My Predictions for 2017

I Can’t Do Worse Than Last Year

OK, 2016 didn’t turn out like I thought it would. You don’t have to rub it in. I admit I screwed up, but I take solace in the fact that a lot of other people were wrong about a lot of things this year. Sure, slashed sleeves did not make a comeback, Disney did not announce the development of a Star Wars retirement community, and Amy Winehouse did not rise from the grave to release a cover album of Carpenter hits as I predicted, but… but… but… Trump won the presidency, the Cubs won the World Series, and a live action TV version of Archie Comics was launched, so, give me a break, 2016 was a year that even the Pythia couldn’t see coming.

Not wanting to appear obstinate, I’m going to change my methods. Traditionally, I divine the future by cutting open four all-beef kosher hot dogs and reading their entrails. Then I eat them. During the nap afterwards, I am often visited by the spirit hot dog (weisswurst) who tells me about the upcoming year. That method has proven ineffective, so this year, for 2017, I decided that I would “count crows”. I learned about counting crows from Tom Mitchell’s great article on crows:

Genius in the Trees: What is it about Crows?

Over the past few weeks I have seen 137 crows in my yard. They may be the same five or six, I’m not sure, then I divided by some fraction number of… something, something, something… math is not my bag… then I consulted my “Encyclopedia of Crow Counting” book and came up with the following prognostications for 2017.

1. Since Hilary can’t grow a beard now that her life is over, I predict she starts to wear short skirts and says “Time for bad Hilary to have her day.” She divorces Bubba, gets a job at Goldman Sachs, starts snorting coke off the asses of male strippers, and shorts the shit out of the American stock market just as it goes kaflooey because of the U.S. invasion of the Philippines. She makes so much money that by the end of 2017 Trump says he would appoint her to the Fed or as Treasury Secretary, to which she replies: “Go fuck yourself. My secretary days are over.”
2. The New England Patriots will win the Superbowl. Tom Brady will be the MVP, but their win will betray the fact that Bill Belichick is a Sith and has drawn Tom Brady to the dark side. Brady, having sustained a final concussion which we all understand is the end of his football career, will renounce Belichick and Donald Trump on his football “deathbed” (sprawled out in the red zone surrounded by people holding sports tape). He will admit his football sins, then go on to star in a TV show called the “All New Brady Bunch” where he lives in a tree house with super cute child refugees from Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.
3. Dunkin’ Donuts will unveil a “cheese donut” that is like a sugar-infested, cakey crab rangoon. Served even moderately warm, these donuts will squirt out sweet, white, creamcheesey goo that will be different colors in different seasons. Served cold, or left-over, the center will solidify, making them like cake covered mozzarella sticks.
4. Drake will release a song that samples Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” and for a while everyone will be like “I love Miriam Makeba, is she still alive?”, before getting totally sick of hearing the Pata Pata/Drake song.
5. The first “breakthrough” VR application will be an experience called “Elvis in Hawaii” where you can walk around on the stage or in the audience during Elvis’s 1973 Aloha concert. You can even choose to be the handkerchief he uses to wipe his sweaty forehead during the climatic rendition of “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.”
6. Justin Bieber will grow a big, long, blond “weird beard” that effectively kills the hipster beard phenomenon.
7. Westworld season 2 won’t be about Samurai hosts, tea ceremonies, and repeated close-up shots of seppuku. It will take place on ships of the line during the great age of sail, where all the hosts are mutinous sailors and people pay a lot of money to see if they can keep control of a ship with nothing but the Royal Navy’s Articles of War and the lash. Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of nudity and sex, just no women.
8. Cleveland will make a bid to move the University of Alabama’s football program to their city. At first, everyone will be like “what?”, but then they will realize the sense of it. All of the ‘bama football players will be excited about getting paid, and Alabama fans will be happy that they no longer have to pay for an SEC television package to watch Alabama blowout USC (52–6), Kent State (48–0), and Mississippi State (51–3).
9. We will have the first computer virus pandemic. It will be like the Black Death of technology… a third of the computer population bricked, leading to genuine Luddite “reform movements” like the “Old Order LiveJournalists” who condemn the rest of social media as “immodest” and only blog among their own, and the MacOS “Jansenists” who re-install their system software every 30 days in an ongoing effort to maintain a “clean box”.
10. Everyone will abandon Facebook after they discover that the only person really reading what they post is their aunt.