“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore
Or should I have said it was a waist of space?
Most memes are “as found”.
Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is! What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing. So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.
January:
- 5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing? Boeing.
- 11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
- 26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?
February:
- 4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
- 8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
- 20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
- 23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.
Barron is planning on starting a business. He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.
March:
- 6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
- 26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
- 28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”
April:
- 20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
- 23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in. Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”
May:
- 1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these. Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
- 7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
- 30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money. Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.
June:
- 5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
- 10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
- 18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
- 22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.
July:
- 13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
- 15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
- 21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.
August:
- 19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
- 20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”
September:
- 10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
- 12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
- 18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.
Are they Putin on the Ritz?
October:
- 1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
- 13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
- 17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
- 27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.
Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.
November:
- 5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back! What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
- 5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
- 25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.
December:
- 1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
- 8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
- 9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
- 24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.
What did I miss?
And here it is, the moment you’ve been breathlessly waiting for, when I list the top scientific headlines of 2024:
1. Webb Telescope confirms something old, finds something new:
https://www.space.com/hubble-tension-cepheid-variables-type-1a-supernovas
https://www.livescience.com/space/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-mysterious-red-monster-galaxies-so-large-they-shouldnt-exist
2. The Percy Mars rover may have found past life fossils on Mars:
https://www.space.com/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-rock-ancient-life
3. The Europa Clipper is launched and may find current life cells above Jupiter’s moon Europa by 2030:
https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-ice-grain-jupiter-ocean-moon
4. A new deep-water ocean algae is discovered is discovered to have a previously unknown new organelle, a “nitroplast”, that if successfully transferred to food crops could eliminate the need for fertilizer and revolutionize human agriculture:
https://earthsky.org/human-world/nitroplast-discovery-1st-nitrogen-fixing-organelle/
5. A new type of magnetism, called altermagnetism, is discovered with the potential to revolutionize electronics into “alienware” by utilizing electron “spin” instead of electron “charge” in microcircuits. This is as big a discovery as the first transistor.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-magnetism-broad-implications-technology.html#google_vignette
6. And speaking of “alienware”, in 2024 the truth that’s out there may have become a signal that can’t be stopped:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12796167/CIA-secret-office-UFO-retrieval-missions-whistleblowers.html
7. The Parker Solar Probe continues yo boldly go where no man has gone before and on Christmas Eve may literally touch the Sun:
https://www.space.com/the-universe/sun/we-are-preparing-to-make-history-nasas-parker-solar-probe-gears-up-for-epic-sun-flyby-on-christmas-eve
8. In a scientific hat-tip to wokeness, Science Magazine chooses as its Top Breakthrough for 2024 the new drug lenacapavir that will allow gays to continue boldly going where the sun don’t shine. This “pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)” drug will prevent anal exposure to AIDS for those who don’t use latex penile prophylactics.
https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2024#section_breakthrough
9 And in a blow to eliminate wokeness from science, Scientific American editor Laura Helmuth has resigned from her reign of woke terror at America’s oldest magazine. Maybe, just maybe, this icon can finally start the long road back to its intellectual glory of decades ago instead of the woke trash tabloid it has become on Helmuth’s watch. Here’s hoping.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/us-news/editor-in-chief-of-scientific-american-laura-helmuth-resigns-following-expletive-filled-rant-against-trump-voters/
Happy New Year, everybody!
Years ago, I bought the entire (pre-woke) Scientific American catalog on CD for a pittance. Great articles going back to the turn of the century with projects for readers that could get you seriously injured or killed if you didn’t know what you were doing. I still like to go through them from time to time.
Anyway, it’s sad to see how far we’ve fallen when comparing the hobby projects done then versus the pitiful stuff going on now. The CD collection even has a disclaimer that some of the projects are dangerous and written before all of our new safety guidelines that we have today.
I think this is why innovation has been on such a steep decline in recent years as kids were more likely to tinker and do hobby stuff in the past whereas social media has almost completely filled in that gap now.
Agreed. Altho the tinkering spirit and thus hope does live on. For example, I am astounded by this kid (who does tech, not science, but still)…
https://www.youtube.com/@built-from-scratch
BTW, you can download the ISO image of the Amateur Scientist CD-ROM here…
https://archive.org/details/Scientific_American_The_Amateur_Scientist_Tinkers_Guild_2000
…and see the projects published by SciAm after the archival CD-ROM came out here…
http://amasci.com/amateur/sciam1.html
The projects published in the final years of the 20th Century before they dropped the column entirely are so sadly watered down. Sigh. Nobody could write them up the way C.L. Strong did it…
http://www.ke5fx.com/stong.pdf
Excellent summary, Ricky! We should do a post about just those next year!
What??? No escaped monkey joke? And nothing about the Murdaugh trial? Well, maybe the latter was 2023; time flies when you’re having fun.
Nonetheless, we in the SC Lowcountry are disappointed.
I decided to play it (mostly) straight for 2024. This year was weird enough.
“Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.”
That was one of the most unlikely stories of 2024. A Penny getting away from a jewish woman? No way!
Hehehehe.
Ponder for just a moment how weird 2024 was and then consider this: 2025 is likely to be like 2016 through 2024 on steroids with a quadruple serving of the 2020 Summer of Love.
^This.
May, our House of Representatives decides to represent their donors rather than voters by passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act
June, the petrodollar agreement ends. I suspect we haven’t seen yet what this actually means.
August, Susan Wojiki dies of fast-spreading cancer. Was the cancer safe & effective?
October, my book, The Mayor of Christ Mountain, comes out in print, handled by myself, at the moment. (Still available for free online starting at https://zaklog.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/april-9-2010-arrival/ )
Love the adders! And, I endorse the book. Go read it!
Nice.
May 9 – Earth passes 9° above the galactic plane and the dandelions and creeping charlie stop flowering but the sunflowers take off.
Don’t forget – that’s the annual day I shave my back hair.
Jesus as promised returns, and yep He is still a Jew
“He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”
Well, maybe not in 2024. But did He ever leave us?
December – Supreme Court Justice participates in gay Broadway musical.
We had “excuted squirrel changes course of election” in October.
Unprecedented hurricane destroys previously hurricane-free swath of the US and Fedgov actively makes rescue efforts worse. No. Wait. That’s just business as usual.
Summer “Tampon Tim” enters the national vocabulary in re a sitting governor
Spring? FBI declares soccer confronting local school boards domestic terrorists.
“We had “excuted squirrel changes course of election” in October”.
I think that one event truly moved the voting needle as people were aghast that the government would do something so mean and cruel.
Trump should posthumously name the squirrel and raccoon as honorary heads of FEMA and dedicate a statue to them in Central Park, just as a reminder of how evil the government can be.
Good additions. It was a crazy year!
December– Ketanji don’t quit your day job.
Wayment…
Ketanji, DO quit your day job and pursue your dream of a Broadway career.
Now that is a great suggestion!