Fame’s Not a Big Help When It Comes to Forecasting the Future

What happens when you ask celebrities about the future? You get Wired Diaries 2000, a compilation of comments about what’s ahead in the years to come. The following are some highlights, as featured in the January issue of Wired magazine:

* Actress Angelina Jolie: “I’m hoping that the future turns out to be more of a Native American movie than a sci-fier, something where we’ll all be riding horses and living off the land.”

* Designer Todd Oldham: “Visit Mars? Oh, yeah. Gosh, I love red.”

* Figure skater Michelle Kwan: “If I have a daughter, my gift to her . . . will definitely be SUHS--Sport Utility Hovering Skates--so she can do quintuple axels.”

* Comedian Sandra Bernhard: “Everybody has a desire to have something much more real. People making so much money and spending so much money. Those people will hit the wall. Believe me, there’s a deep longing that none of those kinds of things can fulfill.”

* Actress Janeane Garofalo: “Being tall, thin and young.”

* Disc jockey Moby: “The future smells like the Washington, D.C., subway system. New, but not too new. Clean but not too clean. The smell is 90% artificial and 10% organic. It’s like my experience recently, lying on the grass in New York City’s Battery Park--78 degrees and humid, the sound of the sailboats in the distance, New Jersey in front of me, the World Trade Center behind. I was gazing up at the trees. But the trees had been there only three weeks.”

* Actor William Shatner: “Sunglasses and hats--the ozone hole, you know.”

* Chef Julia Child: “How about fresh peas that are quicker to shell. . . . You could also have a suction gadget that would suck out the fat and not the juice in a frying pan very quickly. Or something for when you’re roasting a chicken that would be even better than a thermometer: You could pass it over the chicken and it would tell you, ‘It’s almost done, except for in the hip here!’ I think we’re going to have even better ingredients--wonderful fruits and vegetables--and I hope we get back into some good red meat.”