The Things that Haven't Happened Yet

As a public service, here is our newly updated list of the remaining things that haven't happened yet:

African-American elected president of United States
Water found on the moon
Peace in Middle East
Joe DiMaggio's consecutive-game hit record broken
World oil supply runs out
Bin Laden captured
Saddam is hanged
Starbucks announces cutbacks
Asteroid hits populated city
Major U.S. city ruined by flood
World Trade Center demolished by terrorists
Pete Rose enters baseball Hall of Fame
A famous ex-football player who kills people
Quantum mechanics reconciled with relativity
Britney Spears photographed without underpants
Time travel becomes possible
Global computer network for sharing pornography
Adam Sandler wins Best Actor
Polar ice caps begin melting
Huge tidal wave smashes 11 countries
Australia completely submerged
Secret identity of "Deep Throat" revealed
A prescription drug to induce erections
National ID cards implemented
Sisters genetically bred to play tennis
A "man" becomes pregnant
Electric cars that actually go
Bestselling memoir that inspires millions is mostly made up
Real mummy comes to life, attacks people
A popular Al Gore movie
Ability to turn invisible
Proof of extraterrestrial life
Respected actor wins top government job in California
Phillies win World Series
A national rating system for public drinking water
Cure for cancer
Robots take over
Chinese Democracy album is released

cross posted at Huffington Post

Movie Taglines for Historic Documents

The Declaration of Independence
Coming to Save the World This Summer

Constitution of the United States
We the People are Not Alone

First Amendment
There’s Free Speech. There’s Free Assembly. But There's No Such Thing as Free Cable.

Second Amendment
He’s back in town…with a few days to kill

Fifth Amendment
Sometimes saying nothing says it all

Sixth Amendment
Their trial was speedy, their romance forever

Eight Amendment
He was cruel. He was unusual. And then things got really weird.

The Federalist Papers
An adventure 65 million years in the making.

Plessy v. Fergson
Two divided by love

The Monroe Doctrine
Ain’t no stoppin’ us now!

Gettysburg Address
Freedom never felt this good.

Woody Allen's Sleeper (Cell)

Woody Allen's Sleeper (Cell)
by Don Steinberg

FADE IN
Abrupt medium close up of Harvey, speaking directly into the camera.

HARVEY
There's an old joke. Two terrorists decide to kill an important government official. At 10 o'clock the next morning, they meet across the street from a building where the president is scheduled to have a meeting, and one of them brings a rocket propelled grenade launcher. Ten o'clock comes and goes, but no president. Then eleven o'clock. Eventually it's noon and the president still hasn't arrived. One terrorist turns to the other and says, "Gee, I hope he's okay."

I guess that's how I feel about life. You wait and wait for the glorious victory, and by the time it arrives, tsch, you just want to go home and watch the Knicks. Gladys and me, we thought we had it all figured out --

CUT TO: Harvey and Gladys are standing in their kitchen.

HARVEY
I'm really looking forward to my martyrdom, in particular the part about having relations with 72 virgins. Can you imagine what that would be like?

GLADYS (looking away)
Uh, no. Why do you think I would know about that?

HARVEY
It's the death part that has me a tad nervous. I'd be interested in a suicide attack where you could fake the suicide, collect the insurance money, and just buy a lot of really good, you know, Reuben sandwiches. Did Dr. Kevorkian call back yet?

GLADYS
I don't think you know how do to this.

HARVEY
I know better than Ned. For his suicide attack, he gave himself smallpox. He was so miserable with it, he didn't feel like going out. Look, I have to go now to the hideout. We're having a very important meeting with all the guys in the sleeper cell, and I'm the only one who knows the address of the secret Web site that contains our instructions. Me and Google.

CUT TO: Four men around a small table. Above it, by a thin wire, hangs a bare lightbulb.

OZZIE
I heard in Europe they are using palladium. It's very a sophisticated material.

HARVEY
Palladium? It's polonium. Jeesh. That stuff is…that's dangerous. I heard they slipped a tiny bit of it onto the desk of a lawyer in, in Berlin, and it mutated him. He ended up with the head of an attorney and the body of a memo.

PHILLIP (toying with a surface-to-air missile launcher)
Where does the missile shoot out of this thing?

HARVEY
Put that thing down. For God sake, do you know how to operate something like this? You have the missile pointing backwards.

PHILLIP
It looks cooler this way.

HARVEY
I'm surrounded by cretins. Terror would be just having you talk to people. Somebody please hit me on the head with a shoe.

LEONARD
You don't want me to do that. It's explosive.

HARVEY VOICE-OVER
After that we all had to go. We set up another secret meeting, and I think in the end we just enjoyed one another's company more than executing our big plans. It…it reminded me of that joke, you know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist, and he says, 'doctor, my brother thinks he's a sheep.' And the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" And the guys says, "We would. But we need the anthrax."

The Picasso Cypher

To call The Picasso Cypher another ordinary historical baseball murder thriller would be far more than a lie. This latest novel from the author of The Abraham Lincoln-Confucius Jinx and Five People You’ll Never Meet is such a fiendish feast of twisting, interwoven yarns, it is essentially like a wool blanket that is both fiendish and delicious.

In the opening pages we are confronted with a scene that seems both familiar and disjointed. It is 1939, and the Yankee baseball great Lou Gehrig is giving his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech. Gerhig, whose unbroken streak of games played earned him the nickname "Iron Mike," is being forced to retire from baseball by the disease that would some day, if all went well, bear his name.

Suddenly shots ring out. Gehrig slumps lifeless on the gravel surrounding the pitcher's mound. Pandemonium erupts. What did Gehrig know about the genetic code that later in the book will become a big deal? Who is trying to silence him?

Abruptly we flash to a laboratory where the young inventor Walt Disney is performing his famous "animation" experiments on dead animals. As he hears the chaos on his radio and reaches to turn up the volume, his hand topples a beaker of a luminous green fluid, which oozes across his desk to engulf a spider that had bitten him earlier. The spider becomes radioactive, and the bite becomes retroactive.

In a hyper-alert state, Disney grabs the Baseball Encyclopedia and begins running Gehrig’s career RBI totals through his oscilloscope. The waveform they produce on the glowing screen, when reflected in a “da Vinci device” (a mirror) spells out a genomic code. Emboldened by the finding, Disney recruits sidekick Thomas Aniston (a character resembling the real-life inventor Thomas Edison) to begin a trek to Africa, where they will hunt for the virus that may later destroy humanity. Aniston has just returned from his fateful experiment in which, flying a kite in a thunderstorm, he harnessed nature’s raging power of electricity. He set up elaborate networks to distribute electric power to businesses and homes across America, but soon turned his attention to what would become a ruinous, life-long obsession: vowing to do everything in his power to put makers of batteries out of business and to physically crush battery-operated toy rabbits.

Disney and Aniston soon plunge into the African jungle, where, using a crude satellite-based tracking device, and by listening to hooting noises, they stumble upon a village inhabited by savages. Surrounded by human skulls and bones is a man who appears to be of European descent, and there Disney utters his famous words, “Dr. Atkins, I presume.” Atkins, a former Tufts University cryptologist and author of Leadership Secrets of the Child Actors, tells them of the clandestine international religious society that is plotting to steal the gene responsible for hypertension. The sect is led by an insane bishop who can only move diagonally.

The page-turner continues like this for page after page, especially in the large-print edition, as the three men of science unite to unlock the shrouded mysteries, also recruiting a symboligist (someone who studies symbols), a chromachronologist (someone who colors clocks), and a young mute boy named Charlie, who would later star in silent comedy films.