Since we’re doing predictions I went to a psychic and asked her what would happen to me in 2009, but when she looked in her crystal ball she just started crying and said she needed to be with her family and left.
I should have asked for my money back.
If we may go back to predictifications again: I’m predictifying that in 2009, Medabot cards will become the No. 1 commodity to invest in. They will become more valuable then gold. You should buy one, no matter what the cost!*
*(Full disclosure: Back in 1999, I spent my entire life savings and bought an airplane hangar (which I nicknamed “The Louvre”) full of Medabot cards, hoping to sell them for millions. I gave selected cards as engagement rings and left them as tips at the Four Seasons. I forged a Medabot card-encrusted crown as a gift to the King of Belgium. People failed to catch on to the extraordinary worth of these cards, and they’re still sitting here—all three zillion karats of them. Suit yourselves, but I still say it’s better to have a picture of Man-Mammoth in your wallet than Andrew Jackson. Especially when the stock market isn’t doing well, if you know what I’m saying.)
Zach, that reminds me—I buried a time capsule/survival kit for the future twenty years ago to this day. I went out back and dug it up, and here’s what I found:
Item 1: Pencil sharpener. I feel a little silly about this now, seeing as we have mechanical pencils. Oh, and computers.
Item 2: Several copies of my Guns N’ Roses mixtape. (It was just “Appetite for Destruction” and one bonus track of me singing “Mr. Brownstone.”) I stand by this choice a hundred per cent.
Before I am willing to predict anything for 2009, I would like to check the accuracy of the predictions that I made in the Cartoon Lounge one year ago today, on January 7th, 2008.
(The following is reprinted from the 2008 version of the prototype Cartoon Lounge that I began several years before the Internet.)
Greetings Earthlings, cower before my awesome predictions!
There will be no Oscars this year because of bird flu.
The Presidential election will be postponed because that is the day they rescheduled the Oscars for.
Thanksgiving will be a week late because the Academy will want to get a headstart on next year’s Oscars ceremony, just in case something happens in 2009, like another outbreak of bird flu.
Next year, 2009, will be a palindromic year (the calendar I use started counting 9,000,000 years before the calendar we use now, so for me the year is 9,002,009).
Not to get off the subject of 2008, but in 2009, on January 7th, it will rain in New York City.
Not a single male actor will be nominated for any of the awards at this year’s Oscars.
Because of some unforeseen Ponzi scheme busting wide open, many actors will lose all of their money (assuming all of their money is already invested in a major philanthropic organization) so they will begin melting down their Oscar statuettes to make brass knuckles and gold fangs, with which to attack passersby.
It will rain a little bit on January 6th, 2009, also.
Bada bing! It may be too early to call me Nostradamus, but look what turned up in my mailbox today:
Greetings, Loungers!
I was eager to put 2008 behind me, but I wasn’t sure what year would be next. I was pulling for 2004, which was a better year. Instead, 2009 reared it’s young, drooling head on January 1st. 2009 hasn’t happened yet, so it should be interesting (I’m told that it typically goes this way, with the years advancing in successive one-year increments, but I’m wary of assuming too much).
Anyway, some time over the holidays you may have read this prediction, by a Russian professor, that the United States will break up by 2010 into roughly four separate republics. It’s a fascinating idea, but too meek. I’m predicting that by 2010 the United States will break up into roughly 300 million individual republics—basically, one per person. People will soon learn to stop complaining about the government and become one (a tip: the archives of the Cartoon Lounge will make excellent filibuster material).
Another prediction is that, due to this development, mapmaking will become one of the most lucrative professions, right behind blogging. But 2010 may still be a good twenty years off, so who really knows.
For 2009, I’m predicting that the word Predictifier will replace Prognosticator as the official word for one who makes predictions. I’m also predictifying that no predictification can possibly come true unless the Predictifier starts it by saying “thence it shall come to pass.”
Thence it shall come to pass, therefore, that, in 2009, Tidy Cats cat litter will get a new look and amp up its performance. Change is coming to America, and I’m betting that it will start with cat litter. That’s my first bold pick for this year. Stay tuned.
Hello, everyone. It’s me, Sali Lamo. I know, I know, I’m a man named “Sally.” Believe me, I’ve taken my fair share of schoolyard teasing for that one. Once my name made a man laugh so hard that he punched me and broke a bone in my face. And last week my wife said she could no longer sleep in the same bed with me, though I don’t think that was related to my name. Sigh.
Anyway, the Cartoon Lounge asked me to do a few blog posts for them. But who would want to hear from me? I’m just a man who can’t afford two matching shoes. I had to paint this one brown. See? It peels right off. I couldn’t really say no to the blog on account of all the money they offered me. Money that I need to buy sleeping pills.
But enough about me. I’m just blogging to wish everybody a Merry Christmas. I hope you all get the presents that you want. And that your families and wives love you all very much. Did I mention that when I was five years old, my mother dropped some of my oatmeal on the floor, spooned it back into the bowl and then fed it to me? She didn’t think I noticed, but I did.
Oh—I almost forgot—Happy 2009. I wanted to type an exclamation point there, but my fingers just wouldn’t let me.
This year, the companies were at it again, redesigning logos and packaging schemes of products and/or marketing techniques. Ah, the exciting world of business!
As always, there were winners and losers, but the clear victor this year was Pepsi Co., who managed, with a simple redesign of the can, to make their original Pepsi look so cold and delicious it would freeze God’s tongue. Also, they made Sierra Mist, a horrible poison, look pretty O.K.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have Wal-mart, who in the panic after the tragic trampling death of an employee, decided they would urbanize their logo with a tear-drop tattoo to claim ownership of the death and appeal to “street youths.”
As a cartoonist, I do a lot of drawings in the course of a year, and 2008 was no exception. I did about 624 drawings in the past year. This number is based on the fact that I do ten sketched-up cartoons every week just to pitch the ideas. That’s 520 drawings right there, and then you add onto that the finished drawings I do for The New Yorker, some blog drawings I do here, and then a smattering of other drawings I do for other things like greeting cards, theatre posters, or handgun targets. It comes out to 624—just trust me on that. Now, in most of my drawings there are humans. You know, one human talking to another, five humans at a dinner table, a whole bunch of humans running a marathon, whatever. Based on that fact, I’d say that in the year 2008 I drew about 1400 human beings. Just like in real life, some of these human beings were good and some were bad. I took a few days recently to look through the year’s rough sketches and found what I think are the best and worst drawings of humans I did in the past year.
Let’s start with a couple of the best. Here’s one:
