COLUMN: Not the 2009 I had in mind

As my regular readers know, every January I like to look back on my annual predictions from a year ago to see whether my keen journalistic insight had served me well in that exercise. And yes, I for some reason insist on continuing to use the word “keen,” despite all the evidence to the contrary.

So let’s see what I had predicted about 2009:

1)“The economy will come roaring back as the stimulus plan creates millions of new jobs and Wall Street bankers embrace sensible new practices.” Um … I may have been a year early on that. Other things I said would come roaring back: Saturns, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the band Kiss and rotary phones.

2) “Bizarre outfits, about a dozen different wigs and thumping dance beats will spell success for the one and only Taylor Hicks.” I was close: It turns out that formula was actually the ticket to the top for Lady Gaga, not Hicks, who opted to stick with his tried-and-true “Huey Lewis on Ritalin” image and sold only 37,000 albums. I was closer on my prediction about Kanye West, who I said would attack Taylor Swift with a Super Squirter and be wrestled to the ground by Beyonce and Bruce Hornsby.

3) “Couple of the Year will no doubt be Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin, with proud mom-in-law Sarah embracing Levi as a shining example of someone who lives up to his responsibilities.” Not quite, although Sarah Palin did wind up wanting to embrace Johnston in a windpipe-crushing chokehold. I did predict accurately that her book would be full of incomplete sentences, but that’s sort of a gimme.

4) “Teenagers will use their ubiquitous cell phones to text thoughtful, pithy poems, resulting in the creative resurgence of the haiku.” Replace “poems” with “naked pictures of themselves” and “haiku” with “homemade stag film” and I was dead on.

5) “In a remarkable show of bipartisanship, President Obama’s health-care proposal will sail through Congress without a single Republican accusing him of trying to murder old people.” Don’t know how I didn’t see that one coming.

6) “No dowdy, middle-aged singers with funny hair will score a hit record.” Darn you, Susan Boyle — I thought I was pretty safe with this one, unless Rod Stewart had another comeback. But I was right when I predicted this would be the year of Michael Jackson’s big career resurgence. Well, sort of half-right.

7) “Wholesome family man Tiger Woods will wind up on the cover of ‘Faithful Husband’ magazine.” I was way off here — turns out there is no such magazine. But I do hear Tiger is slated to share the cover of next month’s “Cheating Horndog,” along with David Letterman, John Edwards and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, if anyone can find him.

8) “Health experts will step up efforts to encourage women to get more frequent mammograms, catching and curing thousands of incidents of breast cancer.” OK, so they did exactly the opposite — turns out they’d prefer if women just asked the screeners at the full-body airport scanners if they see anything unusual. In my other health predictions, I was also wrong when I said that most of the human population would be annihilated by swine flu, that a zombie plague would sweep the planet and that the world would end in an orgy of computer-generated special effects and John Cusack.

9) “Jason Bay will ink a deal to play with the Red Sox until the end of time.” In fairness, this one came from my 8-year-old son, whose undying devotion Jason sold out for an extra $6 million and a fifth-year option, plus his eternal soul. I was also wrong when I predicted that Tom and Gisele would have a baby and name it “Eli Manning Brady.”

10) “President Obama will be universally hailed for the stunning success of the stimulus plan, the health-care reform initiative, and the removal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.” Er … I meant to say that he would get a dog.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

2009: The year that wasn't

Revisiting the top stories from (fake) 2009. (For the full versions of these stories and more daily news satire, visit CAP News.)

February: Report — Most teens can’t recognize a newspaper

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. (CAP) — A new study out of the Poynter Institute shows that more than 80 percent of teenagers don’t recognize a newspaper even when one is placed directly in front of them.

Presented with a series of publications and periodicals, most of the 300 subjects between the ages of 13 and 17 could identify comic books, videogame instruction manuals and magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Cosmo. But shown a newspaper, the majority said they’d never seen one before and could not identify its purpose.

“Dude, I know that looks familiar,” said participant Josh Zwybeck, 16, when shown a copy of the Orlando Sentinel. “I think I saw a homeless guy in the park sleeping under one.”

“Some of the participants were even a little frightened by them,” said the Poynter Institute’s Dick Edmunton, who noted that several of the teenage girls “freaked out” and had to be calmed down when the ink came off on their hands.

Of the 20 percent who could identify the publication specifically as a “newspaper,” the majority said they had seen one in a movie or on a television show, such as the ’70s-set police drama “Life on Mars.”

“That’s how people would download their news back then,” said Carla Fredricks, 15. “Or, you know, however it got to them.”

One positive finding from the report, though, is that when shown a newspaper and explained what it was for, many of the teenagers thought it was a “pretty cool” idea.

“It would be kind of neat having all those stories and things together in one place, so you could carry it around and stuff,” said Luke Bertinelli, 16. “Plus, I’m pretty sure you could roll a joint with it if you really needed to.”

April: Goldman Sachs accused of unregulated baby trading

NEW YORK (CAP) — A new report out of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) suggests that investment firm Goldman Sachs has been taking advantage of loopholes in trading regulations to invest heavily in the future sale of babies, primarily in Third World and African nations.

“By directing investors toward the baby futures market, they’re basically betting that the price of babies will go up dramatically in the coming months,” explained CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler.

Asked whether this could possibly be legal, Gensler responded, “Well, it’s not technically illegal, if that’s what you mean.

“But it certainly doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do,” he added.

Child advocates agree, saying that investing in the buying and selling of babies is “inappropriate and immoral.”

“With its actions, Goldman Sachs is tacitly condoning the sale of babies to the highest bidder,” said Emma Rodstein, president of Babies Without Borders (BWOB), at a press conference attended by a CAP News reporter and one intern from Babytalk magazine, who appeared to be there for the free vegan beet cubes.

Goldman Sachs officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but one executive said off the record that the corporation has done nothing wrong. “We are investing in baby futures, so really these are just paper babies we’re talking about,” he said. “What could possibly be bad about that?”

He then offered to help invest the CAP News reporter’s entire retirement fund in the burgeoning baby market. “You can trust me,” he said.

[Read the rest at North Shore Sunday.]