Reply Hazy, Try Again

I was in a store today (who wasn’t) and I saw something that brought back some memories for me. They weren’t particularly good memories, but neither were they bad ones, I would say that they were more ambivalent than anything else. It was one of those “Magic Eight Ball” things.

 

You know the Magic Eight Ball; it looks sort of like an oversized eight ball from the game “eight ball” which is played on a pool table. You take the eight ball in your hand, ask a question, shake it up and turn it over and a “fortune” or prediction will rise to a window on the bottom. It will say “YES”, “NO”, “MAYBE” or “TIME WILL TELL”. There are twenty possible answers in the eight ball which are

The 20 answers inside a Magic 8 Ball are:

● It is certain                                      ● It is decidedly so

● Without a doubt                               ● Yes – definitely

● You may rely on it                            ● As I see it, yes

● Most likely                                       ● Outlook good

● Yes                                                 ● Signs point to yes

● Reply hazy, try again                        ● Ask again later

● Better not tell you now                      ● Cannot predict now

● Concentrate and ask again                ● Don't count on it

● My reply is no                                  ● My sources say no

● Outlook not so good                         ● Very doubtful

Mostly it is incorrect, but the odd time if the stars line up and you have asked the right question, it will give you the answer that you want to hear. Often it would take ten or twenty tries to get the exact answer to your question. I don’t know how, but the ball would break eventually and stop giving any kind of answers for me. I guess that was an answer if I had only seen it as such.

 

There are other ways to make predictions that are at least as good. I like the “she loves you: she loves you not” as you rip the petals from a flower. I would never pick a buttercup which had five petals; I would always go for the flower with thirty or forty petals, so that fate could actually take a hand in the answer. Speaking of buttercups, it is said that if when you hold a buttercup under your chin it becomes yellow, it means you like butter. Well, who the hell doesn’t like butter? What’s not to like? I tried to be romantic once and held a buttercup under the chin of my girlfriend and said “If your chin turns yellow, it means that you like the guy holding the buttercup.” I failed to realize that she couldn’t see the yellow and would have had to take my word for it. Even back then I was known to be a little fast and loose with the truth, so she didn’t believe me.

 

My favourite way to tap into the cosmos is to ask a question and then open a book at random. It is said that the first sentence that you see will be the answer to your question. Sometimes you have to think about it for a while. Of course, it is best to use the “Bible” rather than the “Harry Potter”, but I suppose you can get truth from almost anywhere. I thought that it would be fun to see if the “Bible” would help me to end the blog tonight, so I flipped it open at random and this is the first line I saw.

“I have slain them with the words of my mouth; and thy judgements are as the light that goeth forth.”

It just doesn’t get clearer than that, unless it’s ● Reply hazy, try again