One that apparently isn’t true was the D-Day crossword puzzle. The story I had heard was that a week before the Normandy invasion, a British newspaper ran a crossword puzzle in which the answers included Gold, Juno, Mulberry, Omaha, Overlord, Neptune, Sword, and Utah - all of which were codewords for the upcoming invasion.
The truth was less prescient. The words listed above had appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s daily crossword puzzles, but not all in a single puzzle. They had appeared in different puzzles spread out over a period of weeks.
I’m not nearly enough of a science fiction buff to do it myself, but I think it would be a hoot to try to describe an ordinary day in some ordinary schmuck’s life in the year 2009 in 50s science fiction terms, using prescient but wrongly-named monikers like “pocket phone”, “seashell buds” and the like.
This, and the Ronald Reagan reference in All In The Family, are no big surprise. Reagan was already a nationally known conservative who was anathema to most people on the left wing, especially young adults and students, whom “Meathead” represented on the show politically. Same with Nixon, although it’s not so clear that Woody Allen was intentionally aiming for a left wing or liberal audience. Certainly a good many of his social and cultural views seem to point that way. Nixon was already reviled for expanding the war into Cambodia; Watergate just gave us a purely ethical and non-political reason to disapprove of him. He wouldn’t have had to resign from office with impeachment nipping at his heels, if all he’d done was make executive decisions in good faith that the Left happened to dislike.
U.S. “advisors” first appeared in Vietnam during the 1950s - remember the French failed following the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Eisenhower administration introduced the Domino Theory. We had combat troops there by 1965. This was just observant, not prescient.
An entry in “Topics of the Times”, A Triumph but Still a Terror, in the December 17, 1906 New York Times, worried about the prospects for a wireless telephone, asking: “How will it be when we’re told, not that somebody’s ‘on the wire,’ but that somebody’s ‘on the air,’ and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?”
In the January 3, 1910 issue of the Times, Michael Pupin was quoted as saying: “You see, we could never get away from it. What privacy would we have left? It’s bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption?”
Also, on a more humorous note, from the January, 1916 issue of The Electrical Experimenter:
Heinlein wrote Requiem in 1940. Its protagonist is Delos “D.D.” Harriman, the man responsible for the first manned lunar expedition. “Delos” is an odd name for an American industrial capitalist; Delos is the birthplace of Apollo.
One that stuck with me was Demolition Man. In the shot of the prisoners in cryo-freeze is one named Scott Peterson. Not exactly earth-shattering, but it was a bit of a minor “hey!”
In Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing, a tv movie made by HBO in 1997, the final words of the movie is the bad guy saying.
That sounds suspiciously similar to the backstory of Freezone, a John Shirley short story from 1985 in which Arab terrorists take out the American banking system with a hydrogen bomb launched in a shuttle which triggers an EMP from orbit:
“The Arab terrorist cell responsible - hardcore Islamic fundamentalists - had been composed of seven men. Seven men who crippled a nation. But America still had its enormous military spread, its electronics and medical innovators. And the war economy kept it humming. Like a man with cancer using amphetamines for a last burst of strength.”
