Birthdays
Nathan Fillion b. 1971
Adrian Rawlins b. 1958
Nathan get to be Picture Boy today. His best known genre work is all in the Whedonverse, a bad guy on Buffy, Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's SingAlong Blog and of course Captain Mal Reynolds on the TV show Firefly and the movie Serenity.
Mr. Rawlins plays Harry Potter's father James in the movies.
In the year 2000!
Predictor: John Elfreth Watkins in The Ladies' Home Journal, 1900
Predictions (Reality):The milkweed will have been developed into a rubber plant. Cheap native rubber will be harvested by machinery all over this country. (Both the Germans and the American tried during WW II. Neither succeeded.)
Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox. (This has taken place.)
The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth. (Epiphyte plants existed even in Watkins' day.)
Sugar cane will produce twice as much sugar as the sugar beet now does. Cane will once more be the chief source of our sugar supply. (There are more acres of sugar beets vs. cane in the U.S., but both are now outstripped in the sweetener market by high fructose corn syrup, an invention from the second half of the 20th Century.)
Strawberries and cranberries will be grown upon tall bushes. (Not so much. These plants still hug the ground.)
Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless. (Seedless melons, apples and grapes exist, as do seedless oranges. Cherries, peaches and plums have pits. Harder to get rid of pits.)
Figs will be cultivated over the entire United States. (The best sources say the West Coast, Utah and Texas.)
Not the best hit to miss ratio for our pal John Elfreth this week. Some agricultural problems are harder to crack than others.
Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!
Thursday is Arthur C. Clarke's turn, where he predicts the speeds of spaceships in the early 21st Century.
Join me then... IN THE FUTURE!
J.E.W. just had a thing for large vegetables.
ReplyDeleteNot that there's anything wrong with that.
Speaking as a heterosexual, though, I have to admit nathan is as pretty as some of the ladies you post.