Unlike many of its sister tabloids, the OC Weekly does not employ a professional psychic. Because of this shameful oversight (probably due to shortsighted cost cutting by our superiors, who also, for reasons we cannot understand, refuse to maintain a full-time sushi bar), we have been unable to bring you, our faithful readers, the mystic skinny on what the future holds. Every year, we watch, scuffing our shoes awkwardly on the floor, as each National Enquirer-esque revelation of torrid romances and lurid divorces stuns the world afresh.
But no longer. Finally, we, too, can offer predictions of the coming annum-perhaps the last, if the millennial doomsayers among us are correct. And our salvation came, as it so often does, from the Internet.
Online county guide OCNow.com (www.ocnow.com) recently began offering visitors advice from the Psychic Kitty (“From the mystic realms of the Nile, Psychic Kitty sees all and tells . . . some”), using the strictest scientific methods available on the open market. Simply type in your questions, and the Kitty will give you her intensely scientific yes or no answer.
We racked our brains for questions to put to the Kitty-but not for the traditional round of celebrity marriages and scandals. No, we wanted the straight dope on events that would affect us directly this year. Whither Bob Dornan in 1999? What about that pesky El Toro International fiasco? And what natural landscape will the developers plow under next?
On some fronts, the Kitty disappointed us. We were crushed to learn, for example, that the Los Angeles Times would not be continuing its quest to remake itself into an exact clone of The Orange County Register, as the prospect of watching two identical titans battle to the death rather tickled us. The Transportation Corridor Agencies will not be adopting the ingenious plan we devised to feed the hungry on all the roadkill it scrapes up off the county's toll roads.
And on several occasions, the Kitty displayed a distressing lack of certainty. She could not tell us whether El Toro International Airport guru George Argyros-unable to control his unabated glee over his coming airstrip-would be forced to walk around in public hunched due to a permanent woody. Nor could she determine whether the Anaheim Angels would once again field a fearless, engaging, overachieving team that will surprise the baseball world for most of the season, only to collapse at the end of the season and just miss making the playoffs-something that sounded like a sure bet to us.
But in other areas, the Kitty sounded quite certain, and her confidence has inspired us to publish the following predictions about our fair county in 1999. Read and learn.
*Perennial underdog and bitter, defeated ex-Congressman Bob Dornan will find a new career-posing in a leather teddy for all those twisted ads in the back of the Weekly.
*Sometime OC resident and Chicago Bulls cross-dresser Dennis Rodman will not discover new and amazing ways to freak us all out in the coming year-but, as the Kitty pointed out, is that even possible?
*Local Godboys Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Crystal Cathedral and the Traditional Values Coalition will stun the world by demonstrating for the first time supreme sacrifice and compassionate advocacy on behalf of the sick, the poor and the powerless and fulfilling other teachings of Jesus Christ.
*However, a close family member of a top dog from one of the aforementioned OC fundamentalist institutions will not come out of the closet in '99.
*Our beaches will suffer even more closures due to pollution, oil spills and sewage overflows, distressing surfers and fish alike.
*Jim Silva and the Board of Supervisors will continue to kiss major developer butt.
*Ex-Governor Pete Wilson, defying conventional wisdom and media predictions, will not announce his candidacy for president in the year 2000. However, he will make up for it by announcing his candidacy for Lord and Master of All Who Inhabit the Universe.
*OC Congressman Chris Cox -who recently announced his candidacy for Speaker of the House and then withdrew two days later when it became apparent he would lose, and then announced he was available again, and half a news cycle later said he would not when it became apparent (again) that he would lose-will run for even more offices and then immediately withdraw from the races when it becomes apparent he'll face legitimate challengers.
*To the great relief of those who fear the imminent collapse of civilization due to the Y2K computer bug, the Y2K problem will not cause computers to begin spontaneously combusting across the county.
*As part of California's new get-tough-on-smoking campaign, cigarette smokers will be hunted down like dogs.
*Developers will finally pave the last open spaces in the county with yet more salmon-colored stucco and red-tile roofs.
*The entire California Republican Party will commit hara-kiri in a ritual ceremony after acknowledging a complete lack of party unity, a battle plan, or a chance in hell of retaking the state. But to almost no one's surprise, they will decline to first admit that their savage, politically expedient, mean-spirited attacks on Latinos over the past few years were perhaps distasteful.
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