A very mixed month for Old Moore’s predictions

‘Rats in the news!’

This was the excitable promise of one of Old Moore's Irish predictions for August. What is it with Irish bands using "rats" in their name? We had the Boomtown Rats a long time ago (pity nobody thought of reusing that name to describe our post-boom bankers). Now we have a band called the Bionic Rats, a ska and reggae band, who performed "an exclusive acoustic track" on The Imelda May Show this month. I guess this was news if you are a Bionic Rats fan.

‘Sinéad O’Connor’s life in the news again’

O'Connor's life and times have been in the news a lot this summer; in July, she pulled out of all her remaining concerts for the year due to an unspecified illness of her son. Then in late August, she posted on her Facebook page that she was due to have a hysterectomy. "Hysterectomy Wednesday thank f***. Ovaries and uterus. My daughter says my vagina will be like a famine road," she wrote. She added, "(PS can everyone considering bitching about what I post on my page kindly f*** off and get their own page)."

‘Record heatwaves everywhere’

Sigh. They sure weren’t here in Ireland, where the “summer” was more like the experience of being in a carwash.

‘Market will have corrections all around’

That would possibly be the so-called Great Fall of China, which had financial markets around the world in a tizzy in late August. Even someone with the smallest amount of knowledge of how markets work (that would be me) got the message that bad things were happening.

‘More exploration of the moon for mining potential’

Early in August, before the tabloids had such fun with the Great Fall of China, that country expressed an interest in mining helium from the moon. Minds more scientific than mine apparently know that something called helium-3 could possibly be harvested to service energy consumption demands back here on Earth. It didn’t seem to gain much momentum, though.

‘Breakthrough in treating Alzheimer’s’

Some 47 million people around the world have this cruel disease, and there is always huge interest in the latest research on it. This month, details of a paper published in the medical journal JAMA Neurology revealed that "an experimental gene therapy reduces the rate at which nerve cells in the brains of Alzheimer's patients degenerate and die. Targeted injection of nerve growth factor into the patients' brains rescued dying cells around the injection site, enhancing their growth and inducing them to sprout new fibres. In some cases, these beneficial effects persisted for 10 years after the therapy was first delivered." We can only hope that such progress continues.

‘Launch of Titanic II. It will have financial troubles from the start’

Well now. Back in 2012, a bonkers Australian billionaire with more millions than sense, Clive Palmer, announced that he was going to build a replica of the Titanic. It would be built in China and was expected to launch next year. Titanic II did not launch in August, and nor will it launch next year. Apparently no work has yet started at all on the would-be ship. Most likely those financial troubles really did begin right from the start.

‘Many food outlets will give you the ability via apps to pre-order and have your item ready to pick up’

I don’t know how old Old Moore is, but I am old enough to have been through all this before, in a slightly different form. It’s called ordering takeout via the phone. Remember that? In fact, many of us still do it. So I find it a little hard to get massively excited about the prospect of ordering yet another service via non-human interaction. It’s definitely happening, though. Pre-ordering food via apps is apparently one of the hottest tech trends of the year, with everyone scampering for a slice of the pie.

MELTDOWNS AND MALALA SEPTEMBER PREDICTIONS

Ireland

• Irish birth rate in the news.
• A drama for the Aran Islands.
• Ireland has legal problems with the EU.
• Ireland and the US butt heads over Irish tax laws.
• Where's Fungi? He's in the news.
• Property prices will have a serious wobble.

World

• Flying cars will be more visible.
• Luxury brands do really well as the rich get richer.
• Fertility will be in the news. Young women will be encouraged to freeze their eggs as the process becomes easier and cheaper. There will also be devices that women can wear that will show they are ovulating.
• Malala will allude to the fact that after her schooling, she will run for election.
• Jennifer Aniston wants a baby.
• A reality show about the moon makes news.
• Euro zone has debt crisis.
• Global financial meltdown is not over yet. In fact, there is a danger of things getting worse.
• Lots of news stories about new ways to grow food to feed the surging population.
• Meat prices become very high, it is now a luxury food.