A look ahead: predicting 2011 headlines

Any two-bit news rag can tell you what happened yesterday. But it takes a truly great publication — one advertising Asian table massages in its back pages — to predict the future.

We donned our swami's cap and stared long and hard at our 2011 calendar until we started hallucinating. This is what we saw.

LeBron James, after winning a championship in his first year in Miami, announces an even bigger "decision" on live TV: "Two words, Jim Gray: sex change." The WNBA will never be the same.

Marco Rubio suffers a botched surgery after damaging his ear canal with a juice-box straw. His hearing forever off, he starts speaking in a British accent. Suddenly derided as an elitist, his career is, as he haughtily puts it, "tragically dashed."

The Miami Dolphins fire coach Tony Sparano. The team's roundtable of celebrity owners — Fergie, Gloria Estefan, Jimmy Buffet, Marc Anthony — deliberate for days before finally naming Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid to succeed Sparano. Upon realization that the actor who played Mr. Miyagi is dead, they go with Eva Longoria instead because she's "super pretty."

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, hounded by recall efforts, quits politics to become an organic farmer in Redland. Ironically, all of his squash resembles Norman Braman.

Raul Castro throws a lavish quinceañera for his brother Fidel's exploded bowels. The intestines look great in a tiara but become violent when it's announced Justin Bieber, who was hired for the party, has backed out due to international pressure.

Indicted Miami Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones, tired of all the negative publicity she's been receiving, starts her own circulation-12 newspaper titled The Michelle Spence-Jonesian. The paper's first feature story, "MSJ Invented Oven Mitts but Was Screwed Out of the Patent," wins a prestigious Michelle® Award at a ceremony held in Michelle Spence-Jones's living room and attended by her and 11 stuffed animals.

Jeb Bush, while jogging through Coral Gables, is attacked by a pack of dogs. When a poodle brings Bush's severed hand home that evening, the dog's owner, a senile and partially blind woman named Consuela, uses it as a letter holder on her kitchen table.