I like these Alt Predictions for 2007, especially this:

President Bush finally manages to raise his approval ratings by recording a video of himself lip-syncing to “Barbie Girl” in makeup and a halter top with two oranges stuffed into the bust, and releasing the video onto the web. While his handling of the war in Iraq remains unpopular, his video is given four and a half stars and praised as “wicked funny,” “so dam hilarious” and “LOLOLOLOLOL.”

And this:

The consumer launch of Windows Vista does not go as well as planned. A cult forms within Microsoft, meeting secretly in the catacombs beneath the Redmond campus. The cult is devoted to a mysterious text message that declares Bill Gates the Once and Future CEO and prophesies that Gates will return in Microsoft’s time of greatest need, delivering stock options to the faithful, smiting the apostate, and possibly even coming up with a decent MP3 player.

Amazon.com’s Best of 2006. Hottest selling products in a range of categories. Intriguing to see that in “Health and Personal Care” Pampers Cruisers (various sizes) come top!

Hmmm… This is interesting.

Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.

Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?

Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung’s part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion.

What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.

A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife.”

“By any reasonable standard of proof, Sigmund Freud and his wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had a liaison,” wrote Franz Maciejewski, a sociologist formerly at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in psychoanalysis, who tracked down the record in August.

Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.

The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called “the Minna matter,” to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.

“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”

Quite so. But interesting nonetheless. Wonder what Woody Allen makes of it.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.