Bloody Hell. Why did I ever start this nonsense!
Well, loyal readership, [Yes, both of you!] here we are embarking on another new year and, before we throw entrails at our tea-leaves and sacrifice our prize otters to the Gods of Things to Come, it’s time to take a look at how we fared with last year’s predictions.
With famous people dropping like flies for most of the year, surley even this jug-eared balloon must have got something right!
Let’s take a look at last year’s predictions and see how we did:
1: A prominent member of the royal family will snuff it. [Yes, I know I predicted this last year too and was wrong. But, surely Prince Philip can’t cheat the grim reaper for much longer!]
Well. This is interesting. If the tinfoil-hat brigade is to be believed, Her Maj herself may, at this very minute, be lying at death’s door. Or, if instead, the double-layered tinfoil-hat brigade are right, she’s already gone to meet her maker and it’s being "covered up" til we get Chrimbo and New Year out of the way, so as not to spoil the party.
Still, I can’t really claim a point for such unfounded nonsense, so we’re off to the traditional un-flying start.
2: We will have snow in Manchester, in April
Didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t remember us getting any snow at all, last year.
3: Jolla will finally go tits-up. SailfishOS will be picked up by one of the big Chinese brands like Xiaomi or Huawei
Nope. Jolla and Sailfish are both alive and… well, if not exactly "kicking", at least "twitching". Nil out of three, so far!
4: The first self-driving taxis will go into operation.
"How does he do it?", cry the fans, in total astonishment.
5: Mötorhead will have a 'postumous' No.1 single [possibly for charity]
Ahem. No chance of that. With a music industry icon falling off the perch on an almost weekly basis during 2016, there wasn’t much chance of a look in for Lemmy and the boys.
Moving swiftly along…
6: Trouble in the Middle-East [on a government-toppling scale] will spread to another country which, up til now, has remained fairly stable.
Well, the same old suspects kept kicking the shit out of each other, but I don’t think we added any new participants to the brawl.
7: Still no sign of 'Life on Mars'
Yay! --we’re still getting the hugely over-hyped press conferences from NASA, which end up announcing a pre-cursor to a pre-cursor of a thing which might indicate the possibility of the existence of a microbe, eleventy-billion years ago. But no sign of little green men yet [or even better, little green women in silver bikinis!]
8: Scientists will 'successfully' clone a mammoth embryo, although it will be born dead.
What the fuck was I smoking? Next!
9: Linux share of the desktop market will peak at over 2,5%. Windows will drop below 90% [No, that doesn’t constitute a "This is the year of Linux on the desktop…" prediction!]
Oooh! --close, but no cigar. According to marketshare.com, Linux’s market share peaked at 2,33% in July last year. So, that part of the prediction was only 0,17% out. [Yes, that was the sound of straws being clutched at, you just heard].
As for the Windows part, I can’t find anywhere that shows the stats for all versions of Windows, combined. And I can’t be arsed doing all the sums involved in adding the individual Windows versions stats together for a whole year. So, let’s just make the [pretty safe] assumption that I got that wrong too!
10: This set of predictions will break all my previous records for accuracy –and, as you know, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition!
Oh well. At least you’ve got to admire the lad’s sense of humour!
And, at the end of that catastrophic cock-pile of crystal ball consulting, I managed to score an even worse than usual
TOTAL: 2 out of 10
for Nostradamus Corner 2016.
Remember to tune in whenever I can be arsed to upload my next set of prognostications, to find out what’s almost definitely not going to happen in 2017.