And Now, a Look at the Year Ahead: Would You Believe . . . .

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) submits legislation to oust the Granite State from the Union after New Hampshire voters stun pundits and politicos alike by casting no ballots in the Republican presidential primary . . . . Woody Allen takes up with Princess Di, while Prince Charles and Mia Farrow co-host a new Fox TV talk show and Soon Yi Previn emerges as a dark-horse candidate for the British throne . . . .

“Nixon Noses” become the novelty sensation of the year . . . . Oliver Stone begins filming “Stassen,” with Max von Sydow in the feature role.

Fantasy, or coming fact? According to the not-for-nonprofit Probability Institute’s 1996 forecast, these and myriad other shocks and surprises are all in the offing for the coming year. The Institute, which claims an 87.5% accuracy score for its 1995 predictions, utilizes an arcane computerized formula that insiders say is part astrology, part Farmer’s Almanac and part “inspired hunch” to anticipate tomorrow’s headlines today.

Will Bill Gates lure Mike Ovitz to Microsoft, buy Coca-Cola, merge with DreamWorks and make a hostile offer for Disney, as the Institute foresees? It would be foolish to bet against it--or against Disney Chairman Michael Eisner’s recruitment of Gen. (ret.) Colin L. Powell to lobby Congress for support of a bill to make Disney the 51st state, and thus immune to takeovers. With separatists having put it in play, Disney’s offer to buy the Canadian province of Quebec and turn it into Franceland, a multimillion-square-mile theme park, will be rebuffed.

In sports, the merger of troubled major league baseball and the expansion-minded National Basketball Assn. will be announced, along with creation of “basebasket,” an daring new sport combining baseball’s four-hour game duration and basketball’s baggy uniforms. The national football and hockey leagues, in reaction, will “seriously consider” their own merger and begin exhibition games of iceball, “the fastest game on cleats.”

Bowing to the need to attract a younger readership, the New York Times will inaugurate its first-ever comic strip, based on the zany doings of the World Bank. The glossy political magazine, George, renamed Julia, will relocate to Los Angeles and concentrate on politics as entertainment and entertainment as politics, with John F. Kennedy Jr., now chairman of Sony of America, a contributing editor. His marriage to Julia Roberts, alas, will not last the year.

Environmentalism will become hot, hot, hot in ‘96--and not because of global warming. Cleaner-air champions will demand that gas and electricity be banned from Death Rows nationwide in favor of the enviro-friendly guillotine.

California’s decision to abandon the technological dead-end of electric cars and promote zero-emission pedal cars instead will wreak havoc in the Los Angeles real-estate market, as weak-legged Hollywood Hills homeowners start a panic wave of selling and values plunge.

On the international front, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will click with their no-holds-barred TV talk show, “Krossfiri y Argumenti.” Yeltsin’s frequent appearances on the U.S. Home Shopping Network, selling paintings from the Hermitage and Soviet nuclear hardware, will be less well received. Her Majesty the Queen’s pending divorce from Prince Philip, after 49 years of marriage, will end 1996 with a thunderclap and all but put paid to the mystique of the British Royal Family, yet sentimental Britons will balk at Donald Trump’s attempt to purchase Buckingham Palace and convert it to condos.

The final prediction may be the most ominous: The Probability Institute, in a coda to its 1996 forecasts, announces that it will probably declare bankruptcy by midyear and be dissolved by the beginning of 1997. Analysts cite “ongoing and irreparable damage to its reputation,” triggered by the failure of its biggest prediction for 1995 to materialize. The Institute had pegged “Waterworld” as the smash movie hit of the year.