It was the year that wasn't.
Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere did not have triplets. Hillary Rodham Clinton did not plead guilty to shoplifting lipstick. Charles Manson did not get a sex-change operation.Those were some of the way out - and, ultimately, way off - predictions from the tabloid psychics for 1994.
A 1995 prediction from the folks at the Skeptical Inquirer: The psychics will be wrong again next year.
"I can't think of any specific predictions that have come true," said Barry Karr, spokesman for the Buffalo-based publication that puts together a score card each year to hold the fortune tellers accountable. "And I can't see the success rate improving in 1995."
Various psychics already have predicted that in 1995, singer Whitney Houston and boxer Mike Tyson will marry, a plant that grows in northern Florida will cure AIDS and volcanic eruptions in August will create a new land mass joining Cuba with the rest of North America.
"Don't hold your breath," said George Emery, who has been watching the seers since the '70s.
Among the predictions for 1994, and what actually happened:
- Prediction: "Sister Act" star Whoopi Goldberg will give up acting to join a convent. Reality: Unfunny "Sister Act" sequel mistaken by audiences for a documentary.
- Prediction: Icon namesake Madonna will marry semi-androgynous '80s pop star Boy George. Reality: Icon namesake Lisa Marie Presley marries semi-androgynous '80s pop star Michael Jackson.
- Prediction: Office workers would flee from the Sears Tower in Chicago after it begins to lean like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Reality: Perfectly vertical Sears Tower sold to group from Boston, where they have pizza.
"As always, the tabloid psychics missed all the truly unexpected news of 1994, such as the O.J. Simpson case, the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding affair, the baseball and hockey strikes and the takeover of Congress by the Republican Party," Emery said.
"Instead, we had psychics predicting that the Dow-Jones would rise to 5,000, that a national lottery would cut taxes in half and that a teenager would build and accidentally detonate a nuclear bomb in Pageland, South Carolina," he said.
Other predictions from 1994 that haven't come to pass yet (although there's still almost a week left):
- Scientists will perfect a car that would run on tap water.
- Jay Leno will quit "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."
- Madonna will marry a Middle Eastern sheik and became a "totally traditional wife," complete with long robes and veil.
- Princess Diana will reveal that an appliance repairman and a postal worker fathered her two sons.