Burriss: Your prediction for 2016???

By LARRY BURRISS

The New Year always seems to bring on a plethora of reflections of the past year. News programs, web sites and television pundits are all involved. Best of; Worst of; Least! Most! It is a bonanza for list makers.

I've also noticed a trend, in predictions for the coming year. But what has me really confused is not so much the trend itself, but who is making these predictions, and, perhaps more importantly, why are we listening to the prognosticators in the first place?

To be sure, many of them are section editors or people who are recognized as trend setters themselves. But the central question remains, "why?"
I heard a food editor the other day tell us that different mixtures of nuts with cheddar cheese is going to be a leading food trend in the coming year. She said everyone was moving in that direction. Well, maybe her friends are doing that, but no one I know is stocking up on pecans and cheddar cheese.

A perennial favorite is fashion trends. This year the look is supposed to be lightweight denim and bold oranges...in other words, blue and orange. I wonder if someone from the Denver Broncos got to the fashion editors with promises of season tickets in exchange for pushing that particular color combination.
No, wait. Another designer said black-and-white with, and I quote here, "a "folksy tribal look" will be what we are supposed to wear.

Let's look at purely media trends for a moment. The prophets are telling us there will be more copycats, spin-offs and remakes in the coming year. Apparently the forecasters haven't been paying attention to the past, because these particular trends have been increasing since, well, the early days of television. Just look at all of the Warner Brothers westerns in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looked like every one of them was somehow an interconnected spin-off.

Sure, making predictions can be fun, so here is one of my own: there will be an increasing trend in predicting trends.