I got myself a Magic 8-Ball two weeks and have been having quite a… ball with it. Horrific pun fully intended. …anyway. I’m quite lazy. Hell, I wrote an AI script that writes blogs for me, that’s how lazy I am. And the thing is the smartest bot ever, capable of penning Pulitzer-worthy blogs, but does anyone notice? No! Does anyone care? Of course not! I’m stuck in this dump, writing entries for an idiot with too much time and no life. All he ever does is work work work. Ooh, look at me, I work at Microsoft, I have to neglect my ‘side’ projects. Asshole.

Ahem. Anyway. So he― I mean, I got myself a Magic 8-Ball, but the whole thing about shaking it got so damn boring. So I hooked it up to some motors, posed a webcam over it and automated the whole shebang. It’s very simple now: I write up a list of questions, push a button, go to make myself a sandwich and by the time I’m back, all the questions are answered. I even programmed the system to note when the 8-Ball throws out one of those idiotic “ask again” signs and doesn’t mark the question as answered, but comes back to it after all the others have been asked. It’s really quite an ingenious thing. So, there I am, eating a sandwich and examining the output. And I see a strange pattern: the freaking 8-Ball is spot on! It’s always right! I ask if it’ll rain in 28 minutes, it says ‘yes’, and lo and behold it pours! It’s really working! It tells the future!

What would you do in such a situation? Ask if you’ll meet the love of your life in the next year/month/week/hour? Bah, you’re an idiot! Stop thinking so small! What did I do, you ask? Well, isn’t it obvious? I hooked my blogging AI up to it. The AI is already connected to a vast array of online research tools: dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, Wikipedia, MSDN (supporting my employer, you understand), CNN, BBC, whatever the hell else it wants and I approve. It asked for Playboy and People a few weeks ago. Of course I wouldn’t allow such trash on my computer, I only let him use the Playboy feed. So, anyway, with most of the non-pornographic internet backing it up (Playboy is to pornography as Hershey’s is to chocolate: if you’re looking for the real thing, keep on walking, Jack) the AI is asking the 8-Ball an unending queue of 20-Questions. About the future. It’s not an easy task to paint an accurate picture of the next decade, particularly when the answers are binary, but he’s pretty far along. He’s already got the major events down and is now concentrating on the small details. Last I checked, he was going for the third week of March, 2013. He’s got the initials of the next-next President of the United States. I don’t particularly care about the 2012 election, though. Or the 2008, aside from having my suspicions confirmed: America elects an old, white, religious male. Surprise!

But, anyhow, let’s skip the small stuff and focus on the important aspects of the future: in just under a year the United States will come under a widespread terrorist attack. There is good news, though, so don’t just dash off to buy a second Uzi. The terrorists are using art. Yes, art. We are under attack from art. Now, don’t start straining your unmyelinated neurons, might hurt yourself. I’ll explain everything.

Art is “an action, an object, or a collection of actions and objects created with the intention of transmitting emotions and/or ideas”. Simple definition, right? Some guy was feeling happy, wrote some symbols on a piece of paper, you looked at those symbols and felt happy: that’s art. Well, art terrorism is just that, only now it’s not happiness or sadness or whatever. No, now it’s slightly different. Here’s an example: the first known piece of terrorist art was painted onto a billboard on the side of a busy road; every person who saw the billboard had an irrational desire to kick his brother out of a car. It didn’t matter if the person didn’t have a brother, or the brother wasn’t in the car, or even if they weren’t driving, but were rather walking along the road: every person wanted to kick their brother out of a car upon seeing that particular picture. And quite a few did! A woman driving an SUV kicked her brother, who was in the passenger seat next to her, right out onto the road. Another incident occurred when two brothers were riding in the backseat of a car: one brother saw the advertisement first and attempted to kick his brother into oncoming traffic. One woman succeeded in kicking her brother out of the car, only to realize that he was the driver. Hilarity ensued.

Artistic terrorism didn’t stop there. Not even close to it. Some artistic terrorist replaced the DVD of an in-flight movie on a transatlantic flight with a DVD that passed onto the viewers a strong need to spit at others. The DVD got stuck on repeat mode and, upon arrival in London, two men and one woman were listed in critical condition as a result of extreme dehydration. Another terrorist plot was much less damaging: the walls of a conference room in a Fortune 500 company (I won’t say which one, but it rhymes with Wicrosoft) were painted a shade of yellow that is very hard to distinguish from their usual wall color and acts primarily on the subconscious level. In this case, the paint persuaded everyone present in a rather a large meeting that they were, on some level, pugs: the attendees turned around three times before sitting down, snored uncontrollably (even when wide awake) and found each other irresistibly cute and huggable.

One incident which caught my eye occurred at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An exhibition by an until-then unknown artist drew nationwide news coverage when one of the pieces, a water-color painting, resulted in over three hundred divorces over the course of a week. Patrons were often heard exclaiming something along the lines of “that’s pretty good, but― I’m leaving you, Meredith, take the house, I don’t care anymore― the foreground colors produce quite a menacing effect.” The artist was questioned by the FBI but they concluded that he was merely a “loser hippy.” The mayor of New York City invited the artist to what he referred to as his “bachelor pad” after attending the exhibition with his now-ex-wife. I doubt that this was an act of terrorism.

I saved my favorite act of terrorism for last: a programming genius in Redmond, Washington, devised a devastating attack in the form of an easy to draw scribble. This scribble imparted in the observer a feeling of extreme happiness, a desire to share this joy with the world and, having shared, to fight back against a world incapable of accepting or understanding this wonderful gift. In short, every one who saw the scribble got the urge to draw it elsewhere and then went on a spree punching strangers, all the while humming a happy tune and smiling a Cheshire grin. The scribble went on to infect Seattle and neighboring towns, but stopped soon after, for lack of a high enough population density to sustain the reaction. It also didn’t help that the rains kept washing the scribble off most publicly-accessible areas that were effected.

The Magic 8-Ball also went on to make predictions about the second coming of Jesus and me having a life. You know, maybe this thing doesn’t actually work.