‘The Oracle’ is the nickname given to the blog Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups written in 2012 by Patricia Swiss and Nancy Nataglia. It ran from September 2012 to December 2017, updating bi-weekly. The content of The Oracle was a melange of satirical postings on topics including news from the future, celebrity gossip and a famous spread on 50 incidents of undiscovered buried treasure. The Oracle became noteworthy when one of its posts describing the death of environmentalist Sean Morris became one of the top three search results a few hours after Morris’s actual death on October 9, 2030. Many of the details in the fictitious post mirrored details from police and coroner’s reports.
The Oracle also predicted the invention of toe ball, vulcanized drum sets, and the destruction of the Hallmark Greeting Card corporate headquarters in Kansas City, MO by a meteor.
Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups ceased updating after co-author Nataglia died in a car accident in 2017. She never lived to see any of the postings take on prognostic significance.
Swiss went on to write for Saturday Night Live and a hit television show called The Barracks. She also published a slim volume of poetry in 2039 called Figs: A cycle of poetry on child rearing. As of this re-issuing of World Glossary in 2041, none of Swiss’s later writings predicted events in the future whereas 17% of the posting from Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups describe, in detail, events that have happened in the relative-future.
Meaning and Speculation
Reaction to The Oracle has been vociferous. This is a guide to some of the more popular theories.
Literary Cryptology: A coterie of Literary Cryptologists at Cornell University have published on the idea that Nataglia and Swiss did, in fact, predict the future. They hypothesize that this was only possible for them as a team and Nataglia’s death ended their powers of prediction.
Nuclear Physics, Nano-Psychology and Izzle-Accusation Theory: Prominent individuals from each of these three fields have expressed belief that Nancy Nataglia was influenced by izzles. This presupposes the notion that izzles create the future or know the future. Further discussion of izzle knowledge is treated in my book, Interpreting and Interpolating Izzles published by Pelican-Sweeney.
Visionary Prairie Dog: Worshipers of the Visionary Prairie Dog are perhaps the single most opinionated group on the subject of The Oracle because of its implicit rivalry with the VPD Twitter Feed. They are summarized as follows:
1. The Oracle was actually a node of trans-temporal backwash, and not written by the two women at all.
2. The Oracle was written in the future but was programmed to update in the past.
3. Nancy Nataglia was a time traveler visiting Swiss from the future.
Artificial Intelligence and other Skeptic luminaries: Skeptics and members of the A.I. Collective claim that the close resemblance between these postings and real life events is pure coincidence. Alan Rickman, a leading Skeptic writer, said of the The Oracle “[It] is irrefutable proof that when it comes to monkey-and-typewriting technology, bloggers of the 21st century were peerless innovators.”