So What Are the Soothsayers Saying About 2014?

By Doug Barry | January 1, 2014 | 7:00pm

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When a national news outlet like USA Today runs an article about what the country’s “seers” are predicting for 2014, it makes one realize how small the distance is between our modern world and a world in which a haruspex in a funny hat would cut open a sheep in front of an anxious crowd, puzzle over the liver, and say with the confidence of a serial killer, “We’ll totally beat the Carthaginians, y’all! This offal says Hannibal is no big deal.” We’re still just blindly groping through our universe, so thoroughly puzzled by its various phenomena that we flee back to a cave of superstitions whenever shit gets too real.

So what are the soothsayers, augurs, haruspexes, magicians, and astrologists saying about 2014? A lot of stuff. Like, 2014 is going to be a banner year for people (but only for the Aquarius, Leo, Scorpio, and Taurus people — the rest of the people will have a crap time in 2014). For one thing, a cure for cancer could be discovered because IT’S ABOUT TIME, SCIENCE. We could also travel through space more intrepidly, and maybe even build a fucking hotel on Mars because obviously the first ship to reach Mars will be a privately-funded expedition by the JW Marriott gang to construct a world-class resort for billionaires. Miley Cyrus is going to maybe get married real quick to someone and maybe also do a spread in Playboy. Something will also happen to [Ryan Gosling]. Some dude thinks 3-D printers will start spitting out kidneys, thus undercutting the black market organ trade. Chris Christie will run for president…but only if he loses an acceptable amount of weight, whatever that means.

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Let’s see…what else? Oh, right! The economy will get better! Unless it doesn’t get better. Dolphins will all be outed as muppets operated by a cabal of miscellaneous cephalopods that want to find out how gullible people really are. An ant name Aloysius will wander in front of the President’s microphone during the State of the Union address and announce to the world that ants are just really just people who got stuck in an ancient Egyptian shrinking ray many thousands of years ago. Warner Bros. will replace Wonder Woman in the new Batman vs. Superman movie with a second Batman. The Yellowstone caldera will explode, but in a surprise twist, it will spew jellybeans and buttercream frosting instead of lava and ash, which will initially seem like an awesome miracle until the ant people, incited by the haphazardly distributed sweets, swarm across the continental United States because that’s how you get ants.

The following things will be invented:

Lightsabers
Crossbows that shoot kittens (gently)
T-shirt cannons that shoot puppies
Robots that walk dogs
Robots that hunt down and destroy the rogue dog-walking robots
Hats that don’t produce hat hair
A cure for baldness that makes people grow huge stalks of anus hair
Anus hair removal kits
Cars with special seat-holes for people who become vain about their anus hair braids

All told, 2014 will be very exciting. Unless you’re a Virgo, in which case you’ll most likely fall into an open manhole, be given up for dead, and one day far in the future, emerge as the leader of the Morlocks.

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