Predictions for 2014

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.”

 - Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Well, I predicted some bad shit for 2013 and was, sadly, wrong about the spontaneous combustion of over-tattood people and the resulting loss of innocent bystanders lives. Of course, I mean I’m sad that my prescience was so misplaced. I suppose the up-side is that people didn’t combust and explode.

I was better at some of my other predictions: in 2013 the heterosexual population of America didn’t succumb to The Gay Flu, and traditional marriage survived.  Whew, eh?

So although the accuracy of my predictions is not precisely inversely proportional to my dwindling patience and cognitive functions, it was less than 50-50 last year. But what the hell, I might as well go ahead and predict some stuff for 2014.

1.     French will continue to be the primary language spoken by people from France.

2.     Corporate banks will continue to financially rape and pillage besieged Americans without fear from regulators, prosecutors, or the whimpering whispers of the atrophied individual consciences of their board members.

3.     The rich will continue to get richer.

4.     No one will invent a perpetual motion energy generation machine, an effective cold remedy, or a soupspoon with a built-in thermometer that will beep softly if the soup is too hot.

5.     No one will come up with the answer to the universal question “what could possibly go wrong?” (Although I predict the next-best answer will continue to be, “Nothing too bad surely.”)

6.     No one will discover a new color in the visible light spectrum. In the unlikely event that this prediction is wrong, the new color will positively not be named “grumble”.

7.     An asteroid will not strike earth causing nuclear winter and killing off homo sapiens to make room for the rise of the cockroach evolution. At least this year.

8.     The android Dick Clark will not be perfected in time for New Year’s Eve 2014 and we’ll either have to go to bed early or get drunk enough to enjoy watching the continued decline of one-time-journalist Anderson Cooper.

That was the easy stuff. Now for the more daring predictions for which I’ve become a legend in my own blog.

1.     Strange moth-winged creatures will appear in Tierra Del Fuego, and by the end of 2014 will have conquered South America as far north as Rio De Janeiro.  They will eat the brains of humans shorter than 5 feet and leave taller people alone.

2.     South Americans will evolve into a taller species than humans on other continents and will never, ever adopt the metric system. Because of, you know, the 5 foot tall thing.

3.     Bright LED lights placed at the Southern edge of the Panama Canal and facing south will both attract and deter the mothmen from migrating further north. They will surround the southern border of the Canal flapping their stupid moth wings in frustration. Sadly this lesson will be earned by the sacrifice of millions of short South Americans who will try to deter mothmen with incandescent bulbs and will not survive.

4.     Sustainable LED lighting will become all the rage in North America and we will save hella energy by replacing all those old inefficient lightbulbs. So, silver lining there.

5.     America, bread-basket to the world, will become gluten-free almost over night due to the emergence of a new pest: the wheat boll weevil that destroyes the entire Archers-Daniels-Midland GMO wheat monoculture that will have replaced all the other grain crops produced in the USA. China will win the 2014 “____-basket-to-the world championship” for rice.

6.     Number One on the list of reasons to go to war will continue to be religion, beating out plague, pestilence, invading mothmen, and all other causes combined. The God of Peace will continue to have the last laugh on his pitiful creatures.