Psychic Predictions for Vernon 2000!
by
Swami Snatchidamunny

• As everyone knows, all my predictions for Vernon 1999 came true (except for the part about giant carnivorous chickens downtown)! Now it is my pleasure to reveal the auguries for Vernon's next adventurous year:

• Because tv stations on planets throughout hundreds of solar systems depend on the Earth Stations in Vernon, alien engineers will take steps to safeguard the town against Y2K power failures. There will be no electricity anywhere in the world except Vernon in the future! This will cause many people to visit here! It will eventually become necessary to build a Great Wall of Vernon to secure the perimeter (vs. barbarian hordes). Such a wall will be built for free by cellular companies, provided the town council agrees to allow commercial towers all along the ramparts.

• Future town council elections will no longer be conducted at the polls! Instead, floating rubber ducks will be inscribed with the names of candidates and will be set adrift in the Black Creek. The first ducks to reach the finish line will bear the names of the election winners! This inexpensive and highly entertaining method of electing government officials will be widely imitated across the nation!

• Mountain Creek will cover its entire Hamburg Mountain property with a huge environmentally controlled superdome, inside which it will always be snowing! It will be renamed the Mountain Creek Winter Biosphere. Because of the Great Wall, ski resort guests will have to arrive by plane, necessitating the construction of an adjoining Mountain Creek International Airport!

• Well drillers delving miles below the crust of the earth in Barry Lakes will strike oil, making Vernon the primary source of fossil fuel for the USA! Giant oil rigs and refineries will spring up throughout what is now known as Wawayanda State Park. Mountain residents will be relocated by the government to vacant homes in other communities outside the 30 sq.mi. refinery zone.

• Records found in the attic of Warren Burgess' home will reveal that George Washington slept in every house still standing in the downtown commercial district! In a related discovery, it will be learned that all of Vernon was once a highly developed Lenni Lenape destination resort patronized by every Native American tribe in North America! These findings will trigger extensive revision of the town's Historic Preservation rules.

• An employee of the Vernon A& P will hold the prizewinning number in a $500,000,000.00 Readers Digest drawing! Will he or she quit work or leave beautiful Vernon as a result?
  The vision becomes a blur at this point.

• Scientists examining the effects of the Mobil underground oil spill downtown will accidentally discover that Methyl Tert butyl Ether is a cure for male pattern baldness! Plans for a town center design will be altered to accomodate construction of a giant pharmaceutical plant on Church St. where the new product, Spillgaine, will be manufactured!

• Even if none of these exciting predictions come true (btw I have never been wrong), Vernon will continue to be known as the home of the most brilliant, neighborly, alert and fascinating people in the world!