The future’s a funny thing when seen through the eyes of 1911 prognosticators

Connie was for several years the most important woman in my life. Depending on whom you asked, she was a) my secretary; b) the office manager; or c) the brains of the operation. (I was the only person to ever refer to her as my secretary, and then only when I was speaking with people I was trying to impress. I thought saying I had a secretary made me look important. I still think that.)

Connie remembered the names of every citizen in the small town I called home and could recite them to me quickly whenever they approached the front door of the newspaper at which we worked. Then I could say things like, “Hey, Bill! How’s the wife and kids?” when they walked in the front door. It made me look like I knew what was going on. I did not. But Connie did.

Constance (she hates it when I call her that) moved down south to Hillbillyville, USA several years ago. I miss her way more than I do any of my ex-wives.

But we’re still Facebook “friends,” so I keep up with what’s going on with her husband, kids and miscellaneous grandchildren. More importantly, I still get to see all the stuff Connie thinks is funny, amusing or interesting, just as if we were still sharing an office.

Earlier today, she posted an article from a 1911edition of The Ladies Home Journal in which the editors predicted what life would be like in the United States by the year 2011. One might expect the predictions would be silly or at the very least far off the mark, but they aren’t. In fact, most are eerily accurate.

For instance, the editors predicted there would be between 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people living in the United States by 2011. According to the Internet, which never lies, there were actually 312,862,977 U.S. citizens last year. Most of them spent their waking hours driving right in front of me, going ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

Other predictions included hot and cold air coming from spigots. The spigot idea didn’t work out, obviously, but the editors did describe with some accuracy central air and heating systems. Also, “ready cooked” meals that sound suspiciously like something you’d get at McDonald’s were envisaged, though the editors predicted the food would taste good, so points off there.

Automobiles that sold for less than horses were another prediction. I guess this depends on the horse and the car, but I’m guessing my 1994 Ford Taurus would pull in less cash than the offspring of Secretariat, say.

The editors also predicted air-ships, weapons that could decimate entire cities, the growth of the suburbs, subsidized education, automated farming, and the fax machine. Not bad for a bunch of guys who have been dead for at least 50 years (or longer).

They did miss the mark on a few predictions, no shame there. For instance, they foresaw the extinction of horses (by accident) and the extinction of flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches (on purpose). Neither of these prophecies came to pass, though I am hopeful with regard to the mosquito thing.

Other predictions included television (did happen), genetically-altered fruit (happening, despite a lot of whining from hippies and other people afraid of growing extra appendages), submarines (happened), free college educations (happened, provided you can hide from the student loan people until you die), cell phones (happened, according to my most recent bill), and auto air conditioning (happened, provided your car is not a 1994 Taurus, in which case it has been broken for a while).

Anyway, Constance’s article got me thinking about what life will be like in 2111, a century from now. I have some ideas, but I want yours, folks! Email your predictions to mtaylor325@gmail.com and I’ll run the best of ‘em in an upcoming Reality Check column. This is your chance to leave your mark on future generations!

In fact, let’s make a contest out of it. The very best prediction wins a 1994 Ford Taurus* with no air conditioning. Who knows? The old girl may have another 100 years in her.

*I’m kidding about the car. I need it to live in.

Give your Kindle something worth reading: Mike Taylor’s e-book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at Amazon.com and other online book sellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Check your text messages to find out

This morning over Cheerios I read yet another article about texting, the smart-phone phenomenon which allows communication via long distance without all the bother involved in using your mouth. Instead, you punch a whole bunch of little keys (either real or virtual) to send messages like “Ill se u ths aftrrrnon aroud 5,” which, allowing for typical texting typos, probably means, “The FBI has your house surrounded and they’re getting ready to toss in the tear gas canisters.”

The article didn’t mention typos, though. And for once it wasn’t another heated diatribe calling for the abolition of A) teenagers texting while driving, B) teenagers texting each other naked pictures, C) teenagers texting each other racy messages, or D) teenagers doing all the other fun stuff adults can’t do because our bodies are shot and we no longer look good naked, even on tiny cell-phone screens.

The article was about a recently-discovered behavior exhibited by some teens called sleep texting. That’s right, sleep texting.

So far Dr. Jason Coles—the “sleep medicine expert” cited in the story—has witnessed this behavior only in teens, but in time it’s sure to spread to older members of society. Sleep texting is exactly what it sounds like; texting in your sleep.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the text messages I receive—mostly from my kids, who don’t realize a phone also can be used for voice communication—are for the most part decipherable, if not exactly typo-free. This is not the case with sleep texting, according to Dr. Coles. Coles says texts created while “half awake, half asleep” can make no sense, some sense or more sense than the sender would likely be comfortable with.

In short, a sleep text may reveal a hidden truth. The same can probably be said of drunken texting, which people do all the time, at least the sort of people I hang out with. I don’t know how many “I love you, man!” texts I’ve received from my buddy Jake over the past three years, all of them sent sometime after 2:30 a.m. He usually goes on to describe how he’s going to kick my (expletive) if I don’t immediately get down to the A) bar, B) VFW Hall, or C) strip club to “hang” with him.

I hope this sleep texting thing doesn’t begin to affect Jake. I do not want to be privy to the abnormal thoughts percolating in his murky subconscious.

In fact, I don’t want to receive sleep texts from anyone. I’m sure my son’s subconscious is still mad at me over the time I smacked him upside the head for lipping off to his stepmother. (I’m not proud of it, but it happened.) And I know my daughter’s subconscious would have a few things to say about the time I yelled at her when she spilled grape juice all over the carpet while I was in the middle of hanging wallpaper. She was only five, but I yelled anyway and made her cry. I’ve felt guilty over that for years, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about it in the first chapter of her tell-all book, written entirely in her sleep.

My Sweet Annie’s phone has no text messaging capability and frankly, I’m glad. We had a quarrel last night and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what she was really thinking about me after the lights went out.

I don’t sleep text myself, but now I’m worried I might. I think I’ll leave my phone in the kitchen at night, just to be on the safe side. I have a few things I could say to a certain presidential candidate and I do not want the Secret Service showing up on my front porch at 4 a.m.

Your Kindle desperately wants a copy of Mike Taylor’s e-book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. If you’re still reading paper, you can buy a “real” copy of the book at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Those basketball fans will be the death of me yet

Times are hard and I’m beginning to think SweetAnnie has taken out a large life insurance policy on me in the hope of making them less hard (at least for herself). I can’t absolutely prove this is the case, but the anecdotal evidence that she’s trying to get me bumped off is overwhelming.

I’m writing this not so much as an attempt to cheat her out of the insurance money should her plan work, but rather as a possible last chapter to my posthumous biography, “I Was Robbed!”

Now Sweet Annie is—while not particularly devious—very intelligent. She’s too smart to simply push me into the Grand Canyon or tie antlers to my head and drop me off in the woods during deer hunting season. She has to make my untimely demise seem like an accident, or if not an accident, then at least a murder she had no part of.

To do this she has been taking advantage of my naiveté with regard to sports. With the exception of boxing, I don’t know diddley when it comes to sports. I can differentiate a baseball from a football (the football’s the one that bounces funny, right?) but that’s about it. As to professional sports teams—who’s playing whom—fuggidaboudit. I know nothing.

How is Sweet Annie using sports to kill me? Well, for the past year or so, she’s been loaning me a sweatshirt. It’s a nice hoodie that on more than one occasion has kept me warm when temperatures dropped suddenly and I had no jacket handy. It’s blue with white lettering, reading in large print: DUKE.

Some of you may already know that Duke is a university somewhere; North Carolina, I believe. Or Saskatchewan. Anyway, it’s a school and Annie’s brother is head of the English department there, which is how she scored the sweatshirt.

Some of you also may know that Duke fields a basketball team, supposedly a good one. And the Duke basketball team has a bitter rival; the University of North Carolina. I don’t know if these guys are with the NBA, NCAA or the NAACP, but the fans there take their basketball very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that the mere sight of Annie’s Duke sweatshirt gives UNC fans an unquenchable desire to engage in the one sport I understand and enjoy (see boxing, above). On at least three occasions, young guys have sent disparaging comments in my direction while I was wearing the Duke shirt. When I try to explain to them that I don’t give a rat’s hindquarters about Duke, UNC or any other basketball team, Sweet Annie chastises me for being “disloyal” to the Duke spirit.

See? She trying to get me to, um, duke it out over Duke. Though I like boxing, even Muhammad Ali was retired by the time he was my age, and for good reason. He wanted to live. So do I.

So, no more Duke shirt for me. If Annie wants that insurance money, she’s going to have to do better than that.

Make your Kindle happy! But it a copy of Mike Taylor’s book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available from Amazon and other online booksellers. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Legal or not, I just can’t be trusted with a taser

I read an article the other day that said Michigan lawmakers are considering a bill to make it legal for regular folks to carry a taser, one of those devices that dispenses a high-voltage charge toward potential attackers, rapists and Republicans with strong opinions, rendering them—temporarily at least—defenseless.  I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, but personally, I’m against it.

Not to worry; when it comes to things like gun control, prayer in schools, reproductive rights and teaching creationism vs. evolution my opinions remain unchanged: I believe whatever you believe.

But when it comes to this taser thing…well…I just think they’re too dangerous. Not for you, maybe, or for most sane, rational people; I think they’re too dangerous for me. I could never be trusted with one. I know myself that well.

Oh, I have a couple guns, left over from the days my son was young and I thought it would be fun and manly for the two of us to go “plinking” occasionally. For two summers, Jordan and I had a great time shooting the arms and legs off his sister’s discarded Barbie dolls. Then he outgrew the sport. I felt a little foolish blasting away at fashion dolls by myself, so the guns were disassembled, secured with cable trigger locks and packed away in a cheap gun safe where they will be readily available should the Soviet Union ever get back together and threaten us with mass destruction. Those three .22’s will come in handy in case of a commie nuclear attack.

Over the years I’ve also owned several slingshots, BB guns, water pistols, pea shooters…I once even built a working catapult. I share this so you won’t think I’m some sort of “anti-weapons” nut, despite the Republican comment in paragraph one.

But I am worried about this taser thing. As I said, I know me. Eventually, I would get one, though I haven’t lived in a high-crime area in years. In my current neighborhood parking my rusty Ford outside the garage where people have to look at it is considered a capitol offense. Sweet Annie goes for her nightly walk hours after dark and I don’t worry. The roughest and most rowdy kids in the neighborhood might commit the heinous crime of cutting across your lawn, but if their parents found out, those same kids would be forced to send you a letter of apology accompanied by a coupon for a free cappuccino at the nearest upscale coffee house.

Self defense is not a legitimate excuse for owning a taser, not for me. But man do I want one!

I want one more than that kid in AChristmas Story wanted a BB gun. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve seen ‘em in action, years ago, when the police department in the town I was working purchased a few with money from a Homeland Security grant. They put on a demonstration for the press at which they tasered Cindy, the photographer covering the event with me. She dropped like a sack of potatoes. It made her cry and I felt bad for her, but in the darkest recesses of my heart it was then I began to lust after a taser of my own.

If they do legalize them and if I do get one, who would I use it on? I don’t know…I don’t see my two younger brothers that often and if I ever jolted Sweet Annie I’d never dare sleep again. Various presidential candidates also come to mind, but my guess is this would be frowned upon by the law enforcement community.

In the end, I fear I would try it on myself. I just wouldn’t be able to help it. And so I’m hoping our lawmakers don’t go through with this. People like me just can’t be trusted with this sort of technology.

Give your new Kindle a copy of Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available at Amazon and most other major online booksellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

You can get into a lot of trouble on New Year’s Eve, especially with a driver’s license

I have a long history of getting into trouble on New Year’s Eve. I’ve been stranded in snowstorms, drunk too much (which doesn’t happen often, much as it may appear that way in this column), gotten hopelessly lost driving home from gigs or parties…the list goes on. I’m hoping this year will be somehow different.

My weekend band is playing New Year’s Eve at (free plug alert!) Riverbend Bar & Grille in Ada, less than two miles from home, so any snowstorm looking to strand me there would have to be exceedingly formidable. Sweet Annie’s driving, so I needn’t worry about the affects of that extra glass of champagne I don’t really, technically, in all honesty need. And my car now has GPS, so it is—in theory, at least—impossible for me to get lost on the drive home, if I were driving, which again, officer, I am not.

So with any luck I’ll wake up around noon on New Year’s Day, well-rested, un-hung over and with the smell of slowly baking ham and sweet potatoes wafting into the bedroom. God will be in His Heaven and all will be right with the world.

Yup, that’s my hope.

But like I said, the odds aren’t good. The first of my New Year’s Eve misadventures took place the year of my 16^th birthday, two months after I received that Holy Grail of teenager-dom, my driver’s license.

The family car was, as were many in those days, a Ford Country Squire capable of housing an entire Catholic family, one that took the Pope’s admonitions about birth control very seriously. There were seven of us and you could still fit a couple dogs and cousins in there along with enough baggage to survive a cross-country trip. That Country Squire was, in no way whatever, a cool car.

Since my folks had no lives other than the daily wrangling of their herd of recalcitrant progeny, they had no plans for New Year’s Eve. I did. I was going to pick up my girlfriend Debbie and drive. When you’re 16, a destination is optional.

The weather was lousy and my mother didn’t want me to take the car. My dad, understanding he had four other perfectly good kids should something terrible happen to his eldest, overruled her. The last thing he said as I left the house was, “Don’t get stuck on any cow paths.”

I had no idea what a cow path was or why I might get stuck on one, but I was in a hurry to get out of the house before my old man could change his mind about loaning me the car so I promised I wouldn’t.

I did. With Debbie. In the middle of nowhere, next to some farmer’s field. What were we doing out there in the middle of the night in the sleeting rain? That’s the same question my mother and grandmother asked me when they drove out to pick us up. I didn’t give them an honest answer and I don’t feel the need to give you one, either.

This was after Debbie and I had hoofed it over a mile of muddy road to the nearest home with lights on, where Old McDonald let us use his phone to call for help.

It was an hour before the wrecker arrived to pull us out of the mud. The ride home with my mother was not a comfortable one. The encounter with my old man when we arrived home was not particularly pleasant either, though I did live to tell about it so that’s something.

I’m hoping this New Year’s Eve will be less eventful. All the roads between home and Riverbend Bar are paved and well-lighted.

We do have to cross one small bridge, however.

Uh-oh.

Mike Taylor’s book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or in digital format from Amazon and most other major booksellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

They never give you the cell phone manual you really need

I just gave my grandson Edison a smart phone for his birthday; no 11-year-old can compete in today’s hectic fifth-grade world without the ability to text, email and play Angry Birds. My granddaughter Rosie—two years younger than her brother—is still using a “dumb” phone, one that has only the ability to text, email, take photos and sort laundry into lights and darks. Somehow, she squeaks by.

My own cell phone boasts the ability to remotely pilot a space shuttle and find the flaws in Einstein’s GeneralTheory of Relativity. The deluxe version of the Relativity ap also allows you to correct Einstein’s flaws and achieve time travel, but that costs 99-cents and there’s no way I’m paying for an ap when I can download Angry Birds for free!

With Christmas just around the corner there are sure to be lots of new cell phones under lots of Christmas trees. Most of these will come with a manual that shows you how to download aps, perform speech recognition functions and—should the need ever arise—make a phone call. To make things easy, these manuals offer instructions in several different languages, one of which might or might not be English.

This may prove frustrating for some users, but it shouldn’t be. Why? Because those manuals don’t tell you anything you really need to know about your new cell phone anyway. I’ve gone through a lot of cell phones since purchasing my first brick-sized, battery sucking Motorola back in the Pleistocene Epoch and over the years I’ve learned what you really need to know about cell phones.

In fact, I’m thinking of coming out with a cell phone manual of my own, a general use kind of thing that applies to all brands and models. Here are some excerpts. If enough people are willing to shell out five bucks for the complete manual, I’ll write the rest.

CHAPTER THREE—SAFETY: Your new cell phone has been coated with a moisture attractant that causes it to gravitate toward water. If you place your phone near any liquid, it will eventually fall in. If you sit your phone on a restaurant table, your beer will tip over and drain into the unit’s most delicate electronic components. If you take your phone with you on a fishing boat so you can pretend you’re working should your editor happen to call, you will fall in the lake. This is especially true if you have been drinking beer and are too lazy to motor toward shore to make room for more. Attempts to “go” over the side of the boat will end in disaster, for both you and your new phone.

CHAPTER SIX—INSURANCE: Insurance for your new phone will seem inexpensive until you factor it out over the life of your phone, at which point you will realize you could have purchased four new phones and Trump Tower for what you’ve paid in premiums. Also, after covering your insurance faithfully for 15 months, your payment will somehow be “misplaced.” This will happen the same day you fall out of your boat, thereby negating your coverage. Oops.

CHAPTER NINE—PROPER PHONE HANDLING: If you hand your new phone to your grandson so he can say hello to his mother, he will drop it, usually on the pavement of a large parking lot or over a bridge and into a river. You will not be allowed to kill him because he is your grandson and you’re supposed to love him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN—OBSOLESCENCE: Your new cell phone is obsolete. Yes, even if you haven’t received your first bill yet. If you waited in line for three days to be the first person on your block to own the latest uber-mega-genius-phone, it will still be an antique by the time you get it home and out of the box. You might as well be using a wall-mounted unit with a crank on the side that only gets Mayberry operator “Sarah,” who will then put your call through to Mount Pilot.

CHAPTER TWELVE—SECURITY: This chapter includes information on choosing a screen protector, a silicon sleeve to protect the screen protector and a hard case to protect the sleeve. A large, steel gun safe usually serves to protect the hard case. This can in some ways negate the unit’s portability factor, but owners of fancy new cell phones like to keep them looking nice right up until the moment they fall out of the boat.

That’s it for now, I guess. I’ll come up with additional “indispensable” information if enough readers agree to shell out five bucks for my omnibus manual.

Buy Mike Taylor’s real book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, at mtrealitycheck.com or download the Kindle edition at Amazon.com.

I’ll have my spam shaken, not stirred, thank you

This could be my last Reality Check column. By this time next week I fully expect to be embroiled in the exciting world of international espionage. I’ll be driving a cool little British sports car equipped with laser guns, rocket launchers, ejection seats, underwater capabilities and hidden turbo jets that pop out and propel me forward at mach 4 when I push the discreet red button hidden beneath the dashboard.

I’ll be dating a long-legged, scantily clad blonde who makes sneaky-looking facial expressions whenever my back is turned. She won’t know I’m watching her from the sides of my rear-view sunglasses and when it comes down to the wire I’ll shoot her before she gets a chance to shoot me. She will then have the good taste to die beautifully in my arms, whispering that I was only an “assignment” at first, but that she has grown to love me.

I’ll be engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Asian gentlemen who crush golf balls with their bare hands and cut the heads off marble statues with their thrown bowler hats.

I am going to be so cool. I will try to remember all you little people, but it ain’t gonna be easy once they issue me my number; I’m hoping for double-oh-eight, one better than James Bond’s 007. As Special Agent 008, I will routinely rid the world of whatever small pockets of Communism remain, even if that’s just five stoners with a Mao poster hanging on their dorm room wall at a college campus in Berkley.

And I will look good doing it. I already own a black suit. If things get formal, I guess I can rent a tux, at least until Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA, or whomever I wind up working for supplies me with one of my own.

You may think I’m just blue-skying it here, but I’m not. I’ve already been contacted via email by a covert group of commie spies, probably former high-ranking members of the former Soviet Union’s Politburo. They’re trying to get me join them and go undercover as a “mole” here in the United States. At least, I think that’s what they want. Since I can’t read Cyrillic, I don’t know for sure.

As some of you regular readers may remember, in addition to this column I also pen a monthly horoscope for an English-speaking newspaper in Moscow. This, I assume, is how I came to the attention of the Russian agents. Because I regularly predict the futures of a couple million Muscovites, the agents suppose I’m sympathetic to their pro-commie agenda.

I’m not. I usually vote Democratic, but that’s about as subversive as I get. But the Russians don’t know this; they trust me. I plan to use this trust to gain inside information into their operation and pass it on to whichever agency is willing to hire me on and provide me with the car, blonde and free tux.

Of course, it’s possible, though unlikely, that the email I received is just some sort of Russian spam. I’m cutting-and-pasting it here in the hope that some bilingual Reality Check reader will be able to interpret it and let me know to which secluded parking garage I’m supposed to report:

Соберем для Вас по сети интернет базу данных потенциальных клиентов для Вашего Бизнеса (название телефон факс e-mail имена рода деятельности товары услуги итд) Узнать подробнее Вы можете по

That’s it. If you also could let me know if I’m supposed to wear a tux to that first meeting, I’d appreciate it.

Do svidanya, comrade. (Don’t call Homeland Security; I’m just practicing.)

Please email your Russian translations and/or plans for world domination to: mtaylor325@gmail.com.