Well as 2004 slinks out of the door and 2005 adjusts it's tie and checks its breath, here are some predictions, in no particular order. New Years prognostications are one of life's guilty pleasures, along with New Year's resolutions and New Years embarrasing memories of having drunk too much the night before.

Firstly, and not all that surprisingly, reality tv will continue its ongoing search to find ever-lower gutters to lay down in.There are some great reality shows and some merely good ones, but most are absolutely excerable. Have you seen the promos for 'Who's your Daddy?' where some adopted girl gets confronted by a bunch of imposters pretending to be her Dad, and has to pick which one really is, for a prize? In england Channel Four is getting ready to show 'Dust to Dust', where someone bequesths their (and I swear I'm not making this up)dead body to the show and they put it outside in the wild, then film it every week as it decomposes. Yep, this is entertainment in the 21st century. The answer to the question, 'are there any limits to the lengths some people will debase and humilate themselves to be on tv?' is a resounding No. There's stuff coming that will make us feel even more like the Roman Empire in Decline than we already do.

Okay, my next prediction is that there will be a natural disaster of biblical proportions, of asian tsunami proportions,in the United States. As I alluded in my last entry, you can only poop on mother nature for so long before she poops back,and we're heading for a poop-o-rama of unprecedented size. The only thing more predictable than this is the outcry from the news media right after, along the lines of 'who knew about this beforehand?', to which the answer is, all of us did.

Next - the situation in Iraq will get worse in unknown but horribly spectacular ways. Listen up - in 1967, smart people (you know, like us) knew that Vietnam was an unwinnable quagmire that was going to claim the lives of thousands who didn't need to die. But there was no way they could have predicted the specific ways in which the situation would unravel. There were still EIGHT YEARS ahead of the Tet Offensive, My Lai, The Pentagon Papers, and the fall of Saigon. It took that long for the average mainstream american to say "hmm, this might not have been such a good idea."In fact, even up to nixon's resignation in 1974, a majority of americans supported the war in Vietnam. Feeling depressed yet? Because this war has got plenty of play in it yet. Financially, it's costing us hundreds of Billions of Dollars, money that could have been earmarked to save social security or actually improve homeland security. In terms of lives lost there's no price tag. Just a lot of pain.

In brighter news, I predict that the aforementioned news media will rediscover it's teeth and become more aggressive in its pursuit of the Bush administration. Partly this is a function of the traditional change in dynamic for 2nd term presidents - critics realize they can outlast the current occupant of the White House and look more closely at his mistakes - but also its because many in the mainstream-but-still-honorable media feel stung that they were conned into essentially endorsing a war based on utter bullshit. The New York Times, for example, which relied on inner pentagon sources for their series of
stories about WMD in Iraq, now feels so betrayed by the administration that there's a palpable vibe of payback-is--coming emanating from the Gray Lady. I expect a huge scandal to break under the Bush administration, in classic 2nd term fashion. Don't expect the mainstream media to soft pedal this one. We may finally see some worthy successors to Woodward and Bernstein emerge.

Man, this has been a depressing post. Next: my upbeat tips for best movies of 05.