Predictions for the future

"Trey Triple Izzo" is Right Around the Corner

Please send me e-mails about how I ripped off Conan O'Brien!The new millennium stormed up in our shit like a horde of marauding Mongols, we hardly even saw it coming. One day everything that was futuristic was "2000 this" and "Ultra 2000 super that", 24 hours later if your product had 2000 anywhere in its name it looked retarded and old fashioned. Because of delays in production Arlogeist's much vaunted Horse Taperer 2000 looked completely idiotic when it didn't get released until fourth quarter 2000. It failed completely, and not because people aren't in the market for a high-speed horse tapering machine.

Always pragmatic, I felt the need to look ahead to the next millennium when developing the marketing strategies of upcoming products for Arlogeist GmbH. Even though the year 3000 (3001 if you're anal about "millenniums") seems awfully far away, it will sneak up on us just like 2000 did, and then we'll be stuck with a whole new batch of poorly named products. I rounded up twenty prophets and psychics, and after testing their performance at forecasting by having them predict the weather, I had them enter psychic trances and communicate their visions of the future. Theses transcripts were entered into an iMac which cross-referenced them and extrapolated an almost error free prognostication of the future.

I have divided the final results into four easy-to-use categories; social, economic, entertainment, and technological.

Social

The Spokane Fatty attacks Boise.
• Shaking hands with someone will be the equivalent of rape, while rape will become the equivalent of falling off a ladder and making a funny noise.
• Teen pregnancy will increase to the point that it is no longer considered a problem. The new problem will be 8 year olds getting pregnant by horses and making centaurs.
• The clone wars will establish clones as superior to natural born humans and the "normal" humans will be forced to wear silly hats. A resistance will exist that wears cool hats, like fedoras and giant foam cowboy hats.
• The size of loaves of bread will be increased by 20%. This will be due to the fact that humans will have evolved massive alligator-like mouths, but still love sandwiches.
• The distinction between genders will continue to blur until the cliché "wearing the pants in the family" refers to the car.
• Smoking will still be a socially stigmatizing behavior, but mostly because after nicotine is outlawed in 2895 cigarettes will be made from aborted fetuses.
• Dolphins will share equal human rights and will build their own cities, but both dolphins and humans will treat trees very poorly.
• Throughout most of the intervening centuries Americans will continue to grow fatter until the city of Spokane forms one giant fat person that destroys half of the West before disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. By the time the year 3000 rolls around Americans will have an average body fat roughly equivalent to a cinderblock.

Economic

• The record industry's latest form of CD copy protection fails miserably. It proves too expensive and too ineffective to pay a guy to stand around in people's houses and say "Hey, what are you doing? Please don't copy that".
• The stock market will be completely superceded by the moth market, which features moths flying around spray painted different colors to represent various corporations. The moths are tracked by ultra-precise instruments and their positions are broadcasted live on CNN, which, instead of a TV network, will be a giant robotic talking head on top of a mile high tower.
• The price of candy bars will drop to a nickel, but the price of candy bar wrappers will skyrocket to almost 800 dollars.
• The crash of a comet into the side of Mount Fuji will briefly upset the precious metals market by introducing a new and prized element to the trade. Months later the market will stabilize when the element turns out to be the incubating eggs of face-eating aliens.
• Train tickets will be exceedingly cheap, mostly because of the hideous train crabs which stalk the Midwest looking for a meal.
• If you fold a Dick Cheney five dollar bill correctly it will spell SEX.
• Unable to mathematically determine the next "number served" for their signs, McDonald's all across the globe are swallowed by rifts in the space-time continuum. Hardee's reaches 5,000 served.

Entertainment

• Wings will continue to run in syndication until 3420, although it will be transmitted via Scaldotron as searing burns to the stomach and thighs.
• The Spider Pope Collective will decree that premarital sex is the best and will dissipate into a swarm of fist sized spiders that terrorize the Vatican for months.
• Banjo Bloodylips will top the music charts for the fifth consecutive year until it is discovered that he isn't actually an anthropomorphic cartoon banjo, but rather a fat guy playing a drum machine.
• Telephones will be replaced with screeching vampire bats; cellular phones will be replaced with pocket-sized bats.
• The Playstation 11 hits store shelves in time for Christmas and die-hard fans of Nintendo's "Fun Hole" game console go on a 9-week terrorist campaign bombing Sony facilities. Playstation fanatics respond by sculpting a 100-foot tall effigy of Mario out of ground beef and leaving it to rot on the lawn of the Nintendo offices in Los Angeles.
• Valve releases Team Fortress 2, Duke Nuke 'Em Forever slated to be released "Whenever it's done!"
• Semi-sentient robotic drones will become the key marketing demographic. All advertisements will consist of text scrolling at the maximum visible speed accompanied by modem connection tones.
• Microsoft replaces its entire lineup of products with a talking grandpa robot that will sit in your house and tell the same story over and over again.
• Salon.com and the New Yorker announce a merger to form the most pretentious entertainment conglomerate known to man. Merchant-Ivory sues in an attempt to halt the merger.

Technological

A T40 Dancing robot is assembled on the turtle line.
• The success of nano-technology prompts an explosion in the ultra mega nano-technology industry, which designs atom-sized robots to repair the molecule sized robots that work on the cell-sized robots that fix the pin-head sized robots that help keep people healthy.
• The common cold is cured but is supplanted by "brain rot".
• The international colony on mars sends a ship to colonize Minnesota. The ship reaches Minnesota but all transmissions end only days after touch down.
• Breakdancing sees such massive resurgence that "the windmill" is harnessed for electricity.
• Robots are much more polite, but secretly hate us more than ever. To prevent a robot uprising robots are incapable of producing new robots, a task left to song birds and box turtles.
• The SA server crashes less frequently through the unique use of a rage venting script that allows the server to stab Rich whenever it becomes overtaxed.
• Virtual sex technology reaches such a pinnacle of advancement that it becomes more pleasurable by far than actual sex, which is good, because if you are reading Something Awful you won't get laid in a thousand years otherwise.

Some bad, but mostly good! All in all I think we have a lot to look forward to, assuming we live to see the year 3000. I know I will thanks to the cranial cryogenic freezer I have reserved at "Crazy Jack's Head Barn".

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– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)