It’s 2024 now everywhere and, as promised, here are my predictions for the year. Don’t worry. They aren’t extensive. In fact, my biggest prediction is not even for the year; it’s that 2025 will be better.

For those who like tumult and uncertainty, 2024 will undoubtedly be your year. For the rest of us…….not so much.

The war in Ukraine will continue; the war in Gaza will continue and may even spread in ways we won’t like.

The climate crisis will still be with us – not only continued warming, but unusual climatic events will become more and more usual.

The political scene in the U.S. will be chaotic (and that is probably an understatement), as our government may, in many ways, cease to function at all.

Common sense will continue to be less and less common, as Artificial Intelligence will so blur the difference between fiction and fact that we won’t even recognize the categories in the way we used to.

Our educational system will continue to fail us.

We will all pray that 2025 comes quickly.

That’s it……

We ended the year both with a bang and a whimper. Perhaps I had too much Prosecco, because I wound up with hiccups that lasted about 2 hours, then abated, and then recurred from about 3 to 4:30 a.m. I’m not complaining. I was reminded of Rene Descartes and realized that if he had the hiccups, he would have written “Hiccupo, ergo sum”. That’s the way I felt.

The other thing we did last night was watch “Killers of the Flower Moon”, the Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro film based on a non-fiction book about dozens of murders of members of the Osage tribe in Osage County Oklahoma in the 1920s. It’s a story I knew nothing about. The Osage became quite wealthy when oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, and Whites began to marry into the tribe, and kill off the Indians, to capture by inheritance their rights to oil revenues. At least 60 and perhaps over 100 tribe members were killed over a five year period until the FBI began to investigate and several of those involved were prosecuted and imprisoned (but later paroled) for their crimes.

The movie is 3 1/2 hours long and keeps your attention throughout. I thought it a masterful film. Only one quibble – the ages of the characters did not match the ages of the perpetrators. De Niro, who is 80, played King, who was in his 40s, and DiCaprio, who is about to turn 50, played King’s nephew Ernest, who was in his 30s. They both did a terrific job (of course), but hearing a law enforcement officer who looked to be about DiCaprio’s age call him “son” over and over was a bit strange. But that’s quibble because I thought it worth it to see the two of them play against each other.

Best picture of 2023? Perhaps. It shares top billing with “American Fiction”, IMHO.

OK, time to get back to our regular activities and to prove my predictions all wrong.