on the way to becoming a geriatric spa for rich retired seekers, the Aspenization of Little L.A. on the Mesa will soon be complete. (Watch for El Emigrante's "Plan to Save Taos" in the upcoming issue of Horse Fly. Think Vietnam.)

# 4b: If we stay here I will surely die from homesickness for rivers, rain, and friends. If we go back to Maryland as current thinking would suggest, I'll die from homesickness for mountains, sunshine, and friends. If I stop halfway in-between (St. Louis), well... Certain death is the result, no matter what! -- and there are no recounts in heaven (or Florida, a considerable distance from the former). Strangely enough, this actually makes me feel better.

PREDICTION # 5: This one was especially hard to swallow at first, but as it turns out, by the time you read this it will have come to pass. Both Hobbes and Pearl agreed that I would be getting up at dawn to watch half-naked dancers in 5 degree cold! And so it goes: the alarm is set to wake me up at 6:00 a.m. on New Year's Day so we can get out to the Pueblo to catch the beginning of the Turtle Dance.**

Now remember: I'm just passing this on. Reading my own opinions into these predictions would be dangerous at best. :-)

Take care, y'all!

John H. Farr also edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments (especially compliments). The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past three years of columns. . . John also writes a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM and produces a strange beast called Zoozone News . (Over 70 pictures of beautiful, expensive New Mexico can be seen at the ZZN Photorama .)

*Greatly simplified, of course. The actual methods used to divine the startling revelations listed above involves far too many esoteric disciplines to mention.

**UPDATE: 9:03 a.m. Jan. 1 -- Just returned from the Pueblo. The dance was magnificent and soul-stirring (it continues for most of the day, actually). About fifty participants in loincloths and feathers, singing and moving to the beat of a single drum. What a way to greet the New Year! I feel like I've been blessed.

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