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There’s no way to duck this, so here goes: In 2009, for the first time ever, all of my predictions for the year were wrong. Every single one. Something is clearly amiss, and I hope to reset the inner calibration this week. If the ginkgo biloba doesn’t work, I’ll try spinning around real fast next to a magnet.

For years now, a 12-month slice of the future has appeared to me around noon every Jan. 1, and always with uncanny clarity unless it gets tangled up with the broadcast of the Gator Bowl.

However, some visions can be hard to interpret. Back in 1978, when I encouraged everyone to attend the world’s greatest family-friendly party in South America, that actually turned out to be the Jonestown massacre. I foresaw lots of people bonding over Kool-Aid and just assumed.

And I’m still apologizing for recommending that investors load up on Enron stock; I guess when a vision comes through in polka dots, that means “opposite.”

As 2009 began, it seemed certain that downtown Des Moines was going to undergo a radical change in appearance. This turned out to be the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park. So when I wrote down “aliens from another galaxy will leave strange objects for us to puzzle over,” it was an understandable mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.

I also was slightly off-base in predicting that six familiar but fearsome figures would make a dramatic appearance in our financial sector and forever change the way Greater Des Moines does business. Although there are, in fact, six zeroes involved whenever someone files a $184 million bankruptcy.

An eerie, skeletal apparition – like Celine Dion, but with sideburns – warned me that Iowa’s movie industry faced a mortal threat. If only I had predicted “stunning financial mismanagement” instead of “forgetting to take off the lens cap.”

In one case, I backed off when I shouldn’t have. I wrote down that the city of Des Moines would threaten homeowners with fines because of unshoveled sidewalks after a blizzard, while leaving its own downtown parking meters buried in snow. Nah, I thought as I crossed it out, no city would have the chutzpah to do that.

In the world of retail, a vision indicated that Jordan Creek Town Center would shut down and then reopen as the site of the annual U.S. Hooverball Championships. It appeared that National Sweetheart Shawn Johnson would have some vaguely defined role, possibly to be tossed back and forth across the net if someone should misplace the medicine ball. Instead, all that happened was that the owner of the joint, General Growth Properties Inc., ran out of cash and started looking into the possibility of reorganizing as a chain of bicycle repair shops.

I expected a project to begin alongside the Business Record’s railroad depot home, on the big, blank Court Avenue space that the city is waiting to develop. It didn’t happen, and we can probably just blame the bad economy. However, I wonder if the city has gotten its hopes too high. It made sense to ask for a mix of retail and housing, but insisting on an area dedicated to “keggers and pony rides” is really pushing the envelope.

The signals were flashing on this one: Des Moines would receive a major honor before the year was out. It didn’t happen until December, but finally we were named by Marketwatch as the best U.S. city for business. Unfortunately, my prediction was that we would be singled out as having the best skywalk acoustics for harmonica solos.

I predicted that someone in the Central Iowa business world would write a successful book, and should have stopped there, because J. Barry Griswell and Bob Jennings did exactly that. Instead, I modestly suggested that it would be me, and it could have been, but I got distracted by “My Name Is Earl” reruns, and then I had to clean out the eavestroughs, and then the year was over.