2008 is SO Yesterday

(January 1, 2009) 2008 couldn't end soon enough. Forget about the tanking economy. Everywhere we turned, there was a new problem and no good solutions. Thank God. 2008 is so yesterday.

So letÂ’s become a modern Cassandra and read the herbal teas leaves.

Here are our predictions for 2009.

Apple will buy Chrysler and make the first iCar. They will be so cool, the American car industry is revived. China and India will make cheap knock offs, but not in time enough before Apple buys Taiwan and makes it its first iCountry.

Personal grooming will gain a new well-upholstered acceptance as bypass surgery becomes a pervasive fad. Obese, overweight, corpulent, portly, potbellied, fat, pleasing plump and even normal weighted people will elect this surgery allowing surgeonsÂ’ to keep timely payments on their upscale vacation homes. Achieving the requisite thinness is now just a scalpel away.

TV infomercials touting 'disposable discount injectables' will replace the Chuck Norris body building infomercials. These easy to use, easy to buy products will quickly, painlessly remove unwanted wrinkles creating a younger, blemish free, Photoshopped version of yourself.

Billy Mays will shamelessly and loudly shill these products never admitting his hair is a distraction.

With every segment of the economy hurting, surgeons will begin a massive PR campaign extolling the virtues of affordable, painless and necessary cosmetic medicine. They will also stop using the name plastic surgeons and begin calling themselves Aesthetic Reconstructionists.

Giving the words 'city slicker' a new meaning, the Metrosexual revolution will suffer a major setback when men discover Brazilian wax jobs.

2008 saw the beginning of the end for the consumer culture. This will continue in 2009. Faced with a marketing meltdown, ad agencies will belittle CON - sumers and hype PRO - sumers, people actively helping the economy by spending money they donÂ’t have. ItÂ’s the patriotic thing to do.

Credit card companies will begin accepting payments in blood.

Social networking on the internet will suffer. A computer version of STDs will sweep through sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter infecting nearly everything.

Conservative pundits will blame this on valueless virtual lifestyles.

Not cured by any known antibiotic or even Web 2.0, under-socialized networkers will have sex via their avatars.

Avatar sex will become wildly popular when the new video game, Missionary Position Hero is released.

Singles bars, the porn industry, and Victoria's Secret will be negatively impacted when Missionary Position is released.

Andy Rooney, on his curmudgeonly soap box, will explain America's fascination with Sarah Palin is really a sexual fantasy about a bespectacled, none too bright librarian who is well dressed and dangerous with guns. Her popularity rises.

Sadly Sarah Palin will come undone in a scandal involving a recently laid off newspaper editor. Revealing post-coital videos of her reading the New York Times will get massive hits on YouTube. 

Sarah Pailn will ask forgiveness in an interview with Katie Couric. She swears she'll never read another newspaper. Her popularity rises except among Metrosexuals who are still in pain over their wax jobs.

3D will not become HollywoodÂ’s panacea for box office blues. There will attempt to make 4D where Hollywood goes back in time and finds box office gold before TV, DVDs, cable and social networking.

The declining economy will adversely affect movie theaters. People will still see movies, but they will avoid the over priced bad food at the concession stands.

Movie theater ushers will begin body searching patrons confiscating concealed Gummi Bears.

The concession stand staffs will get a new look as teenagers are replaced by former Hedge Fund managers.

Congress will enact legislation limiting the number of film festivals in a given year.

Heritage Life Coaches will emerge as THE hot job. These coaches will help busy suburbanites grow their own food. They will help them raise rabbits, chickens, goats and emus for slaughter. All to assist them in living like their great grandparents did.

Any living great grandparent will disinherit anyone who hires a Heritage Life Coach.

Heritage Life Coaches will help suburbanites in an emerging sideline - helping them deal with the personal attachments they have made to the rabbits, chickens, goats and emus and why they canÂ’t murder Flopsy, Henrietta, Gustav and Emily.

New magazines will be launched to ride the Heritage Coach wave. Titles like Modern Manure, This Old Chicken Coop and Bottomline's Personal Wood Burning will hit the supermarket check out counters.

If any of these prediction come true, you can rest assure it was totally accidental, and of course, we're geniuses.

Smart, opinionated and down right thrifty, the Frugal Yankee enjoys life and spends less.  Find out more by going to FrugalYankee.com.