Every Book Holds Your Future

Antique shops are like free museums of the lovely and old. I wonder what sort of things that seems ordinary to s now will be found on the dusty shelves of antique shops in the future? Now a days, old computers from the 90's look dingy, clunky and a bit sad.  But maybe in the future they will be utterly charming. Or maybe we will find flip phone cell phones at antique shops and we will think of them as elegant relics of the past. The last time I was at an antique shop there were a bunch of old rotary phones. They seemed beautiful, although I bet at one point they seemed pathetic compared to cool wireless phones!

Here are some photos I took when I went to an antique shop in a quaint little town in the Washington countryside.

This phrenology head interesting! Probably an old timey doctor used it in an attempt to better understand his patients, no realizing all of his examining of his patients heads would provide no illumination into their true personality. I use to think phrenology was like palmistry, except instead of using lines in a palm to predict the future, people used bumps in your head to predict the future. There are some pretty strange practices of telling the future that people believe, so it didn't seem too outlandish people would believe this. 

One strange method of fortune telling is called scarpomancy which is the practice of reading the future by looking at a person's old shoes. If I looked at my old shoes, I could predict that in my future, I will procrastinate to by a new pair of shoes until there is a hole large enough in my current shoes to make them almost unwearable. 

Another method of fortune telling that seems more interesting is called stichomancy. This is when you open a random book and read the first passage. The first passage is suppose to relate to your future some how. I am going to give it a try!

I went to my bookcase and chose the book '1001 Questions Answered About the Seashore' by N.J. Berril and Jacquelyn Berrill. I won't quote the entire first passage, but here is the first line "Seashores belong to the sea and almost all life that may be seen on them, apart from birds and humans, comes from the sea." I don't know what this means about my future, but the line does sound rather poetic when considered as some sort of mysterious clue to the future. 

(Source: I learned about the two fortune telling methods mentioned above from the website Neatorama and this list on bizzare fortune telling methods.)