In the spirit of the annual predictions made by the supermarket tabloids, the author of this site herewith dares make his own set of auguries and prognostications for the first year of the new millennium. He bases certain of these on a translation of an old manuscript allegedly originating in 16th century France (as authenticated by the flea market vendor who sold it for $1.50). Others were revealed to him in dreams. No representation can be made concerning the accuracy, relevance, or seriousness of these "prophecies", nevertheless it would surprise no one of any importance if they turned out to be 100% true. Ignore these at your peril!


At the end of the much-ballyhooed millennial year, the author of these predictions courageously owns up to both his minor failures and resplendent successes.







Major price breaks in certain computer and electronic products.

• New low-end notebook computers below $600
  450 Mhz CPU, 64 meg RAM, 6 gig HD, 12.1" active matrix display, 32x CD ROM
  Off by a factor of 3. Maybe next year.
• RAM shortage ends : memory and component prices tumble to new lows
  Mostly on target (applause, please).
• $50 MP3 player a hot seller
  Off by a factor of 2. Maybe next year.
• $500 portable DVD player a very hot seller
  Off by a factor of 2. Maybe next year.
• Prices for newly issued music CDs fall below $5
  Totally wrong. Maybe next year.
• Two large recording firms declare bankruptcy
  All the recording firm members of the RIAA declared moral bankruptcy.

Evidence found suggesting extraterrestrial intelligent life.

• Anomalous Seti signals
  Yes, but no repeatable ones. Near miss?
• Radiation detected from the drives of "starships" (Bussard rams)
  Nope. Maybe next year.
• Galactic-scale "artifacts" identified by space telescope
  (subsequently revealed as immense advertising billboards).
  No, but a number of new extrasolar planets discovered.

Congress votes itself a $50/year pay cut and authorizes the award of solid gold "Good Citizen" medallions to each member.
No, but quite a number of congressional warhorses get "pink slips" from the voters.


Senator John McCain wins the Republican nomination after decisively defeating George W. in debates. He picks Oprah Winfrey as his surprise running mate.
McCain, the most credible Republican candidate, gave it his best shot and gave Dubya a scare.


Bill Bradley wins Democratic nomination and picks Michael Jordan as running mate, a choice hailed as a "slamdunk".
Bradley, the best of the major Democratic candidates, made Gore sweat.


Barbara Walters beats out Jesse Ventura as Reform Party candidate.
Buchanan pulls off a coup d'etat, makes off with the federal election funds, gets only a few votes, but the ones he does get by mistake in Palm Beach County, Florida, decide the election. Even supermarket tabloid oracles, in their wildest, sickest fantasies, could not have come up with this.


"None of above" receives the majority of votes in the presidential election. House of Representatives selects Jerry Brown as president and Jesse Helms as vice president, as nation watches in either horror or apathy, depending on which analyst you believe.
Dubya gets "elected" by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the country gets ready for a repeat of the Harding administration. Might as well rename the Oval Office the Teapot Dome Room.


Fashion industry resurrects Christian Dior's "New Look", but this time around no one is buying. Designer janitor uniforms become hot seller.
Nope, but the rag trade embraces S&M chic and inner-city ghetto "style". Still crazy, after all these years...


A new word anagramming board game takes the world by storm, eclipsing Scrabble® and causing Hasbro stock to plunge.
How do you spell Monopoly®?





Major strike by terrorists causes massive loss of life and property damage. *

• Most likely locales: Italy, Austria, Holland, Scandinavia
  (due to lower level of security)
• Use of "suitcase" nuke or biological weapon
  Anti-terrorist forces set up by military forces worldwide
  Draconic justice and major restrictions in civil liberties

Not yet, fortunately. Pray that it doesn't happen this coming year, either.


Catastrophic earthquake (8.6 Richter Scale) hits central California. Over 15,000 dead and 400 billion in property damage. Several insurance conglomerates declare bankruptcy in the wake of damage claims. People immediately begin to rebuild atop fault lines.
Nope, just the usual weather-related disasters.


World stock markets take a major hit.

• Dow Jones drops 60%
  More like 20%.
• Technology and Internet stocks especially hard hit
  Right on the money. NASDAQ off 40%. Dot-com meltdown.
• Investors bewildered
  Despondent would be a better description. Former daytraders think back on their glory days while they bag groceries and flip burgers.
• Mutual fund managers in hiding
  Fugitive stock market swindlers nailed in Europe.
• New biography of Jesse Livermore becomes hot seller
  Someone ought to write this, since history seems to be repeating.

Microsoft undergoes drastic changes as a result of court decisions and forced resignations of Gates and Ballmer.
Gates resigned as CEO. Ballmer isn't sleeping too well either.

• Stock price tumbles below $30
  Actually, into the mid 40's.
• Linus Torvalds named as new MS CEO, hailed as "savior"
  If Ballmer fails to turn MS around, this is still a real possibility.
• "Winux" becomes hot seller
  As it happens, there did appear a couple of Linux distributions that run in a Windows partition, but they haven't sold well... yet.

Dormant volcano erupts in Redmond, Washington. Because of advanced warning (in no small part due to this very prediction), there is no loss of life, but the entire Microsoft "campus" is buried beneath 1500 feet of hot lava and 75,000,000 copies of Windows 2000® are incinerated. Mt. Windows becomes new tourist attraction and ski resort.
Actually, two volcanoes, Mt. Jackson and Mt. Linux. No loss of life, but much crying, hair pulling, and loss of paper profits. Win2k sells below expectations and MS adopts predatory licensing policies in a last-ditch effort to meet earnings goals.


New computer virus, "Toecheese-22a", infects and crashes tens of millions of systems worldwide. Effects include melting the hard drives of the striken computers and giving their display monitors an incurable dose of acne.
Deadly e-mails. Love Bug and Resume viruses. Toecheese by any other name doth stink ever so pungent.





Y2K causes only minor inconveniences, but a meteorite strikes the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

• Only a smoking crater left on site of the presses that produce paper money
• Serious currency shortage drives up the value of the dollar versus the Mark and Yen
• Hoarding causes paper dollars to become collectors items

Meteorite misses.


Benedict Arnold commemorative postage stamp stirs angry protests.
No, but some of the new stamp designs induce nausea and vomiting.


Members of a religious cult wait atop a mountain for a UFO to land and transport them to Heaven. The UFO descends, but denies cult members admittance because they have not accumulated enough Frequent Flier points.
Wrong. They did have enough points.


Evidence surface that Pat Buchanan had been a Soviet agent in the pay of the KGB. Buchanan angrily denies that this prompted his sudden decision to enter a Buddhist monastery.
Close. It turns out that the Manchurian Candidate was an agent in the pay of the Florida Election Commission, nefarious successor to the KGB.


Scientists find strong evidence linking television watching with early onset of Alzheimer's disease. Stock prices of the major networks fall.
Actually, it's adult-onset Mongoloidism, and the network stock prices fell along with the rest of the market.







Some of the above "predictions and prophecies" are deadly serious, even no-brainers, other are just plain absurd, even to the point of being silly. Separating the one from the other is left as an exercise for the reader.

DISCLAIMER: The author takes absolutely no responsibility for the accuracy or lack of same of these predictions. He claims no access to "inside information" nor any exclusive hotline to the Celestial Realms®, Higher Powers®, or Angels®. These predictions and prophecies are based on unfounded speculation, uninhibited intuition, wild guesses, and channeling the stuffed penguin, Tux XXIX.

If you, the reader, are gullible enough to take these seriously and even base decisions on them, it is solely your lookout. If you make investment or other important choices based on this piece, you are a moron. These "predictions and prophecies" are intended solely for entertainment purposes. If they cause you to think critically about the future, so much the better. If they make you laugh, then there is some hope for you yet. If they make you cry, then there is some hope for the world.

Actually, if you had made investment choices based on these predictions, such as divesting of Microsoft and dot-com stocks and maybe some judicious short-selling of same, you would have come out looking like a genius. Celestial Realms® Investing Associates at your service.



The predictions were mostly wrong, but the ones that hit were uncanny, so scary that the only new one for the coming year is that astronauts will discover a mysterious monolith in the crater Clavius, on the moon (apologies to Stanley Kubrick). "Life imitating art" gets tiresome after a while.

* This frightening scenario is presented to motivate the readers to urge their elected officials to strengthen the national police, military, and security forces to better enable them to deal with this threat. A modern industrial society is extremely vulnerable to fanatical terrorists armed with high-tech biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Once more, history repeats itself and the barbarians are at the gates.