Even for those of us in the Optimist-American community, it's hard to come up with cheerful predictions for '09. You end up sounding like an irrepressible red-tressed moppet from a '70s musical. The sun'll come out, tomorrow! Yes, Annie, it will, but the simple facts of celestial mechanics don't change the fact that it's 1933, and the economy will remain flat until it's revived by war with a genocidal madman. Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I Love Ya! Tomorrow! You're only a day away! That's the problem. Maybe tomorrow could just hold off for a while and let us absorb all the bad news from today? Unless tomorrow has something really good up its sleeve, like:
Aliens land in Loring Park, give us a source of endless cheap energy, the cures to all diseases and reveal to a stunned, hushed global audience that the writers of "Lost" really do know where the plot is headed.
But it's best not to plan on alien intervention, attractive as Loring Park may be from orbit. More likely we will wince and groan through much of '09, and then things will pick up, and we will have gained Depression-strength wisdom. We will all save string and rubber bands and every single plastic margarine tub, which seems to have been the Depression's most significant impact on every baby boomer's mother. Then again, we're different from our parents, and that's probably why we won't have a Great Depression. We haven't the attention span for one. Doesn't mean we couldn't have an awesome one, though.
Anyway. There will be good news. You just have to look for it.
1. No local banks will fail, although one will attempt to discourage withdrawals by rigging its ATMs to deliver debilitating, bladder-loosening electrical shocks when you attempt to get your money out.
2. The Minneapolis WiFi system will be perfected. They've been having problems; the signal has been defeated by nature's most ancient weapon: leaves. It's possible that any kind of weather could affect your connection; if the wind was intense, it could blow your neighbor's bits into your aerial, and all of a sudden you're looking at flexible-teen-penguins.com instead of Startribune.com, and things get uncomfortable at the next block party.
The Wi-Fi will be completed right around the time SuperWifi is announced, which is capable of drilling through squirrels and giving them intense 3D hallucinations while it does so, and can stream an entire high-def movie in 17 seconds. Unless it's foggy. Then everyone in your movie bumps into furniture.
3. The recount will end. Oh, it may end in litigation, followed by a do-over, followed by another close election, followed by a recount that's ruined when some prankster stands up at the Canvassing Board meeting and yells random numbers, throwing them off so they have to start again, and it may end in a tie because one vote's thrown out because someone surrounded the ovals with little hearts and wrote BFF by the candidate's name, which indicates that the voter was 17, and the governor may eventually appoint a cardboard cutout of the Pillsbury Doughboy to fill the seat, but it will end.
