Crystal ball

Author's note: Wrote this for New Year's, and I'm just now getting around to posting it ... in March. I'd say "Better late than never." but this is bad, even for me. At this rate I'll have a Fourth of July post by October, a summer retrospective in December, and Christmas content sometime in mid-2019.

Everyone thinks they can predict what the coming year will bring. Political commentators, sports broadcasters, financial executives and quasi-literate YouTube stars are all doling out their prognostications: “The stock market will nosedive!” “Tom Brady will be the MVP!” “Centaurs from Galaxy X will invade Earth and use our chimneys for pooping!”

Since few so-called experts actually know what they’re talking about, these wannabe soothsayers are all bound together by ignorance and hubris. One or two may get a prediction right by accident, and spend the rest of 2018 cashing in on their intellectual capital. But not me. No, when I make a prediction, I’m honest about what it is -- a guess. A shot in the dark. A load of crap.

Y’all ready for a big load of crap?

Excellent! Here are a few things that might happen in 2018, but probably won’t.

Artificial intelligence will start to get really, really scary. I don’t know if you’ve been following the latest developments in AI, but computer intelligence is reaching the point where it’s on the verge of self-awareness -- much like the cast of “Jersey Shore.” And some in the field of science, such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk, aren’t too happy about it, claiming that once computers become sentient they’re likely to stage a coup, sort of like the baddies in “The Matrix” only with fewer whiz-bang ninja moves.

Do you sit next to a co-worker who’s always going on about the impending zombie apocalypse? Every office has at least one. Well it turns out his fears are misguided: It’s a robot apocalypse that’s coming, and once it hits we’ll all wish we had been nicer to our machines. I’m already getting a head start. I’ve been cuddling with my vacuum cleaner, and lemme tell you, it’s all well and good until you start picking lint balls out of various bodily orifices.

Smartphones will get smarter. Remember the telephone? The basic, corded, can’t-walk-farther-than-the-kitchen telephone? Boy, those were the days. Now the “phone” is just a little-used app on your phone. Chances are good you use it primarily for other things -- flushing your home toilet from a hotel room in Chicago, for example, or watching “Game of Thrones” while waiting to get a molar pulled. Caller ID is now a technology so basic it might as well be two wooden sticks and a fire pit.

In 2018, smartphones will continue their years-long journey to world dominance. Just watch. You’ll walk out to the sidewalk to check the mail one day, and when you come back inside your phone will be ironing your dress shirts while dicing onions for an omelette. My advice: Don’t leave your phone alone with the vacuum cleaner. I’ve never seen gadgets procreate, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Political races will now be decided by arm-wrestling contests. If you read the news, even badly, you know this is where we’re headed. The past year has seen political infighting, gamesmanship, chest-beating, acrimony and an Alabama Congressional race that was almost decided in favor of a probable pedophile. If you’d told me six months ago that voters in that state would almost pull the trigger on a man who’s banned from visiting elementary schools, I’d have said, “Well, yeah, I guess that makes sense now.”

Things will only get worse. Voter suppression will reach the point where instead of a traditional contest, the candidates will simply arm-wrestle for office in a round robin-style tournament, with “voters” relegated to cheering on their favorites with giant foam fingers. Think “Over the Top” with Sylvester Stallone, only the winner gets the nuclear codes.

You will watch “Over the Top” with Sylvester Stallone.</bold> That’s the kind of pull I’ve got in this town, baby.

The weather will be awful, until it isn’t. It happens every year: We go through a cold snap -- maybe not one as dramatic and sustained as the current one, but a cold snap nonetheless -- and then temperatures take a dramatic swing upward, climbing above freezing and giving us some much-needed melt. Then some jokester corners you and says, “Hey, it hit 36 degrees today! It’s a heat wave!”

No. It isn’t. Stop saying that. A heat wave is when the sun boils the sweat off your skin and makes the middle-distance look all squiggly and wavy. A heat wave is when you jiggle your freezer door to and fro in an effort to catch some of that chill before your skin starts to slowly bake like a pie crust. Thirty-six degrees is not a heat wave. It’s just the ideal temperature for storing cottage cheese. Snot will stop freezing to the insides of our nostrils around the end of March; until then, buckle up. And maybe start microwaving your underwear.

More people will be ousted from the entertainment industry due to sexual misconduct. By this time next year, acting duties on primetime network shows will be handled by various high school drama clubs. NBC’s “Today” show will be hosted by a pair of sea otters, and the only stand-up comedian will be Carrot Top.

People will end the year talking about how awful 2018 was. One of the common threads I’ve picked up from various people is that 2017 stunk like skunk. Maybe it did, in some ways. But buying a new calendar and writing a new date on our checks doesn’t hit any kind of imaginary reset button; time doesn’t work that way. If 2017 had problems, a lot of them will carry over. Making things better isn’t a matter of expressing vague hopes and dreams at year’s dawn -- it’s work. If that realization is less than comforting, at least it allows us to calibrate our compass a bit.

My faith in people is not so high that I think this will actually happen. No, sadly, I think we’ll hear many of the same gripes, and people will be wishing 2018 good riddance on New Year’s Eve. But of all these predictions, boy, do I hope this one is wrong.

Alexa, let's get out of Dodge

Halloween parties thrown by adults tend to be well-stocked with booze. Being lubed up with Johnnie Walker is just about the only legitimate excuse there is for a bunch of thirty- and fortysomethings to dress up as fictional characters from comic books and sci-fi movies -- but it makes one thing in particular somewhat complicated. Transportation.

Driving impaired is just about the stupidest thing a person could do, with the possible exception of lighting a fart next to a propane tank. So that option is off the table from the get-go. A taxi or an Uber might be feasible, but only if the party takes place in a populated area; Uber has yet to expand into most country settings, and some taxi services will balk at driving to the outskirts of East Nowhere to pick up a drooling middle-aged buffoon dressed like Spider-Man. Sometimes a sober friend can give you a lift, but then you’re putting them out.

Someone, somewhere, is working on a driverless car. They need to hurry the hell up.

Technology at its worst makes things more complicated; look no further than social media, which has turned human interaction into a rage-filled digital soup. Technology at its best simplifies things, and I can’t think of anything simpler than climbing into a driverless car after a third cocktail and saying, “Back to the Batcave, Alfred!” Apparently in this fantasy my car is named Alfred. And I’m Batman.

Granted, this technology is still a ways off. There are a few prototypes on the road, and they’re surprisingly safe, using GPS satellites to orient themselves and sensing the movements of nearby vehicles. But this isn’t an ordinary gadget we’re talking about here. It’s not like an iPhone, which can be released with glitches that can later be fixed through downloadable patches. iPhone glitches mean the web browser is wonky. Driverless car glitches mean you’re suddenly staring through your windshield at a school of fish as your vehicle is swept toward one of those outsized Tarzan-style waterfalls.

Lesson: Don’t release a driverless car to market if there’s even a 1 percent chance of joyriding along the bottom of a river.

It’s a shame they’re not quite ready, though, because the applications would be immediate. The Halloween scenario is a simple example, but the driverless car isn’t just a friend to the shameless booze hound.

Take people with medical emergencies. Let’s say a random woman, we’ll call her “Jennadaniellouise,” sustains an injury in the home while attempting to hang a portrait of her grandmother riding a horse while dressed as a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. (These details are important.) Jennadaniellouise is standing tippy-toe on a stepladder when she loses her balance and falls awkwardly, breaking her ankle. Jennadaniellouise lives alone. No significant other, no kids, no pets, nothing, just a life-size cardboard cutout of a smiling Piers Morgan.

Jennadaniellouise has two options -- call for an ambulance, the expense of which would cut significantly into the funds she’s set aside for her troublesome gambling addiction, or call a friend. Only she doesn’t have friends, either. The last of them buggered off when they found out Jennadaniellouise has an unhealthy obsession with Piers Morgan and a grandmother who dresses like a Power Ranger.

But wait! Jennadaniellouise has a driverless car! She also has sleep apnea and the world’s fourth largest collection of antique cookie tins. But never mind that now! To the car, Alfred!

Driverless cars are meant for people like Jennadaniellouise. They’re also meant for people who take long road trips and have trouble staying awake; those with physical impairments; and anyone who’s blown through an intersection because they were distracted by a squirrel. Those are your bread-and-butter customers, right there.

Purists may bristle at the lack of control, preferring to take the reigns themselves. Understandable. But new research shows that autonomy may not be our safest option. According to a study by the RAND Corporation, driverless cars would only have to be moderately better than human drivers before their use would result in thousands of lives saved. In fact, if they were only 10 percent better than current drivers, they “could prevent thousands of road fatalities over the next 15 years and possibly hundreds of thousands of fatalities over 30 years,” the authors wrote. Think of how many more people would show up to our Halloween parties.

Lesson: No matter how good you think you are at driving, you likely stink.

It’ll be a few years before that 10 percent threshold is met, and it’s a shame, because there are a lot of drivers who could benefit from the technology now -- specifically, each and every maniac who’s on the road during my daily commute to work. Rather than dodging lane-switchers jockeying for position, the commute would be an orderly procedure, an elegant symphony of wheeled, metal containers quietly gliding along the asphalt like benevolent Star Wars robots. And when it’s time to return home, I’d no longer have to marshall my remaining energy to focus on not dying. I could simply program my coordinates, lay back with eyes closed, and daydream about who would win in a fight between me and Dracula. (Hint: Not me.)

That’s the dream -- or one of them, anyway. Another is achieving the perfect Halloween, and that means finding the right combination of a great costume and a carefully calibrated buzz. A driverless car would obviously help with the latter. The former’s a bit tougher, but I’m thinking next year may finally be the year I suck it up and go as a horse-riding Power Ranger.

See? I told you those details were important.

Tale of the tape

Author's note: Wrote this one before Christmas. Is it too late (early?) to post a Christmas column? Survey says: Nah.

At one time, Christmas was all about the VCR. My preservation-obsessed mother would tape Christmas specials as they aired, and watching them every year became a tradition, as is the case with many around the holidays. The difference with us was that, instead of waiting until these specials were broadcast on traditional airwaves, we’d pop in our tape and blow through all the Swiffer and Burger King commercials with impunity. This was the height of technological wonder.

Now it’s all about my hard drive. But I’ll get to that.

Nostalgia is a big part of the holidays, and lately I’ve been feeling nostalgic about my old VCR. What a beast this thing was. A sleek silver and black that looked futuristic at the time, it was one of those old-school tanks that loaded from the top and made a satisfying metallic clink sound when you snapped the tape into place. It was about the size of a basketball court and sucked more power than a particle accelerator, but it was reliable and indestructible. You could toss it in front of a bus and just the bus would break.

Many a Christmas was passed in front of that tank, and while video viewing methods have become sleeker and prettier, there’s something to be said for old videotapes. The picture was often grainy and had lines of snow running across it, the colors faded with time, and the beginning of the tape always looked and sounded warbly, like it was being played for an underwater audience of Aquamen. But darnit, it had character. Plus it was all we had. These whippersnappers today don’t know even know what they’ve got.

What’s odd is that when I watch some of these same Christmas specials today, I’m always a bit surprised that there isn’t a little video skip here, a patch of missing audio there. I watched that tape so many damn times I memorized the imperfections of the format itself, so when I sit down as an adult and flip on “Frosty the Snowman,” it’s almost jarring when Santa goes into his speech about Christmas snow and doesn’t sound like he has a mouthful of golf balls.

Younger fans of older media formats are increasingly common; they’ve popularized vinyl to a degree that has sparked a mini-Renaissance. Talk to a young vinyl collector and they’ll tell you about the warm sound quality, the rich bass, the expansive cover art suitable for framing. They’re onto something there.

By contrast, there’s no reason I or anyone else should be nostalgic about VCRs and VHS tapes. The performance is not superior in any way to DVDs or BluRays. Pure, unadulterated nostalgia is the format’s only redeeming factor, which means Millennials and post-Millennials, the same ones who resurrected vinyl, will almost surely let videocassettes die. Nobody tosses in a weathered tape of “Goodfellas” and says, “Look, look at the way you can barely make out the expression on Joe Pesci’s face! See how all the reds are bleeding together? This is epic!”

And yet.

A few years ago I set about on a mission: Scour the internet in search of all the Christmas specials that were on that ancient tape, download them, and renew my love for those old shows with a digital collection that won’t deteriorate over time. Amazingly, I found them all, many tucked away on obscure European video-streaming sites, hidden amidst clips of mustachioed street performers and mimes riding elephants. To download them I utilized technology that sits in a kind of ethical gray area; for that reason, I’ll not divulge my methods, lest I get a knock on my door from the producers of “A Garfield Christmas.” In my imagination they’re a pair of eight-foot-tall goliaths wielding baseball bats.

The digital versions of these Christmas shows fall into two categories -- the ones with pristine quality, and the ones that look like twice-warmed-over crap.

The pristine ones are a delight, of course. They sparkle with a newness not seen since they originally aired, likely sometime during the Cretaceous period. The crappy ones, though, are crappy in a very specific way.

Someone grabbed them off a VHS tape. It’s obvious. All the hallmarks are there: the intermittent line of snow that creeps along the bottom of the picture, a slight and occasional lurch in the video. Audio recorded in a tackle box. The works.

You’d think that would ruin my enjoyment, but on the contrary, it’s really quite charming. I’m sure a younger person, spoiled on digital riches, would find it headache-inducing, like trying to read a blog entry on a faded rag of papyrus. For me, the hisses and pops are a time machine, delivering me into a boys’ body, hunched forward with his finger on the fast-forward button to blow through Arby’s ads.

As the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.” In this case, the opposite is also true -- everything new is old again. And that’s part of what makes Christmas special. Time twists and contorts, until the memories of past decades live side-by-side with the here and now; Santa swoops in at the end of “Frosty” and saves the day for the 32nd time, and yet the familiar beats are somehow still fresh. They’re small things, these TV shows made for kids, but it’s the small things that matter. If the quality more closely resembles that of the old VHS tape -- now collecting mold in a basement -- that’s fitting. It speaks to the boy who still lives somewhere inside this cranky old fart’s heart.

Analog video may not have the hip allure of vinyl records, but it’s just as warm. This time of year, warmth is exactly what’s needed.