Garcia Media Life

I don’t know why people venture forth with predictions for the future. Maybe it’s that one in a thousand wild-ass guess that comes true that allows predictors to feel good about themselves. For some, like psychics, it’s a business.

Political Predictions

On the other hand, for some, like Karl Rove and William Kristol, who are paid to analyze politics, it’s dangerous territory. Rove, of course, predicted Sarah Palin would get into the Presidential race. He was apparently thrown off by that huge tour bus wrapped in the constitution with the big Sarah Palin signature on it, so he can be forgiven.

Kristol, who was once Vice President, Dan Quayle’s chief of staff- is just perpetually wrong about almost all things political. Wasn’t just his bold prediction (backed up by two sources!) that Rudy Giuliani would run for the White House this year. We all fondly remember his prediction three years ago that Barack Obama would not win a single primary against Hillary Clinton.

Sports Predictions

In the world of sports, we had two dream teams in 2011- the Miami Heat and the Philadelphia Eagles. Sports is one profession, where grandiose predictions about your own team tend to backfire because, see, word gets out among your competitors that you’re implying they’re all chumps which only feeds their desire to crush you. So when LeBron James predicted a half-dozen NBA titles, this was not well received by, among others, the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks.

It was Eagle’s back up quarterback, Vince Young, who remarking on the large number of expensive free agents Philadelphia signed up in the off-season, saw a dream team there in the city of brotherly love. The season ended ignominiously for the Eagles a couple of weeks ago with no playoffs but lots of talk about the potential firing of long time head coach, Andy Reid.

Psychic Predictions

My favorite erroneous or just plain hilarious predictions come from psychics. It’s a veritable treasure trove of goodies. We will leave out delusional pastors who twice called for the end of the world in 2011.

In the “Psychic to the Stars” category, a mantle claimed by some guy named Sydney Friedman and a woman named Nikki, we had the following from early 2011 looking at the year ahead.

From Sidney Friedman: “Lady GaGa becomes a teacher at a university. Maybe it’s just for a day or two, but she lectures at a school of higher learning.” I scoured the World Wide Web and this did not happen, though the University of South Carolina threatened to offer a course called Lady GaGa and the Sociology of Fame. Curiously enough, about a month before Friedman’s prediction,there were reports that she had applied to teach fashion and art appreciation at NYU.

Mr. Friedman also offered this gem: “This I truly hope does not occur: A major league baseball player inexplicably dies on the field.” Morbid and interesting- but wrong. Granted, entire teams died on the field in 2011, notably the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves who each blew historic divisional leads, but no one actually passed on to the hereafter on a baseball diamond.

From Nikki: 1) The Playboy Mansion will burn down; 2) Hillary Clinton will win the Nobel Peace Prize; 3) A gold rush will occur in Hawaii. No, no and no. Turns out there was an interview in which Rolling Stone band member, Keith Richards, said he once almost burned down the Playboy mansion. Hillary did not get the Nobel nod. And the only rush rumored to have hit Hawaii this year was the invasion of private investigators sent to the island by Donald Trump to look into Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Alas, that didn’t happen either.

Then there’s Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker, who call themselves ‘Britain’s Best Psychic Couple’. They came out with the predictable prediction of the great California earthquake and that the Hollywood sign would be damaged. But my favorite: Tropical Island to be evacuated because of volcanic eruption. I’m no expert in plate tectonics, but cursory knowledge of these matters would tell you that, by nature, any island is a product of volcanic or seismic activity. That’s how they’re born. It would, therefore, not be unusual that some island, somewhere in the world might experience a volcanic eruption and that some people may have to be evacuated.

Finally, there are the Psychic Twins, Terry and Linda Jamison. They claim to have predicted the 9/11 calamity and have even appeared on The View. The twins boldly predicted that President Obama would not be re-elected in 2011. This, of course, actually did come to pass, because the election is not scheduled until November 6th, 2012. And even if you give them credit for having given us a bonus prediction for 2012, the odds on this, of course, are about 50/50.