I’m also sincerely tempted by Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits for $5 (through the weekend), even though it is Steve Miller, one of the cheeziest pop acts of the ’70s… I need to check my collection for cheeze content – make sure this doesn’t raise my cholesterol to a dangerous level.

UPDATE: How did I not notice this? $5 Mitch Hedburg comedy!

Also a good deal (from last Friday’s $5 deals but not yet re-upped in price): The Very Best of the Beach Boys. 30 BB tunes for $5 (even if one of them is “Kokomo”) is a good deal, and should provide the right amount of ’60s surf music to anyone’s shuffle mix.

But hurry, both the Dan and the Boys are up past their official expiration time for the special price and I would NOT recommend even “Aja” at 99 cents a song. But if you haven’t checked out the Amazon MP3 Deals Page, it has some free tracks too. And nothing beats free (and LEGAL!).

DISCLAIMER: I am an Amazon Affiliate and I have pimped out all the links (even the heavy metal mess) so that if you use them to buy something I get a kickback. Of course, for a 99-cent-special, that kickback is really really trivial, but as I said before, I believe in Financial Transparency.

UPDATE: It’s too late. It’s over. “Aja” has returned to its regular price of $6.93 (99 cents per each of 7 tracks) and “The Best of the Beach Boys” is now $7.99 (which for 29 songs plus “Kokomo” is still a pretty good deal).

• After failing to get support for bombing Iran, President Bush will do the next best thing: authorizing the Hollywood studios to distribute Nicole Kidman’s last three movies to Iranian theaters.
• President Bush will take extreme economic actions to ensure that a recession does not begin in 2008, and a full depression starts two weeks after he leaves office.
• The Administration will finally acknowledge the threat of Global Warming, which will ironically end the threat due to the cooling effect of Hell freezing over.
• An expanded investigation by Senator Mitchell will reveal that none of the winners of “Survivor” or “Amazing Race” had ever used steroids, but 62% of the winners of “The Price Is Right” have.
• Apple will introduce a new product that will sell 2 million units before anybody notices it’s called the iGotcha.
• Confused activists will organize a boycott of the Beach Boys over their purported support of waterboarding.
• A mob of angry football fans will mistake Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick and the resulting incident will result in the closing of several banks and the Miami Dolphins.
• Facebook will introduce a sister site for people who have had bad encounters with the police, and call it “Tazebook”.
• As the Hollywood Writers Strike drags on, Jay Leno will compensate for a lack of comedy by hiring Ron Paul as Permanent Co-Host.
• Stephen Colbert, unable to play the character Stephen Colbert due to Union conflicts, will become Rachael Ray.
• The studios and networks will finally agree to the Writers Union demands after Rupert Murdoch comes to the conclusion that Bill O’Reilly needs some help punching up his act.
• It will be revealed that the Writer’s Strike was originally instigated by the Producers of “Lost” as a delaying tactic after they realized they were never going to figure out how to end the series.
• The Fox Network will be charged with unfair labor practices after the new season of “24″ shows Jack Bauer waterboarding his writers.
• After a series of spontaneous combustion incidents involving its E-Book Reader, Amazon will quietly rename it from Kindle to Kindling.
• Tay Zonday will follow up his web-based hit “Chocolate Rain” with “OMG That’s Not Chocolate, Don’t Try to Catch It on Your Tongue!!”
• Voting machine problems and other irregularities will force the 2008 Presidential Election to be decided by a waltz-off on “Dancing With the Stars”

Happy New Year in spite of it all…

Okay, let’s see how I did…

No… Not even close… It would’ve been funnier than what actually happened… Nope… Maybe in an alternate universe…

Wait a minute, here are a couple that came close…

• More than one famous pro athlete who should have retired years ago will test positive for Preservatives. (It’s got to be somewhere in the Mitchell Report)
• Apple will partner with GM to introduce the iUV, a car with a single ‘click wheel’ control and trips sold through iTunes for 99¢. (Okay, it turned out to be AT&T and the iPhone; all those big corporations look alike to me)
• There will be controversy in the second season of “Heroes” when it is discovered that the cheerleader didn’t “save herself”. (Between the disappointing story arc and Hayden Whatsername turning 18, I think that’s almost correct.)
• Al Gore will NOT run for President again, because it’s too inconvenient. (Score one for me!)
• “Spiderman 3? will feature so many cool villains, the producers will have to edit out Spiderman. (If you actually saw the movie, you’ll have to admit I was close.)
• The Time Person of the Year for 2007 will be “That Guy Who Was Out of Town When We Gave Last Year’s Award to Everybody Else”. (That’s Putin, right?)

Well, with my batting average, nobody’s going to be accusing me of using performance-enhancing drugs.

My Predictions for 2008 are coming soon. In fact, I can confidently predict that I will make my 2008 Predictions before 2007 is over!

I, for myself, don’t want some randomly generated number. I want something meaningful. And since for me, funny is very important, I want to put together the funniest set of hexadecimals possible.

Here goes:

37 – recognized by many as the funniest number, used everywhere from “Clerks” to “The Price Is Right” for comic effect

42 – Douglas Adams’ Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life the Universe and Everything… but WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?

4F – having A-F available in hex allows us to use things like this classic designation for ‘unfit to join the army’, used frequently in WWII-era cartoons

69 – For its obvious sexual reference

86 – Maxwell Smart’s Agent number as well as an old slang code for being shut out

96 – It’s 69 for the celibate (or just incompetent)

A0 – numeric equivalent of Ed McMahon’s call-out to Johnny Carson “Hey-O!”

BC – although Johnny Hart became less funny as he became more pious, the Golden Age of the BC comic was great

I don’t need to limit myself to 2-digit combinations, so…
667 – the Neighbor of the Beast (technically across the street from the Beast, but more obvious than 668)

789 – punchline to a classic children’s joke “Why was 6 afraid of 7?” “Because 7 8 9″

AD0 – from Shakespeare’s comedy “Much ___ About Nothing”

B52 – the Air Force bomber wasn’t funny, but the beehive hairdos and 80s New Wave band were hilarious

19 95 – the classic price for products on TV commercials and parodies of commercials

So here it is:

37 42 4F 69 86 96 A0 BC 667 789 AD0 B52 1995
©2007 Wendell Wittler. All Rights Reserved.

Now I have no intention of trying to keep My Number private, and I fully acknowledge the concept of “fair use”, so I will not object to the republication or public performance of individual digit combinations, but if you’re going to use more than 4 combinations or 8 digits total, I expect proper credit, and using more than half of My Number is going to cost you royalties, more if you use them in this exact order. Contact me at wendellsnumber (at) wendellwit (dot) com for a formal licensing contract.

Some of the numbers I considered that didn’t make the cut were more fun than funny, like 23 (Skidoo!), 57 (Chevy), 3D and B00B, so I’m cofident there are enough other combinations for many other ‘creative’ people to lay claim to.

• Hours after Saddam Hussein is hanged, President Bush will announce that all American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq, declaring “everything’s done that I thought needed to be done.” Celebrations will be muted when it is learned that the withdrawal route is set up to go through downtown Tehran.
• A secret plan by Karl Rove will be uncovered in which the White House made plans to trigger a Constitutional Crisis with the Democratic Congress once every 28 days to correspond with Nancy Pelosi’s PMS. The plan will be abandoned when a staff member points out that the 66-year-old House Speaker/Grandmother is well past menopause. That staffer will be immediately fired.
• The G.O.P. will fail in their efforts to get Senator Lieberman to change parties, and so will the Democrats in trying to get Rep. William Jefferson to do the same. However, as a result of the “Political Brain Damage” law quietly passed at the end of the last session, Senator Tim Johnson’s stroke will automatically change his affiliation to Republican.
• In response to threats against Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, he will be offered his own Military Security Detail but will turn it down when he discovers one of the soldiers assigned to the squad is Corporal Lynndie England.
• After months of Wall Street analysts complaining that Google has too much unused cash, the web giant will use it to buy the New York Stock Exchange. Microsoft will respond by starting its own stock exchange, accessible only through Microsoft Money.
• The Next Big Thing on the Web will be a site designed to attract the 100 million plus web users who don’t want to be part of a social network, tentatively called “DamnKidsGetOffMyLawn.com” A rival site, “AndIWouldHaveGottenAwayWithItIfNotForThoseDamnKids.com” will be frequently criticized for attracting illegal activity.
• The creators of Digg.com will introduce an upscale version of their site, called “Excavatte.com”. A mainstream newspaper will attempt a Digg-like site, but in a total misunderstanding of the concept, call it “Graave.com” and only use it for obituaries.
• Apple will partner with GM to introduce the iUV, a car with a single ‘click wheel’ control and trips sold through iTunes for 99¢.
• HP will capitalize on its ‘spying’ scandal by introducing a pocket device that allows you to listen to other people’s iPods. But the only “iPod killer” product to have any sales success in 2007 will be one from Smith & Wesson.
• As the ratings for CBS News continue to decline, Katie Couric will take the unprecedented action of doing her daily newscast while not wearing panties. The FCC will decline to cite the network for indecency because she’s just so damn perky. Still, her ratings will not improve, so by the end of the year, Katie will be replaced by Rachael Ray.
• Ted Turner will use a portion of his fortune to establish the “Ted Turner Home for Delusional Cable News Personalities Who Think They’re Doing Something Important.” Lou Dobbs will be the first to be admitted, but by the end of the year, the facility will be full. There will be a serious ‘incident’ when the admissions clerk puts O’Reilly and Olbermann in the same room.
• More than one famous pro athlete who should have retired years ago will test positive for Preservatives.
• The umpteenth revamping of the Bowl Championship Series will result in the NCAA’s #1 Womens Volleyball team being picked for one of the New Years Day 2008 games. And an obscenely high sponsorship offer will finally convince one of the major bowl games to be renamed the “Ti-D Bowl”.
• NewsCorp will hire Chris Hansen and his “To Catch a Predator” team away from NBC and replace the shows on its “MyNetwork” with 10 hours a week of “The Perverts of MySpace”.
• In response to the success of ABC’s “Ugly Betty”, the Fall 2007 schedule will include NBC’s “Plain Jane”, FOX’s “Homely Hillary”, the CW’s “Deformed Debbie” and CBS’s “Agnes With the Great Personality.”
• The Time Person of the Year for 2007 will be “That Guy Who Was Out of Town When We Gave Last Year’s Award to Everybody Else”.

“I’ve had it with these tabernacle snakes on this tabernacle plane.”