Looking backwards, looking forwards

The week building up to New Year’s is a good time to look back at the year that has passed.  We’ll be doing that on this blog over the next week, among other things, with your help.  Then we’ll look forward to the new year ahead.  And that will bring us to a celebrated and notorious feature of this blog:  the year’s predictions.  On New Year’s Eve, we will check the predictions that you readers made last year and see who takes the virtual prize of glory for the most astute prognostication that came true.  Then on New Year’s Day, we will make predictions for 2014, which will be checked on the last day of that year (if we last that long).  So be thinking about what’s going to happen!