Detroit's Black Helicopter

Does anyone other than me remember that prior to the year 2006, I posted a list of prognistications?  Well, even if only for my own purposes, it is time to review my accuracy, which ended up being 13 of 17 for a whopping 76% -- not bad IMO, check it out:

1. Detroit hosts Super Bowl XL on February 5, 2006.
Let's not even count this one -- it was too easy, so I hereby declare that there are 17, not 18, real predictions.  Maybe I thought that somehow the city would live up to its ghastly reputation and cause the Super Bowl to get moved to Miami. :) Quite the opposite happened -- everyone involved (well, except for Seattle fans who watched the referees blatantly mug their team) had a great time, including the national media, it appears the NFL was sufficienlty pleased that we'll be given strong consideration for another iteration of the big game in the next decade.

2. Seattle travels to Detroit for an unexpected Super Bowl run.
Bull's eye!  But I stopped short of predicting a Seattle Super Bowl victory, didn't I, so either my ESP told me that the refs would cheat to hand Detroit's Jerome Bettis a fairy tale ending, or I'm actually the puppeteer who decides who wins and loses. I wish I had just gone out on a limb and predicted the Seattle win...

3. The city of Detroit goes bankrupt after the Super Bowl (probably by March).
Happily, I was wrong.  Perhaps the Super Bowl itself generated enough short term revenue that the city was able to avoid bankruptcy (for now).  Of course the city's still in trouble and teetering on the edge.

4. GM avoids bankruptcy for 2006.
Another correct answer for me -- this really wasn't too hard to predict.  All availale information points to either a bankruptcy after several years, or just a drastic downsizing of people and market share.  The only way bankruptcy was going to happen in 2006 is if the available information were actually false or significantly incomplete, obscuring an Enron-esque icerberg beneath merely choppy but not tempestous waters.

5. The Pistons continue to be the best team in the NBA all the way through the Finals.
Wrong on this one in total, but I was correct in implying that they'd end up with the best record in the NBA prior to the playoffs, and we were one step away from the finals in making the conference finals.

6. The wheels continue to fall off of the administration of this U.S. President as more of its conspiracies are uncovered and its foreign policy fails.
I'll give myself a big "correct" on this one. Various wiretapping and secret prison conspiracies were uncovered (and Plamegate was officially solved, though the administration was esentially able manuever itself away from a technical violation of the law).  More dramatically, the Iraq war worsened so significantly, particularly with its first elections doing nothing to calm the increasing violence between religous sects, that the electorate sacked the administration's party from not one, but both houses of the legislature.  The rest of the administration's foreign policy is also quite ugly -- North Korea is declaring itself a nuclear power, disregarding any admonitions from the U.S., and Iran is increasingly louder in proclaiming its progress in developing nuclear weapons.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also taken a turn for the worse after democratic elections in Palestine voted Hamas, a party hostile to Israel and the mainstream "peace process", into parliamentary power.  Let's not forget Russia's apparent belief that human rights conventions do not apply to it.  I was even more on point for this than I thought when I predicted it...

7. Seattle breaks ground on its African-American museum, constructed in the footsteps of Detroit’s own such institution.
As predicted, this happened -- cool.  In fact, Bus Chick and I went on a fact-finding mission at Detroit's museum during our Super Bowl XL run and passed the information on to the folks at Seattle's Northwest African-American Museum. This is the sort of project that could easily be suddenly cancelled due to a budget shortfall or some other event related to poor planning / extremely limited resources.  It's been making progress though, so hopefully it will open in 2007 -- here I'm happy to be right.

8. U.S. liberals make some moderate gains in the 2006 elections even as the U.S. electorate continues its rightward shift toward economic and social irrelevance.
This prediction is technically correct, though it certainly understates the biggest change in congressional power since 1994.  The "liberal" Democrats now have both houses, so my feeling that people could only be tricked into accepting a horrible administration for so long was correct. The "rightward shift" did continue I think, with a continuation of anti-gay laws, and, sadly, Michigan's blaspemously titled "Civil Rights" proposition that was passed by state voters to eliminate affirmative action.  Add to that protectionist trade / immigration rumblings around the nation, the absence of discussion in the election of any discussion of the executive branch's theft of personal freedoms is indicative of a population that is resigned to the extreme right's belief that laws apply only to those not in power.

9. More nations thumb their noses at the U.S. a la Iran, Iraq’s "insurgents," Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil.
This prediction was rather vague, but truthful in that "more" includes just one more, and North Korea fits that bill.  Iran actually got worse, and Syria and Lebanon have joined the fray as well.  Let's not forget Russia either...

10. Apple finally uses standard hardware such as Intel chips to make more affordable PCs and laptops – it’s about time.
Yes I'm right about this one since all the new Macintoshes are based on Intel chips that have become more cost-comptetive with PC's, but I can't remember how I came up with this, because this ia a very impressive prediction!  It's possible I was just stating something that already happened, in which case this shouldn't even count.  I do remember thinking that PowerPC chips from IBM were pricey and not good for business, so perhaps I concluded a siwtch to Intel was the only viable option.

11. The world gets an overdue but cool new operating system in Vista.
Technically, I'm right here.  Vista released to manufacturing, though you could argue that the "world" doesn't really get it on a wide scale until January 30.  Still, the released version is out there (hey, I'm using it now :)) for anyone with an MSDN subscription.  Close enough on this one.

12. It starts to become normal for DVD’s to release simultaneously with theatrical showings.
I'm wrong.  This still isn't happening, though there were a few movies that did this.  Certainly not a "normal" occurrence though.

13. Video on demand starts to seep into the mainstream.
Thanks to YouTube, I am right, since that is a form of videon on demand.  Even outside of YouTube, The Microsoft XBox Live service now offers movie downloads on to XBox, so normal humans uninterested in installing weird software on a PC to watch a video rather than just uising NetFlix can watch a selection of movies on demand.

14. Several game publishers drop out of the PC game business.
I'll just say "wrong" because I'm too lazy to find out if this is true.  What is true is that ghe PC game industry continued a decline this year, with many speculating that the extremely popular World of Warcraft online game with its time commitment and monthly subscriptio fees is sucking sales out of the rest of the industry.

15. Something unexpected and bad happens.
Correct -- lots of bad, unexpected things happened: accelerated global warming / melting ice sheets,
16. Something unexpected but good happens.
Hmm -- Democrats taking both houses of Congress?  The lowly Detroit Tigers getting to the World Series?  The start of Book Cadillac Hotel restoration after years of failed deals? I think this qualifies as correctness...

17. Me and buschick jump the broom.
Ok, so we planned this.  But people don't always go through with these, and besides, a wedding isn't guaranteed to go off successfully when it is planned by two bohemian types with an aversion to conformity.  It has turned out so well since the big day that I have to get some correct answer credit for this.

18. Detroit’s downtown business and residential climate improve even as the city’s schools and services continue their decline and people leave the city.
Sadly, tru dat.  The Book Cadillac deal along with numerous new condo and loft openings / construction, building restorations, a downtown Staples, and many other developments are the indicators that the first condition was met.  Unfortunately, cuts in bulk garbage pickup, the closuer of 50+ schools, a teachers strike which generated a huge shortfall in the number of students needed to retain federal funding, and the placement of Michigan (helped along by Detroit) as the state with the largest net loss of population in the country this past year all indicate that the second condition was met as well.  It will easy to make this same prediction for 2007...

All told, 13 of 17 (76%) isn't great on an exam, but as a demonstration of ESP, I think it's fairly impressive.  I can always improve my results for 2007 by picking such controversial positions such as "air will exist next year," but given our global warming situation and the people running the executive branch of the USA, that's no sure thing. :)

I'll never forget the day of the Million Man March, 11 years ago today.  I was in my 4th year of college at the University of Michigan and it was only on the day itself that I realized that my tendency toward letting my school work pile up was a poor excuse for missing part of history. 

Of course, I'd decided I couldn't go anyway because I found the "men only" nature of the event to be silly, potentially divisive, and disrespectful of my Nubian queens.  At the very least we could have doubled the tally for a 2 million person march, right?

I watched the television coverage with my fellow Afro-centrists at the Black Student Union.  Here is what I remember:

• As we expected, the journalists claimed that at the start of the march, the actual number of marchers was far less than a million, more like 500,000.  Of course, we knew this was a c-o-n-spiracy. :)
• There was a 12-year old (or younger) kid with a dashiki who spoke like he was 20 years older and commanded us to rise up like he was Malcolm.  I wonder where that brotha is today?
• More agreement among us viewers that we had easily exceeded a million.
• I was trying to understand why some women spoke at the event, yet they were discouraged from attending.  Odd.
• I gave much props to Benjamin Chavis (pre-Muhammad) because he was down with hip hop and he had revolutionary credentials (my favorite combination).  Little did I know we'd later learn about a mistress and get ourselves a classic rise and fall and partial redemption story later on...
• Why did Minister Farrakhan have to be soooo.. well... boring! He took way too long to get to the point, and the supposed etymology / deconstruction of the word "atonement" into "at, one, ment" was just random.  Bruh, you're supposed to tell us why we're here and how we're supposed to be different after going through this atonement process.
• Ok, the whole William Lynch thing sounded fake to me even then. Not exactly written in what I would imagine to be antebellum vernacular, not to mention the overly self-conscious diabolical smugness ascribed to the slaveholder -- their crimes speak for themselves.  Did Farrakhan really believe that Black people needed contrived melodrama as admonishment to turn our energies from inward conflict toward solving our problems?

So now I look back and ask myself what was accomplished.  I think for anyone who went, the experience had to be powerful, and probably there were many who were changed once they realized the responsibility and potential of their lives. So maybe those individual changes continue to ripple through our community today, motivating us to strive and seek redemption for our people as a whole.

But the effect is smaller than I would have hoped, and I hear less about the march today than I would expect for such a significant event.  I think we have several stages to go through before our culture reaches a level of organization and unity that would permit us to act purposefully as a collective to control our own destiny.

Anyway, until recently, Detroit had over a million Black people, so every day there was a march of a million.  Maybe we can get Jesse or Obama or Mandela or Al or somebody to come down to the D and get the city marching until we find whatever the answer is for undoing these last few centuries.

... I shouldn't have left you....

Too many things going on this year -- biggest was a knot tied in the summer with the lovely Bus Chick, followed by establishing our joint helipad in the CD.  All this in the midst of a career upgrade.

Anyway, we now return to the normal unreliable blogging schedule.

Today's good news was actually from last night -- somehow, the Tigers are in the World Series.  I saw them play here in Seattle earlier in the season and they were good, but I certainly didn't predict this.

In fact, this was almost a Good Michigan Sports Weekend, nearly the exact opposite of a Bad Michigan Sports Weekend.  The improbability of the Tigers in the World Series, a Michigan victory over Penn State to stay unbeaten, and the Lions' long-awaited first victory of the season overshadowed a Friday loss by the Red Wings and of course an expected embarrassment of Michigan State at the hands of #1 ranked OSU (this last one just listed for completeness, not because it actually concerns me).

The Tigers victory that allowed thousands of suburbanites to celebrate in the streets of downtown Detroit as if they had always stood in solidarity with its citizenry was nearly enough to hush my Detroit anxieties.

It's too bad that winning sports teams can't fix schools or give lives ruined by poverty and ignorance a reason and a means to seek a return to productive society.