When you think of the word “future” what do you think of? Do you think of careers and jobs you may have later in life? Your children’s wedding days? Goals you have set for yourself? That’s all well and good….for the NEARBY future. What about for the long term future? Do you see wars or peace? Do you see more inventions? What types? Do you see greater societies (economically speaking) or depression?

No matter what the (long-term) future turns out to be, it will be what the majority thinks it will be, even now. If a great number of people envision peace, peace there will be. Inventions are already being created in the minds of the young generation through their imaginations. If economic trimuph is strived for by all, then it will be achieved. 

John M. Richardson JR said:

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: Those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.

The future depends on us and our choices. We will recieve the consequences, good or bad, of our actions and we must be ready to accept them.

*Love, Sarah*

First being theoretically tarsier-ed is not as fun as it sounds. Whatever happened to “you will catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” Rika?  

Rika if glitter is sign of weakness ( see Conair post) then is the nearbyfuture weak, for we now have” theoretical glitter” at the top of our page. 

Okay sorry, I just could resist pointing that out Rika! We need to stop using the word theoretical. 

Now for the real stuff…. Frozen yogurt beats ice cream every time. It healthier, looks better, and tastes better than ice cream plus it is in Chuck! Even Sarah loves frozen yogurt. In fact, I predict that because of current trends frozen yogurt shops will become about as popular as Starbucks except in the frozen delicious, snack, lunch, and otherwise amazing foods industry. 

Now for the real article. WAIT look! I just took half a post commenting other poeples’ posts . WOW, that takes skill, ha-ha not really. Now that I think about it, a lot of our society is just comments on other peoples work. I do not want to rain on anyone’s parade but I do not think that there has been an original idea in an at least 200 years. We just build off other people’s ideas. Almost everything in today’s society alludes to something else that has already been said, done, or heard.    

  I believe that somewhere in Along for the Ride it says something a long the lines of, the story never changes just the details. Therefore, if this logic is to be believed then the future will have the same story line as today. It makes sense, we are creatures of habit .We get up in the morning shower take our coffee, go to work, ECT. Most people do the same thing repeatedly everyday. It cannot be explained why we do what we do other than we do it for comfort, for familiarity. We were creatures of habit. That is the way it is, the way has been, and looks like that is the way we will continue to be. 

Keeping try to oust the older ideas. Lets’ make improvements that burst with creativity; lets’ revolutionize the world with the same ideas done differently. For what is life with out near impossible goals and giant challenges?

You’ve heard of communism right? Very popular in Russia and a few other countries. Now here’s something slightly less known: Marxism. This is a concept very harshly shown in the book “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

It was created by a man named Carl Marx. He dreamed of a perfect society where no one was rich, no one was poor, there were no classes, and everyone was perfectly equal.

In the book, Zamyatin gives us an idea of what might happen if a society was controlled by a communistic government for too long. It gets out of hand. People have no emotions; no souls, as he quite often mentions. The people in the world are emotionless, unable to love. But individuality is human nature. It can’t be erased and it’s nowhere near that in this amazing, but semi-confusing book.

Could that possibly to happen to such a free society such as the U.S.? We have freedom; we can think whatever we want to think. We can love. We can express our feelings and we have rights to live without too much oppression. And we’re definitely used to it.

In Zamyatin’s biting satire, he uses Modernist color symbolism to decorate his prose and prod his (rather slow) plot along.

The book is uptight and boring at times, and the ending is down right shocking. Does it present the future of our own society? Could we be slowling moving towards this freedom-less society?

The Media loves a good ghost story. They love nothing more than to lure people into their inky clutches and scare them silly with apocalyptic promises and new and improved weight loss tactics.

This week, Yahoo!’s helping of Doom included a solar eclipse that threatened to throw the world into turmoil because science and superstition isn’t getting along.

Over in India, pregnant woman will be hiding inside as the solar eclipse happens, fearful of their baby developing a birth defect if they go outside.

The politicians and astrologers and everyone with their head on straight predicts bad things are going to happen- because the overly-superstitious people believe so strongly in ever impending doom. They predict domestic violence and possible assassinations of political figures could be a problem in places such as China and other Southeast Asian nations.

In a nutshell? Take this direct quote of a quote from the article:

“The probability for unrest or war to take place in years when a solar eclipse happens is 95 percent,” announced an article that attracted a lot of hits on the popular Chinese web portal Baidu.com.

That proves it. All this chaos would be lessened if people calmed down. I know it isn’t easy to just tell people that, as their fear of eclipses are grounded in their religions. But still; it does seem a little silly.

Mmm. I think I’ll have some ketchup with my serving of Doom. Yum.

-Rika

(Article Citation)

After a flurry of google searches and a tip from Nero, this issue has been brought to my attention. And clearly, it needs to be brought to the nation’s attention. I have found a grand total of TWO articles detailing some news that I find very disturbing:

North Korea may be firing a missile at Hawaii sometime around July 4th.

Yet despite this notable piece of news, stations and websites like Yahoo! News seem to be far more interested in the King of Pop’s death. Oh- they’re doing a second autopsy on Micheal Jackson? No way!

I get it. People want to know about Micheal Jackson, and the news services want to make sure people are visiting them. But sites like CNN and Nytimes.com have a duty to educate people about what’s going on. Especially when it comes to the missiles headed to Hawaii.

If I was in Hawaii, I’d get out of there. Fast.

Do you think that this issue has gone under-reported?

-Rika

It is June…and the theme of the month is Apocalypse (a.k.a. “the end of the world)! I was just randomly Googling “Apocalypse” and I happened to come around to this website www.apocalypse2012.com. Personally, I do not believe the world is going to end in 3 short years, however, I was intrigued by this website and thought I would write about it. This website is based off of his book Apocalypse 2012.

Who believes in Apocalypse 2012:

Lawrence E. Joseph, who worked in advanced physics research in Albuquerque, New Mexico and worked on the Vulcan Plasma Disintegrator (a furnace at high temperature meant to completely get rid of “biological and chemical wastes with leaving no toxic residue”). This is all part of his biography on his website. Along with that includes his education, prizes he has won, and even where he currently lives. Feel free to go and take a look. He examines everything through history, to come up with the idea that the world will indeed end in the year 2012. Studies include the Revelations, I Ching, and even the recent Bible Code, as well as the Mayan Long Calendar. He even goes to Guatemala in the harsh jungles to physically see the Mayans who contributed to the prediction of the world ending. His travels also stretches to Siberia, in which geophysicists believe that our solar system is “moving into a highly charged interstellar energy cloud”. The last stop he made was to South Africa, where he interviewed physicists who are trying to figure out why the “earth’s magnetic field is vanishing”.

The 10 things he believes is guilty of this Apocalypse:

1. Ancient Mayan prophecies say that on December 21, 2012, it will be a new age, where when new things are born comes with blood, agony, hope, and promise.
2. Through 1940-2003, the Sun has been of an uproar than ever before since the last major global warming encounter in the last Ice Age. Solar physicists say that the solar activity will reach its highest point than ever before in 2012.
3. Storms on the Sun (storms on the Earth) which include Hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005 which contributed to the stormiest weeks recorded history of the Sun.
4. Earth’s magnetic field, which helps solar radiation, has been fading with cracks in the ozone hole.  Soon, a pole shift, which is when the protection almost reaches zero and the North and South magnetic poles reverse.
5. Russian geophysicists says that our Solar System has turned into an interstellar energy cloud which is giving energy and changing the balance of the Sun and the planets. They predict that something bad will happen when our Earth reaches this cloud in the years 2010-2020.
6. Physicists from Berkeley discovered that 70% of species and dinosaurs extinguished an impact which will create another horrible catastrophe coming our way.
7. The Yellowstone supervolcano, which erupts every 600,000-700,000 years is coming soon. In Indonesia, another volcano eruption 74,000 years ago led to more than 90% of deaths in that population.
8. Philosophies like the I Ching etc. also believe that the world will end in 2012.
9. One of the interpretations of the Bible even predicted that the world will end in 2012.
10. Have a nice day (It literally said that on the website)

Well, I do hope all of you have a nice day. Again, I still do not believe our world is going to end in 3 years (at least I hope not). That is why we need to do whatever we can to protect our Earth. If this Apocalypse prediction is true, we want to do anything we can to stop it from coming.

~Hope

We’re in a recession. Can’t you smell the desperation in the air? If you want to tell which companies aren’t doing so hot by simply perusing one of their products, count the number of adjectives. The more adjectives, the more debt the company has. A company goes through a verb phrase before they unconsciously turn to adjectives to save them.

Photo Courtesy of dwstucke from Flickr

Verbs: they are not anyone’s friend right now.

• Verbs have begin sprouting on my bobby pin labels; “Dream, Imagine, Create”. After researching Conair (the maker of said bobby pins) I discovered that they are going out of business. Because I bought these bobby pins some time back, I searched through other Conair labels and saw a massive increase in adjectives shortly after the spike in verbs,  a tell tale sign of a tanking company.
• Another example of the rule “more verbs = more desperation” is “Pilot”, a pen company based mostly in Japan but also sells in the U.S. and I found some interesting data. A week ago I bought some pens from them- “Easy Touch Retractable”. See? We’re all ready in trouble here. This cover is full of verbs- “Feel me!”, “Retractable Ball Point Pen”, “Refillable”, and even “Made in USA” which I find ironic because even though it’s made in the U.S. it’s a Japan based company. This company is inching into the full blown adjective stage, although it’s still in the troubled verb stage. But I bet it will, and it’s sales will decline also. Here is a page that illustrates my point.

Adjectives = Defeat

• Wrigleys: After a company goes through the verb phase and begin descending into the darkness of company sales failure, we see those verbs get replaced by strange adjectives and equally strange color schemes. Take 5 Gum, for instance. Owned by Wrigley, this product started out with flavor names such as “Rain” and “Flare”, but as it’s stock dropped those verbs disappeared and the company gave into a new flavor that is yellow and named “Lush” with the tagline “…a crisp tropical”. As things got tough, color schemes, names and taglines incorporated more confusing adjectives. And why isn’t it green if it’s supposed to  be tropical? After all, I think they’re trying to get at a “lush” rain forest.
• Conair: As mentioned above, the Conair company went through their verb stage many months previous to this article, when I bought bobby pins. Their adjective phase was a horrendous thing. Straighteners became “Ionic”, hairdryers became “Infiniti Ionic Hair Styler” with a tag line of “Tourmaline ceramic ionic technology”… do I have to continue?

In short, companies place a lot of verbs on their labels as financial troubles begin, and when those verbs get replaced by adjectives their financial troubles have escalated. Count the number of verbs and adjectives to gauge when to buy and sell a company’s stock or to just discover how they’re doing.

-Rika