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In This Issue

• Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
• Crazy Pill-Popping Cult Lives On
• A Brief History of the Apocalypse
• Letters to the Editor
• The Newest Ball-Suckin' Tea Craze
• Young Lady Changes Sex, Founds Frat-nerd-ity
• Columbiatron Chatbot Advises For Success
• Reasons Why Those Two Seniors Got Caught Cheating on the GREs
• DVD Features Will Make This World a Better Place
• Thousand-Foot Monsters "Battel" for the Future
• Duuhnuh.... Duuhnuh... Dunudunu... SHARKWALK!
• Dean Quigley: Oracle, Comedian, Swell Guy
• Jesus Freaky Christ and His Many Dopplegangers
• I Done Mediocre
• Future's A-Gonna Be Swell
• Sports Riots Portend Downfall of All Mankind
• The Four Stages of Zombification
• Super Novi Bros.
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• Now With Added Filler!
• The Staff of 18.5
• THEY Watch

The future is nothing new; there's always been one. Human interest in the future, however, has increased quite a bit over the course of history.

To understand my point, imagine we went back to visit a real, live, scrunched-over, protruding-eye-browed, Charlie Manson-bearded caveman, and told him that we knew the future (assume also that he understands American English and wouldn't just bop us on the head with his club and drag our women by their hair back to his cave). His first question would be, "Will I starve to death or be eaten by a tiger before I reach the ripe old age of 27?" If we told him no, there'd be days of wild cave orgy in celebration. You sure as hell wouldn't hear any follow-up questions about flying cars, or whether the job market will be strong for music majors when he graduates.

Unfortunately, humanity's blissful, innocent attitude towards the future was ruined forever by the immense popularity of a terrible book about a dorky virgin who did magic tricks. (Hint: it was not Harry Potter.) This new book, the Bible, rocked people out of their future-related complacency by presenting a very nearly insurmountable body of evidence that the end of the world was coming soon. Furthermore, the impending apocalypse turned out to be very bad news for anyone who had ever touched, licked, seen, or suspected the existence of genitals.

This prediction caused a great deal of panic, and the "futures market" for the next 1500 years was completely cornered by crazy priests and astrologers who claimed to know the date of the highly anticipated event, often attracting large peasant followings. This later turned out to be somewhat disadvantageous, as these same followers generally burned them at the stake once their predictions failed to materialize, and then returned to the then popular pastime of watching unpopular neighbors die of plague.

By the 1950's, these sort of horrific doomsday predictions had started to seem played out, and surviving cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Catholic Church saw membership dwindle. In their place arose a number of completely new, but equally stupid, ideas about the future. Optimists hoped for flying cars, jumpsuits with big shoulders, white bread colonies on the red planet, and cardboard space ships that even William Shatner would be able to command.

In the following decades, we learned to dismiss all the silly claims about technology changing people's lives too drastically, especially for the better. Take those little food pills for example: typical 50's nonsense. Americans would never eat them because you wouldn't be able to blot the grease off with a napkin (or even a proportionally scaled, mini-napkin-like product), and Europeans don't eat anything that isn't grown in 100% natural cow shit in the presence of 100% natural disease-carrying pests by 100% natural disease-carrying peasants.

As for the time saved by new technologies, we know from experience that every last second of it is wasted by those same technologies. Every Palm Pilot has Tetris pre-installed, and for every program like Excel and Mathematica that is legitimately useful, there are fifteen programs like Snood and Kazaa, which are respectively the digital equivalents of smoking crack and robbing liquor stores.

We've also learned from the past's many blunders to look at the future in a much more balanced way, and try to close as few doors as possible. One of the many lessons in the Bible is "be sufficiently vague in your assessments, and your words will survive for hundreds of years." Sure, your classmates really believe those posters they put up saying socialist revolution is the wave of the future, but they do go to an Ivy League college and they're probably minoring in economics just in case. It's called "hedging your bets," and if there's one thing the past has taught us about the future, it's not to buy the bunch when you can fuck the banana peels for free.