In the future, everyone will have Personal Awareness Recorders. These, like the so-called "black boxes" on airplanes, will record all sorts of telemetry. But rather than flight dynamics, the PAR will record your health, blood-sugar, and stress-level, which it will then overlay over a real-time recording of everything you see, say, or hear. So when you want to recall exactly what you said in a conversation, you can just replay it. This will open a huge industry in PAR obfuscation (to prevent the recordings from being used against you in court or elsewhere), PAR copying (so you can relive the conversation from their perspective), PAR blanking (so you can forget things), and, of course, PAR Pornography. Safety programs will be implemented to prevent people from getting addicted to their own pasts, or clogging themselves with what will come to be known as "dejavusis" (replaying a scene from the past will re-record it, since you're experiencing it again! Doing it too many times could get you trapped).

Clothing will no longer be sold. Corporations will freely issue individually tailored clothing, which will be made with SmartCloth, a substance that will change colors under nanocomputer control. In order to finance this free clothing, companies will continuously broadcast advertising that will blend with the design of the clothes. Advanced statistical alogorithms will match the ads to what you're most likely to be doing at any given time (breakfast cereal ads will play from 6AM-8AM, for example).

The Government, in order to be "more efficient," will incorporate. Citizens will lose their rights unless they become stock holders (elections will be held only at share-holder meetings). Through a quirk of corporate infighting, the Supreme Court will declare the Government Corp a monopoly, and force it to be broken up into a collection of separate companies. The Pentagon will IPO on NASDAQ, setting new records for first-day trading. Strangely, the CIA will be listed on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange.

(If you're interested in the future of the internet, please help me with an experiment and click on http://www.fogbound.net:8080. Thanks!

Phone in comments to 310.210.3347, meil 'em to the postal address skillfully concealed elsewhere on this page, or email 'em to samuelg@themeander.org

• "The Lama" by Ogden Nash
• "Female Worker found Flash-Frozen" by Gail Collins
• "Glory Goes and Gets Some" by Emily Carter from The Best American Short Stories of 1998
• "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot
• "why some people be mad at me sometimes" by Lucille Clifton from Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep by Michael Harper & Anthony Walton
• "Observations about the Millennium & Internet" by Andy Steinberg
• "This is just to say" by William Carlos Williams
• "A Few Words about Balls" by John Berendt

All misspellings, misattributions, omissions or errors in naming should be construed as Acts of God, directed through yours truly (for reasons at which we as mere mortals may only guess...)