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.

4. The State Fair will go on as usual; it is our annual respite from vagaries of the world, a place where the crass materialism of our era is replaced by the gentler, crass materialism of another era. Exactly 1,293,423 people will stream though the gates. Interestingly enough, only 1,193,487 will leave, the rest having signed up as carnies and moved on.

What won't happen? I don't think the Vikings will get a stadium this year. It's hard to talk about public funding for "luxury boxes" when the term, for some, means a cardboard refrigerator crate in which a family of three can sleep. The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, each of which consisted of two previously merged papers, won't merge into one for fear the process couldn't be stopped, eventually forcing any newly formed entity to merge with itself and collapse into a black hole. No light would emerge from the object, but if Sid Hartman was entering the building when it happened, his image would be permanently trapped at the event horizon.

Won't happen. How will these predictions fare? Ask me next year! And I say that with the utter confidence of someone who not only believes what he writes, but knows that articles are purged from the database after a few months. Happy new year!

No, really, happy new year. Can you think of a better idea?

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz.