Was 5764 a good year? For Jews around the world, it was the usual mixed bag of bad and even worse news. Abroad, there was worry about anti-Semitism in Europe, a seeming stalemate in Iraq and little let-up in the ongoing terrorist war against Israel. At home, scandals and partisan politics seemed to take center stage.

But the arrival of a new Jewish year has us asking the same question about what's in store for 5765: Can things get worse? Of course, they can!

I trust any guy that uses the word prognosticate in a sentence correctly. Of course he also predicted The Passion would bomb.

For the record, in last year's quiz, I was right about the future of the peace process. No applause please, predicting a stalemate there is like shooting fish in a barrel. However, I also wrongly predicted that Howard Dean would win the Democratic nomination for president, and that Sam Katz would be elected mayor of Philadelphia, as well as forecasting that Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" would bomb at the box office. Topping those whoppers will be difficult. Save this column, and see if you or I do better this time.

We call that the McGovern effect. That's when you ask all your friends who their voting for and use that to determine who's going to win the presidential election. In this case, he asked all his Orthodox Jewish friends if they were gonna see the movie, got negatives, and figured no one would want to see it. Never mind just about every Christian and quasi-Christian religious group on campus either bought, sponsored, or was giving out tickets in exchange for email addresses, not to mention the fact that no Catholic can stay away from any movie that's Catholic. Factor in DVD sales (mine should be here by the end of the week)and we're off by a couple of hundred million dollars.