The Silver State Chronicles

Some Intriguing Predictions from 1900

Way back in December of 1900, The Ladies Home Journal published a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. that offered a series of predictions of what would be in store for the USA and The World 100 years later, in the year 2000.

Well, here we are in 2007, so lets take a look at how well he did:

What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years
by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr.

Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”

Prediction #2: The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.

Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.

Read more…

End of an Era

Our friends at the NY Post reported on Sunday that good ol’ George Steinbrenner is finally stepping down from his seat of power over at the NY Yankees organization.

The Steinbrenner boys have taken the reins, Yankees brass has told The Post.

Hank and Hal Steinbrenner will share leadership of father George’s beloved Bronx Bombers in an arrangement to be further ironed out at top-level meetings in Tampa this week.

“George has taken on a role like the chairman of a major corporation,” said team president Randy Levine.

“He’s been saying for years he’s wanted to get his sons involved in the family business. Both of them have stepped up and are taking on the day-to-day duties of what’s required to run the Yankees.”

George Steinbrenner bought the NY Yankees back in 1973 for the hefty sum of $8.7 million. While a controversial figure, his aggressive management style brought success to the Yankees very quickly, with an AL Championship in 1976 and back-to-back World Titles in 1977 and 1978.

The NY Yankees organization is now valued at $ 1.2 billion. People may not like him, but there is no arguing with success: under his watch the Yankees have 6 World Series Championships, 4 AL Championships, and most recently 12 consecutive years of post-season action. No baseball franchise comes close to the success of the NY Yankees.

Enjoy your semi-retirement, George! And thanks for everything.

Batman vs Blockbuster

One of my alltime favorite comics book covers featuring The Batman swooping down on ol’ Blockbuster, who is doing a number smashing Batman’s logo. Pretty sure this is by the talented hand of Carmine Infantino, but if it isn’t please let me know.

Now that’s a pretty sharp cover! In the story inside, lower-tier Bat-Villain Blockbuster undergoes some therapy so that he would be filled with love, rather than hate & rage!

Initial results of the therapy are promising, but when Blockbuster catches a glimpse of some Batman related toys, he is thrown into a fit of uncontrollable rage, turning him truly ‘Bat-Mad!’ Don’t miss this issue!

But still no James T. Kirk

Yahoo reports that the cast for the movie re-launch of Star Trek is shaping up.

Rumors abound as to what the story is about. It does appear that Nero is the bad guy, and will be a Romulan. This is an early adventure of the Enterprise crew, but the presence of Captain Pike complicates things for oldschool fans like me.

Seems the whole project is to make Trek ‘cool’ for a new generation of young, disrespectful, & unemployed slackers. Seems as good a financial bet as any, at this point, though.

I don’t have a good feeling about this, but I’ll give it a shot when it comes out on Christmas Day, 2008.

Here’s what we have so far.

Green is confirmed. Red is rumored.

James Kirk	Chris Pine
Spock	Zachary Quinto
Leonard McCoy	?	?
Scotty	Simon Pegg
Uhura	Zoe Saldana
Sulu	John Cho
Chekov	Anton Yelchin
Nero	Eric Bana
Mr. Spock	Leonard Nimoy
Captain Christopher Pike	?	?

Battle of The Undefeated

I went a snazzy 12-2 last week and am back to pretty good form! This weeks ghas some intriguing matchups, and here are my best picks. See you at The Palms Sports Book!

Sunday October 14, 2007

• Bears
  Chiefs
  Browns
  Titans
  Ravens
  Packers
  Jaguars
  Eagles
  Cardinals
  Chargers
  Patriots
  Seahawks

Monday, October 15, 2007

• Giants

Always nice to hear what Stan has to say!

On October 8tn, 2007, Dennis Miller did a quick interview with Stan Lee on his relatively new radio show. Dennis has a great sense of humor and his radio show is really taking off. Last week, a caller just casually suggested that he invite Stan on the show, and Dennis’s people got on it quickly and made it happen just a few days later!

Stan discusses some memories of Nick Fury, flatters Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, covers the 1960s Marvel Comics creative process, and manages to mention the new Iron Man and Hulk films.

Dennis is a genuine fan of Stan and Silver Age Marvel Comics, so it’s clear that this interview is a genuine treat for him. Enjoy!

Just the thing to give Crazy 21st Century Moms Fits!

Yep, way back in 1967, comic books had ads for all sorts of great stuff! The Johnson Smith Company hawked everything from a life sized cutout of Frankenstein’s Monster, plans to build your own amazing robot, and my personal favorite, the X-Ray Specs!

Yep, much of this stuff would cause the usual suspects in today’s political scene to have a stroke! X-Ray Specs? So Junior can try and sneak a prurient peek at his buxom neighbor in her undies, or less? That’s sexual harassment in 2007! And the product of a patriarchal system designed to keep women subjugated for 1000s of years!

Well, that’s the song the usual suspects have been singing for a few decades now. And no matter what, they still find something to be crabby about! So this legion if misfit moms did their duty – create a generation (or two) of utterly sissified males, scared of their own shadows, and most alarmingly frightened by and of the women in their lives.

The truth is, Junior would benefit greatly from those X-Ray Specs! He’s supposed to wonder what that sexy neighbor looks like in the raw – gives him something to look forward to when he grows up! It’s high time the pushy & holier than thou Moms of the 21st Century just take a backseat and encourage some rascally behavior in their sons. The fate of the free world could depend on it!

Indeed, you won’t find a bigger collection of misfits and antisocial twerps than at the local mall, and we have our modern era of Moms to thank for it. Regardless of their intentions, the social damage is crystal clear: a generation of weakling, snarky, slacker males.

So that brings us to our first installment of Greatest Comic Back Covers, the back cover of Batman #194:

That’s right, Mommy! Get Junior a brand new Mattel M-16 Marauder so he can practice killing VC and other assorted enemies of freedom! What’s that? You just exhaled loudly, rolled your eyes, and announced that don’t believe in guns? I have news for you, sister – guns don’t believe in you! The reality of a gun doesn’t hinge on your narcissistic beliefs! The guns are real whether you believe in them or not, and whether you like them or not.

And don’t let your exaggerated sense of self importance make you look past the fact that this is just a toy gun, after all. Nobody’s going to get hurt!

Back in a saner time, a boy was encouraged to play with a toy gun. Several generations were encouraged to play with toy guns, and they overwhelmingly turned out just fine. Can you look at the collection of slackers with backward baseball caps and sagging oversized jeans at your local mall and say the same?

I call ‘em like I see ‘em: Moms of all varieties (married, single, or divorced) just love to tell us what a hard time they have, how they work a tough day job and still manage to be a great mother. I’ve got news for you: most of you suck at mothering. Your kids are out of control, have no respect for anyone or anything, are as dull as a doorknob, hang out with miscreants, have terrible diets, and are poorly educated despite their strong self esteem.

Great mothers? You’re not even good mothers. You’re absentee mothers. You’re lousy mothers. Take a look at your children – they suck, and when you look at them, you may as well be looking in a mirror.

To be fair, most modern era dads suck too. After all, this descent happened on their watch.

As if She Never Had This Problem Before..

Our friends at the NY Post report this story of a mannish woman who ran into some restroom trouble at the Caliente Cab Company restaurant on Bleecker St & 7th Avenue South.

In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Khadijah Farmer says she’s seeking an undisclosed amount for “embarrassment, humiliation and emotional distress” when she was bounced out of the Caliente Cab Company ladies’ room this past June.

“I felt extreme embarrassment. I’m not the most feminine woman, but I shouldn’t have to be,” said Farmer, 28. “What happened to me at Caliente Cab Company shouldn’t happen anywhere.”

The Austin Powers-like moment happened in June, when Farmer went to the Seventh Avenue South restaurant with her girlfriend and another friend after attending the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride March in the neighborhood.

Farmer said they’d ordered their meals and had finished eating their appetizers when she excused herself to go to the downstairs bathroom. She passed by a woman who gave her a nasty look as she walked into the empty bathroom and into one of the stalls.

Moments later, “a male bouncer burst into the bathroom and began to pound on the door of the stall Ms. Farmer was using,” the suit says.

“The bouncer yelled through the stall doors that he had been told there was a man in the women’s restroom, and demanded that Ms. Farmer leave the restroom and the restaurant immediately,” even though “the only man in the women’s restroom was the bouncer himself.”

Farmer told the bouncer through the stall door that she was a woman, and even tried to show him her ID.

“He refused to look at it,” she said, and then followed her upstairs to the restaurant and ordered her and her friends to leave.

Farmer said she was flabbergasted by the experience. She said she’s been mistaken for a man many times before, but when she tells people she’s a woman, they usually offer a quick apology.

“I never had this kind of experience before,” she said.

Farmer said she was wearing a polo shirt and pants at the time, and her lawyer, Michael Silverman, said the restaurant should have been more open-minded. “Would she have had the same problem if she were wearing white pearls and gloves?” he asked.

In a statement, the restaurant says it “thoroughly investigated” Farmer’s allegations, and “there has been no discrimination or violation of anyone’s civil rights or human dignity by Caliente Cab Company or anyone employed here.”

My question, of course, is “Did she have a wide stance?’