I don’t mean what do we have to look forward to the way Time and every other magazine on the face of the earth did when they made their—yawwwn—predictions for the next 20 years. After all, how accurate could they hope to be when the best minds of our country can’t even figure out that no one has any interest in seeing a TV show about rapping white brothers, half-hour retreads of Ally McBoring, or anything on UPN?

     It won’t stop there. Once people realize they burn up between 45 and 60 calories for every ten minutes of sex (meaning the average man burns 7 to 15 calories in a normal sex session), you can expect the Tantric Diet Plan to hit the shelves (and the bedrooms). But I predict no diet will be half as successful as the Crab Picking Diet, in which you eat nothing but hard-shelled crabs because, as any researcher worth his or her weight in Jenny Craig endorsements will tell you, people expend way more energy picking crabs than they take in eating the meager pickings.

     Well, your dreams are almost coming true. IncrEdibles, as they so cutely named them, are the perfect no-muss, no-fuss meal—you toss it in the microwave, eat it by pushing up on the attached plastic stick, then use any paper towel or sponge to clean up after you spit it out. I shouldn’t say that since I haven’t tried them, but the idea of push-up macaroni and cheese with chili, scrambled eggs with sausage, and leftover tuna casserole with crumbled potato chip and green mold topping just doesn’t sound very appetizing. And you thought we couldn’t top last century’s invention of Spam, Velveeta, Slim Jims, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal.

     What else can we expect in the near future? More lawsuits like the one from the Canadian tourist who’s suing Starbucks for $1.5 million because his penis was crushed in a toilet seat in a store in Manhattan. Or at least warning labels on the toilet seats. The preservation of endangered species by stuffing them, like they’re doing to Hsing-Hsing, the National Zoo’s panda which recently died. More web sites than you can shake a mouse at, which won’t be hard since they’re predicting there will be 3.2 billion websites in 2000. Of course, since they’re also predicting that only 256 million people in the world will be online this comes to 12.5 websites per person, making me wonder who the hell’s putting them up. And finally, we can expect a lot of Jacobs and Emilys, since those were the most popular children’s names last year. At least they were in the U.S. In England the two most popular were Jack and Chloe, which I could have sworn was a cancelled series on UPN this past season.