Showing posts with label X-Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label X-Men. Show all posts

Monday, October 7, 2013

7 Oct 2013


Birthdays
Shawn Ashmore b. 1979 (X-Men)
Aaron Ashmore b. 1979 (Smallville, Warehouse 13, Lost Girl)
Dylan Baker b. 1959 (Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, The Cell)
Howard Chaykin b. 1950 (American Flagg!)

A short list of birthdays today. The Ashmore twins have done very little work together, but both were on Smallville, Aaron several times as Jimmy Olsen and Shawn twice as Eric Summers. Shawn played Iceman in several of the X-Men series. I put Dylan Baker in the Picture Slot because I know more of his work, though very little of it is in genre films.

Many happy returns of the day to our birthday boys.


Prediction: Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing.

I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming.

Predictor: Isaac Asimov in 1964, making predictions about 2014 for publication coinciding with the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

Reality: If he had just stopped with that first sentence, Asimov would have been credited with a hit. If he had included the second sentence, modern coffee machines could have given him some semblance of correctness. But the automatic kitchen making meals is not a reality fifty years after he predicted it. (It should be noted that similar predictions were made in the L.A. 2013 article published in 1988.)

I'd like to write, "wait until next week, Isaac gets better", but I'm taking his predictions in order and it's a while before he really nails one directly on the head.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

The first of two exact date predictions from Demolition Man, celebrating its twentieth anniversary tomorrow.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!  

Thursday, February 21, 2013

21 February 2013


Birthdays
Ashley Greene b. 1987
Kelsey Grammer b. 1955
Anthony Daniels b. 1946
Alan Rickman b. 1946

Today we get birthdays of actors from the Twilight, X-Men, Star Wars and Harry Potter series. I love same date, same year birthdays. C-3PO and Snape! Who knew?

Alan Rickman gets the picture because All Sentient Beings Love Alan Rickman.
  

What life will be like... in the year 2001!

Predictor: Robert A. Heinlein in the 30th Anniversary issue of Amazing Stories, 1956

Predictions: lab outpost on Pluto...
the Sahara Sea...
Telepathy for military purposes...
We finished World War III with 100,000,000 more people than when we started...
Five billion sometime in the 21st Century...
Still no cure for the common cold.
 
Reality: I found this picture of Heinlein weeks ago, but decided to use another because this makes him look ridiculous. With this set of predictions, I realized I should have two pictures, The Sensible Heinlein and The Ridiculous Heinlein.

This set of predictions deserves this awful sports coat.

We don't have a lab outpost on the Moon, much less Pluto. We didn't flood the Sahara. We don't use ESP for military purposes. We didn't have World War III, we passed five billion in the 1980s.

He's right about the common cold, though.  I don't know how he does it.

 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Still plumbing the depths of this issue of Amazing Stories, a reader named Clarence W. Van Tilburg wins the prediction contest and while not perfect, he does a hell of a lot better than Heinlein.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!