Nobody has any quips about the future because nobody has been there, except for Jeff Goldblum. And the only thing he was able to prophesy was that he’d make a hell of a lot more money in cinematic ventures where he didn’t have a proboscis and antennae appendaged to his cranial structure.

The businessman from The Graduate was unswervingly convinced that plastics would make a good future of young Dustin Hoffman. But it turned out that the only future Hoffman had involved getting hitched in that mondo crystalline chapel, which not-so-reliable sources inform me resides in La Verne. So the future is with the Leopards, I suppose. They do have that old-time ecclesiastical feel going on over there, just a few clicks west on Bonita past the Claremont Police force, and Jesus will come back with a vengeance whether there’s a Messiah show (surely more spectacular than whatever Patrick Resing’s favorite animal-training tandem, Seigfried and Roy, have planned) or not.

The Claremont constabulary is mentioned only because the future doesn’t necessarily work progressively forward, chronologically-speaking. Daryl Gates is sitting in 1989, for instance.

The future of the media is novel, however. The future of the media is Eli Hastings, apparently. Now, I’ve never met this individual, and I’m sure that goes for a vast majority of the Claremont Colleges’ undergraduate populace.

But lately, it seems you can’t digest a paper pulp-product based print media source without stumbling across this guy’s moniker. Sure, sure, you say, but the pundits were all saying the same thing about Linda Tripp, right? Yes, of course, but for one thing, Linda Tripp wasn’t...how to phrase this delicately...very photogenic. I don’t think they like to contrive media phenomena out of individuals who frankly look like the love child of Madeline Albright and Willard Scott. Now I know that Eli Hastings has to be more ready for prime-time than Linda Tripp.

The Eli Hastings mystique, and his apocryphal life-narrative, proceed to be cultivated, geometrically it seems, even as this article is being written. First off, this persona was allegedly spotted in Seattle. Now we all know perfectly well that there’s absolutely no plausible rationale for a Claremont Colleges student being off campus in between late August and late December, what with Aramark serving a nice, bloody Delmonico every night. The only conclusion to draw from the data, then, is that Eli Hastings has accrued to his aura an Elvis-like, rather cultish following. When do we get to see residual imprints of Mr. Hastings’ silhouette, etched in the custard pie quietly molding in the refrigerator that belongs to some old widower quietly residing in, say, Tupelo, Mississippi? I’ve always like the pert and perky inflection of that town’s name, for some reason.

Okay. They put me up to this. I’m sure Eli Hastings is a perfectly nice young man. I bet he filled out his Selective Service card without any prior governmental coercion. Or something along those lines, anyway.

I guess jealousy is just an ugly emotion–I mean, I’m still waiting to get discovered by the Claremont Courier, although I hear that the debates over which people’s names they’re going to insert in their lead story are legendary.

If Mr. Hastings pulls off some sort of Woodward and Bernstein journalistic coup, just because he happened to see something going on outside the Starbucks which they don’t have depicted on one of their nice corporate murals, then I will be envious. The only thing I got to see on my trip to Seattle was a poignant, vista-intensive stretch of Interstate 5, as it wended its way through the bucolic suburb of Renton like something out of a Washington Irving short story on the Hudson Valley.

So parley your exposure while you can, Mr. Hastings. Exploitation doesn’t come easily or fortuitously out here in the dusty, parched expanses of the Inland Empire, about as far North as one can get from Subcommandante Marcos while still residing in a predominantly Hispanic locale. Just ask the Inland Emperors themselves–they’ve been waiting to get their Funtime Fawty Figurines trademarked, syndicated, and franchised for what seems like days on end.