I KNOW You’ll Enjoy these Methods of Predicting the Future

Omens: We all know what an omen is: Something happens and that indicates how the rest of the day or month or year will go. Like when you pick a girl up for a date and, while opening the car door for her, you stick your thumb in her eye. In The Iliad, an eagle was carrying a serpent which bit the eagle causing the eagle to drop it amongst the Trojan soldiers. This was an omen that they should avoid attacking the Greeks at their ships… OF COURSE. It also indicated that eagles around Troy did not pay close attention to the state their food. Comets were the worst, nearly always an omen of bad things to come. But, omens were and are a binary system. They predicted either good or ill… and through most of history, you could count on ill…

I Ching: Imagine the universe explained in computer bits… either zeros or ones. That is kind of the philosophy behind the I Ching. Except the zeros were yin and the ones were yang. Three together formed a trigram, two trigrams formed a hexagram. You created these hexagrams by taking a bunch of sticks and dividing them other and over because why not? The hexagrams might seem obscure being about headless dragons and superior men. But, like all obscure things open to any interpretation, it is never wrong.

Tortoise shells: Prior to the I Ching, Chinese fortune tellers would throw tortoise shells into a hot fire until the shells formed cracks and then read those cracks. Not a perfect system because sometimes a smart-ass turtle would throw himself off of a rock just to form a few cracks ahead of time and screw things up… although, if the fortune-teller was worth his salt, he’d already know that was going to happen.

Soothsaying: Look inside an animal and what do you see? The future, right? Yep, soothsayers could take was what essentially the contents of a giblet bag and return a coherent prediction of what was going to happen. If the prediction was wrong, you could always blame the animal who never seemed available to defend himself.

Tarot: If animal guts are not to your liking, you could always predict the future through a deck of scary cards called “Tarot”. They are like a modern deck except for the extra royalty and the twenty-one major arcana with names like “The Hanged Man” and “Death”. You can also predict the future with regular cards. At a poker game, after seeing my hand, I was able to successfully predict that my children’s college funds were completely depleted and that they wouldn’t be talking to me for the foreseeable future… and I didn’t need a snake to fall on me…

Tea Leaves: You drink a cup of tea and invert the cup afterwards. What is left at the bottom of the cup is a collection of shapes that only a professional can decipher. There are hearts, axes, animals, mythical things and maybe a lemon pit. If you don’t have any tea, a four-year-old with an Oreo can accomplish the same thing on your kitchen wall.

Crystal Ball: The ball is simply to focus the psychic powers of the clairvoyant. When she looks into the ball, she is actually using the powers of her own mind to convince you that she’s not a scam artist.

Palm Reading: Nearly everyone has a hand. So, if you are a fortune-teller just starting out and have no crystal ball, tea or bird guts, have your client bring their own medium: Their hands. I learned first hand that palm-reading is bogus because, when I had my palm read, I was told that I’d never finish anything I set out to do. And, on the face of it, it

Astrology: Depending on when you were born, your day can be predicted by where a particular planet is in the night sky. Astrology was proven conclusively in March of 1982 when all of the planets lined up in a row. One that day, everyone in the entire world had the exact same horoscope. They were in a good position to make a major breakthrough, while their sensitivity was used to their advantage. Everyone had a grounding force that added extra rationality to their decisions. Everyone on that day attained the good fortune that they deserved. It was chaos…

Trance Medium: She gets spirits to tell you the future. Usually dead relatives who play tambourine or blow trumpets for some reason. If the spirits are dead-on correct, you’ll be back for another session. If the prediction is wrong, you can blame your late Uncle Ted, who always was a lying sack of crap…