January 7, 2003

WHEN CRYSTAL BALLS are outlawed, only outlaws will have crystal balls.–In late December the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considered new legislation to regulate fortune-tellers and psychics. Really. The proposed law – an attempt to separate known tricksters and con artists from the professionals – would require all seers to seek an official city permit before soliciting money for divining the future. –Imagine what asking to see your fortune-teller's permit will do to the supernatural ambience at that crucial moment just before she sacrifices the fatted calf to read your future in its entrails. Besides, if the city starts certifying psychics, isn't it just asking for some disgruntled sucker to sue San Francisco when his sunny five-day forecast of burning love and bottomless bags of gold doubloons doesn't come true?

Thankfully, not all stupidity can be outlawed. Yes, it is still legal to make predictions without a license in the pages of a free weekly. Here's one for 2003.

Hating SUVs on righteous political grounds continues to gain support in the mainstream. The no-blood-for-oil renegades have been plastering "I'm Changing the Climate! Ask Me How!" bumper stickers (www.changingtheclimate.com) on the rear ends of unsuspecting SUVs. And the Detroit Project (www.ariannaonline.com/suv), a nonprofit recently launched by syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, announced that in January it will begin airing anti-SUV TV commercials that bluntly link terrorism and gas-guzzling overconsumption. In one script a driver seated in his SUV says, "I helped hijack a plane." Another chirps, "I helped bankroll suicide bombers." But Hummer drivers need not fret over such public shaming. This year an innovative oil executive will find a domestic solution to the United States' overdependence on foreign fossil fuels, a solution swimming right here in northern California's coastal waters.

While planning a family vacation to California from his desk in Houston, Vernon Shingledecker will stumble across the Web site of the Año Nuevo State Reserve, whose beaches are the winter breeding grounds for thousands of northern elephant seals. Vernon will be enchanted by the live seal Web cam, which captures the antics of the 5,000-pound alpha bulls, their harems of still-nursing females, and the blubbery baby seals fattening up for their first epic ocean migration to Alaska.

But where Californians see pinniped charm, Shingledecker will see opportunity. Why go to the trouble of drilling in the frigid Arctic National Wildlife Refuge when you can get just as much oil by harpooning a few thousand seals right here in the lower 48?

Besides, it's only the extirpation of the California grizzly bear, which would have preyed on the seals, that's allowed the bulbous-nosed creatures to move from offshore islands to mainland beaches. The oil industry will pledge to harvest only the sick, young, and aged seals, standing in for the grizzly in the great cycle of life. Vernon himself will appear in a full grizzly costume in a suite at the Westin St. Francis for the press conference announcing the impending slaughter. "Finally, an initiative the oil industry and the environmentalists can agree on," he will proclaim. "No blood for oil!"

Thousands of Bay Area schoolchildren and local adults, reared on foggy, educational field trips to the breeding grounds at Año Nuevo, won't stand by and watch their seals being sacrificed for fuel. However, ignoring seal supporters' protests and letter-writing campaigns, President George W. Bush will – surprise! – take the oil industry's side, overriding the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and federally authorizing the great seal kill in the name of tapping domestic oil resources. "Every American must make sacrifices to fight our war on terror," he'll declare. "It's our elephant seals versus their evildoers." In defiance of the federal edict, outraged Californians will offer the seals asylum on land and in water owned by the state. No matter – the oil companies will carry out their harvest in federal seas just a few miles offshore.

California won't give up. The seal travesty will convert thousands to the cause of the California secession movement, spearheaded by Working Assets' www.actforchange.com. The state Air Resources Board will stick it to the oil companies by mandating that all cars sold in California be fueled solely by hydrogen and emit nothing but water vapor by 2004. The new regulation will spur fuel cell- and hydrogen-based technological innovation in Silicon Valley, kicking California's flagging economy into a new boom.

Soon enough, Canada will heed the secessionists' calls and extend diplomatic relations to the state as a sovereign nation. And Californians won't forget that it was the sacrifice of the noble northern elephant seal that inspired them to finally revitalize the state's flagging economy and seek freedom from the cultural tyranny of the other 49 states. A fleet of nonpolluting, hydrogen-powered peace vessels will surround and protect the seals whenever they swim into treacherous, international waters on their northward migration to Alaska. And California will retire its outdated grizzly bear flag – the bears don't even live here anymore! – adopting the super weaner as the new symbol for its flag.

As all California kids will learn in fifth grade civics, a super weaner is a truly ginormous baby elephant seal, weighing in at 600 pounds. Fully double the size of its normal weaner peers, the wily super weaner attains its stunning girth by sucking down not only its own mother's milk but also an adopted mom's mammary stash. It's an elephant seal with two mommies.