12.27.09
In premonitium
by Jon Worley
It's the end of the year (and the decade, if you're one of those math freaks), and so it's time for idiots like me to predict what will happen in the year twenty-ten.
By the way, that is my one and only real prediction. By the end of the year, the approved term will be "twenty-ten" and not "two thousand ten." Just a guess.
As for my nonsensical predictions, there's a time-worn template: pick an event in the last year, give it a funny tweak and send it out into the world.
Here's how it works:
The biggest stories in sports last year were performance-enhancing drugs and Tiger's Woods's marriage-depleting activities. So, in the year twenty-ten, a famous athlete with a clean-cut reputation will bite the dust after ingesting the deadly combination of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and Enzyte--all for the benefit of "enhancing" an extra-marital affair or few. The lucky bastard? Peyton Manning.
Now that you know how this works, you can plug almost anything into it. For example:
Brian Williams decides that the evening news is simply not nearly "30 Rock" enough for him. He leverages a move to "Today," just before recently-purchased NBC changes the name of the company to Comcast Crap Net.
The birthers finally give up the ghost and admit that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in Hawai'i. Less than a day later comes the revelation that the state's admission to the nation is fraudulent. It seems President Eisenhower never actually signed the act of Congress that authorized Hawai'i's statehood. So once again, it turns out that the Prez isn't a real American. In order to keep the flag at fifty stars, the District of Columbia offers to take Hawai'i's slot. Republicans balk; Sen. Mitch McConnell leads the charge to deny D.C.'s bid by saying, "A territory that allows gay marriage will be admitted over my dead straight body--or my straight dead body. Whatever."
Radical liberal operatives infiltrate local Chambers of Commerce and videotape "administrators" giving advice to prospective massage parlor owners. "Anyone with the chamber gets a discount, right?" one clean-cut young man behind a Chamber desk asks.
Dick Cheney breaks his back while opening a candy box. Like Jesse Helms a few years back, he "loses all feeling below the waist." Lynne Cheney immediately embarks on a five-year tour of the south of France.
Ellen DeGeneres comes clean and admits that she has been sexually harassing male members of the crew of her show. "I 'became' a lesbian just to advance my career. It was so much easier to make it in Hollywood fifteen years ago if you were gay. Now I'm free to come out of the closet and be myself."
The #1 song of the year will be "Tooty in My Pooty," a semi-scatological rap "sung" by three-year-old Serge Gainesbooger (not his real name). The iTunes sensation sells fifty million copies, and the video on YouTube has so many downloads that it melts down the counter. Two months later, Serge's followup ("Hurlin' in the Wind") falls flat, exciting only a handful of Exorcist fans.
Major newspaper chains ensure eternal profitability by diversifying and purchasing Internet porn sites. Almost instantly, www.nytimes.hustler.com becomes the #1 most-visited site in the world.
A-B InBev purchases SAB-Miller and Molson Coors. One of their "merged" brews, Lite Beer from Keystone Busch, is declared the worst beer on the planet by the Delta Tau Chi national office.
So play along at home. Make your own predictions and share them with friends. The really funny part is when one of them actually comes true.
A few years ago, Jon Worley predicted a Grammy sweep for the Flaming Lips. Strangely enough, the band did pick up a trophy a couple months later.
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