Predictions

With the NBA season opening last night, it's time to get some predictions on the record.Only, because this is the NBA, the league that common sense forgot, predictions can't stop at the normal rundown of who is going to win, blah, blah, blah.There are other, equally interesting issues to speculate about, such as how long it will take the Knicks to regret signing Latrell Sprewell to a $61.9 million contract just weeks after he blew off training camp and took a cross country drive in one of his 11 cars without calling the team.

Since WrestleMania, the biggest buzz in the WWE Universe has focused around Brock Lesnar's return to professional wrestling. This Sunday, Lesnar will compete in his first match back from a nearly eight-year absence when he faces John Cena in an Extreme Rules match at the pay-per-view of the same name. As of this writing, only a handful of matches have been announced for the show, leaving room for last-minute additions. Ring Posts contributors Arda Ocal and Adam Testa weighed in with their predictions for the card thus far. Pre-Show Match United States Championship Santino Marella (c)

Some people rely on psychics for a hint of the future. In Roland Park, the place to go is Schneider Paint & Hardware.For more than 25 years, Paul Schneider has posted his predictions for the coming year in this old-fashioned hardware store, which takes up the first floor of a brown shingle house on Wyndhurst Avenue.The list, a hand-lettered sign on white tagboard, hangs over the counter throughout the year. Customers are clamoring for the 1994 list, but it won't be posted until next week.

Al Eilbacher jokes about crystal balls and dart boards. He kids around about rewarding schools that send him good Christmas gifts. And he chuckles at the popular image of himself as the great and powerful Oz, squirreled away behind a curtain, deciding and dictating the fates of overcrowded schools in a booming voice. Reality is much different. Reality involves a lot of pointing and clicking. A lot of late, Jimmy Buffett-fueled nights at the office. A lot of flipping through maps, dragging columns on a spreadsheet and defending predictions that inevitably will come under attack from nearly every direction.

Charley was the least predictable. Determining where Frances and Ivan were headed was easier. And Jeanne, well, she pretty much took after Frances. As Floridians clean up from a hurricane season that left $18 billion to $26 billion in damage, meteorologists are poring over how accurately computer models predicted the path and intensity of each storm. They did pretty well. Five days before three storms reached land, forecasters predicted within about 200 miles where they would hit. But Charley was a bear.

Lakisha Jones ended American Idol with a bang last week, winning over the judges with a sassy rendition of "Stormy Weather." But hours after her final note, the online chatter looked grim for the former Millersville bank teller. DialIdol.com, which says it can predict the results, had her at the bottom of the heap. Online bookmakers had moved her into elimination territory, ousted from her frontrunner position. And Jones' name had finally crept onto some fans' "in danger" lists. But after all that hand-wringing, Jones had the last laugh, standing in the Top 3 of the remaining nine finalists.

Does Baltimore's unseasonably cool, rainy summer mean we can expect to dig out the down coats and wool scarves around Halloween? Or will a late summer finally arrive in September and October? The answer depends on whom you ask. A National Weather Service meteorologist says there's no correlation between cool summers and any particular kind of winter, be it mild or harsh. But the man whose "conjecture of the weather" has appeared in the Hagers-Town Town and Country Almanack for the past 32 years says he expects the state to be in for a lot of cold, wet weather come November.

With critical decisions about future school construction and development at stake, Howard County school Superintendent John R. O'Rourke pledged late yesterday to quickly find an accurate way to predict school enrollments. At a meeting with the County Council, O'Rourke also said that he would review a new enrollment chart that, if approved by the council Feb. 5, would close the western county to development starting in 2003 because of school crowding not foreseen seven months ago. "I'm fully responsible for it," O'Rourke told council members, who asked why predicted enrollments turn out to be wrong year after year.

LONDON -- Prince Harry will head into space, and humans will land on Mars.There will be sex purely for love and lust, while fertilization will be achieved through reproduction "banks."And the attention span could be in trouble.They sound like supermarket-tabloid headlines, but these speculations are among the predictions offered by 30 intellectuals peering into the next century.The Oxford University Press anthology "Predictions" is a provocative, playful and at times sobering look at the 21st century, as envisioned by scientists, writers and philosophers.

Who would have predicted that the personal archives and artifacts of Jeane Dixon would end up on display in Strasburg, Va., a picturesque hamlet in the Shenandoah Valley and a place she never lived? Dixon, most likely. She was the best-known psychic of the past 50 years, a regular on TV talk shows, radio programs and a headliner in the supermarket tabloids. Set aside her much-debated abilities for a moment. The fact is, Jeane Pinckert Dixon, who died in 1997 in Washington, did steer a sizable portion of her physical estate to the Wayside Foundation of American History and Arts through her friend and business associate, Leo Bernstein.