The Oracle of Bob doesn’t prophesy; it merely extrapolates. A quick gaze into the ball shows the following likelihoods and inevitabilities for 2009.

Mayor Pat Hays adds the S.S. Minnow to North Little Rock’s rusty tub fleet, and displays an authentication certificate signed by Gilligan, the Skipper Too, the Millionaire and his Wife, the Movie Star, the Professor, and Mary Ann.

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Citing three Old Testament sanctity-of-marriage passages that leave him no choice, Mike Huckabee announces on his TV talk show that he has agreed to take an unspecified number of concubines. He shudders to think what will happen when the missus finds out. He supposes it might prove to be a pow-zoom case, as with the Kramdens, with her providing the pow and him the zoom. And sure enough.

The first big jackpot winner in the Arkansas lottery is one of the Waltons.

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None of the hunky regular panelists on Arkansas Week is a finalist in People magazine’s annual Sexiest Man Alive competition in November.

This from the TV show “Family Guy”: Dick Cheney, the outgoing vice president, takes a job as a Wal-Mart greeter and tells all customers entering the store where he works to go bleep themselves.

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Sarah Palin isn’t one of the Huckabee concubines. In fact, her first 2012 campaign ad has Huckabee’s terrified face superimposed on the head of the turkey going into the grinder in the background.

Twenty-six major hurricanes — the last and most destructive of them, Hurricane Zsa Zsa, inspires Barbara Bush to remark again on how natural disasters tend to make life oh-so-much better for poor people.

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The next big bailout is $1 trillion given to the New York Yankees who use it to pay signing bonuses to three of their players.

The Southern Baptist Convention prescribes “a good talking to” as the recommended first step to treat backsliding — and if that doesn’t work, waterboarding.

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Prince Charles’s wish of five years ago is granted as a panel of Royal Wizards transforms him into one of his wife’s tampons.

John Daly uses most of his six-month suspension from the PGA Tour to catch up on his reading of Proust. (Yes, I know, but it’s no less plausible than George W.’s alleged big rassle with Camus.)

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Still no sign of the ivory-bill.

A 19th Duggar young’un debuts by year’s end. A Nance Grace bombshell discloses that the ultimate Duggar goal is to qualify the household as its own congressional district. Not out of the question.

Irrefutable evidence surfaces that Justice Jim Johnson and President Obama share a woodpile ancestor.

The state legislature in February designates the pudendum as the official state naughty bit.

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The state legislature in March trashes Benjamin Franklin in its continuing campaign to vilify the nation’s Founding Fathers.

The Rapture occurs in April. Those of us left behind don’t know what we’re missing, but we have more elbow room – not a bad tradeoff.

The new Obama family dog is called Snoop.

Razorbacks in the Andy Williams Most Wonderful Time of the Year Bowl at Branson around Christmas time.

Irony is seen in some quarters when, in June, a Gen. Shermanitski leads a Russian invasion of Georgia.

Ever seen a dog that maimed itself by chewing madly at the base of its tail? Something like that happens in the second quarter to The National Review, the conservative magazine.

Tyson Foods experiences a hostile takeover in July by the Antichrist, a vegan.

Scojus Scalia and Veep Cheney spend the better part of an afternoon in January blasting away at the Peabody ducks waddling by, the ducks in much less jeopardy than others within range – conventioneer passersby, bellhops, drivers of delivery vehicles, boaters out on the river, low flying aircraft. After the ammo runs out, the vice president tells the unharmed ducks to go bleep themselves.

One of the entertaining peripheral battles in the War on Christmas next December features Mormons and Scientologists confronting one another across the Bridge to Total Freedom, one side led by the angel Moroni and the other by the released thetan that was once trapped in L. Ron Hubbard.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, citing evidence supplied by historian Elizabeth Jacoway, reports on Jan. 9 that Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, perhaps in a previous incarnation, was chiefly responsible for David O. Dodd being hanged as a Confederate spy in Little Rock on this very day in 1864.

The better-known televangelists collectively suggest, when money gets really tight in the fourth quarter, that you use your holiday charitable contributions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to provide for the widow and orphan, instead of sending the money to them to squander on their own lavish lifestyles.

Yeah, Oracle of Bob, sure they do. Sure they do.

 

 

 

    

 

 

    

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