20 astounding predictions

1) 'Coffee is bad for your teeth': This wisdom will be turned on its head, after a boy named Jack exchanges his mother's cow for a handful of Columbian coffee beans that sprout overnight into a towering dentist who doles out gold fillings.

2) A revolutionary 'kidney sponge' is invented that, with a simple wipe across a plate, processes food and drink into human waste before you eat it. Restrooms will be a thing of the past, and kidney donors will be completely unnecessary.

3) Tubas will be made obsolete, after Barry White learns to play the trumpet.

4) Steel-toe boots at construction sites will be scrapped, finally, in favour of steel toes.

5) 'Embedded reporters' will greatly enhance media coverage of the Being Eaten By A Snake World Championships.

6) Sectarian jihad will spread to the Amazon jungle, where, in deadly suicide attacks, rabid Shiite pelicans take flight and launch themselves at high speeds into trees filled with infidel Sunni baboons.

7) The preserved corpse of Lenin will have a reoccurring dream that he has risen from the dead shaved his mustache. In each dream he hides his identity, and works in St. Petersburg as a stockbroker. One day in a pharmacy he encounters the resurrected corpse of Stalin, and both men pretend not to notice. Alarmed, Lenin hastens to the grave of Trotsky and digs up his corpse, to make sure Trotsky is still dead, and when he fails to see the body Lenin wakes up screaming. Tourists in Moscow will begin to notice this and complain.

8) Pizzas and humans will achieve a glorious 1-to-1 ratio.

9) Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico will be amalgamated into 'New Arkansoma' in a bid to reduce the number of U.S. states that are too hard to remember.

10) The helmet industry will suffer a setback, after it is discovered that, when being shot from a cannon, wearing a helmet is completely useless.

11) Reality TV will once again go too far, with the airing of Survivor: Charles Manson.

12) High heels will become redundant, as the surface of the Earth becomes so hot that all women must walk on tip toes - to the delight of men everywhere.

13) Hundreds of toads will blacken the sky over Canada, causing great anxiety among Canadians. Anxiety will lessen when it is discovered the creatures are not an act of God, but were intentionally airdropped by the U.S. Marines. Anxiety will shoot up again when Canadians realize they are being invaded - and are hopelessly outgunned.

14) India will protest the use of 'laying down a brownie' as a euphemism for defecation.

15) Prostitutes will gain widespread respect, after the Pope's latest encyclical urging Catholics to 'Holy it up' over Lent contains a hilarious spelling mistake.

16) Amid a critical housing shortage, crocodiles will populate our city sewers, raising the question - do crocodiles know something we don't?

17) The West's 'aspirin embargo' against North Korea indirectly sentences millions to death, when, slamming down the phone following a lengthy argument and, frustrated by his throbbing headache, Kim Jong Il launches a nuclear strike on his mother-in-law.

18) Saddam's decaying corpse will begin to emit deadly chemical gases throughout the cemetery, polluting the other coffins. In response an outraged Iraqi Tribunal will dig up his body, try, convict and execute Saddam again.

19) Due to global warming, Kevin Costner's Waterworld will become a nightmarish reality. In this water-soaked age, demoralized umbrella manufacturers will go out of business, but ironically make a comeback selling spring-loaded lily pads.

20) Eating bacon is found to cure cataracts. The phrase 'like a blind man slaughtering a pig' will suddenly become a byword for sensible behaviour.