2011 in Review

And so here we are again.

On the eve of yet another shiny new year in this, the glorious future.

Is it just me?

Or was 2011 some kind of a disappointing year?

I mean, come on, it was 2011. It’s supposed to be the future.  All bright and shiny and futurey smelling.

Sure, there were some good things. 

For example, we’re now more than a decade into the zippy George Jetson 21st Century and there still aren’t any flying cars, for which as I’ve mentioned before I am eternally grateful.  Flying cars. Bad idea. So good on on Detroit for not inventing any yet. 

But, still, the first year of the second decade of the 21st Century was, well, lame.

Frankly, I expected more.

Turns out Obama isn’t an alien reptile terminator in a rubber human suit from some Future Liberal Hell of Evil sent into our past so that he could be born in Africa and then smuggled into the United States to renounce his citizenship so that he could then study abroad in a school full of Muslims which would somehow then facilitate his sneaking back into the US to become President in order to destroy Capitalist Jesus with his Socialist-Darwin White-Baby Abortion Ray powered by the sparkly rainbow emissions of same-sex marriage and the white-hot lies told by global climate change scientists (Well sure, when you say it all together like that it is a seductively persuasive argument).   Heck, as it turns out, he’s not even really black.  As conspiracies go, the sullen whimpering end of Birtherism turned out to be pretty damned disappointing – though admittedly the mascot was fairly entertaining in a wild-eyed, crazy-hair sort of way. Wait, am I thinking of Orly Taitz or Donald Trump? Man, can you imagine what the offspring of such an unholy union would be like? Actually, no need to imagine, that question answered itself – and seriously, look at the picture, Dom Deluise in drag channeling Glenn Beck, or is it just me? Just when you think it couldn’t get any sillier.

Those Swiss bastards at CERN turned on the Evil Large Hadron Collider of Mega Death and ran that sucker up to full power.  Whoopie Tee friggin doo. My unbalanced washing machine was more exciting. No earth destroying black holes. No anti-matter explosion that cracked open the crust of the planet.  For a minute it looked like there might be some kind of faster than light evil beam of evil, but it turned out to be just your standard stream of high energy exotic particles. Ho hum. Just cutting edge physics, insights into the very fabric of the universe, nothing to see here, move along. Not even a giant lightening-wreathed rift in space-time wrenching open a glowing portal that allowed monstrous blood swilling Hell-demons to cross into our world from an alternate Evil Dimension of Evil. Nothing. It didn’t even affect cell phone reception. No God Particle, no Son of God Particle, not even a Minor Deity From An Obscure Cult Particle. Apparently all that happened was some “invisible” particles that cost a lot of money and only physicists can see went whooshing around in a big circle. Not even one evil Hell-demon. Woooo. Exciting.

The much ballyhooed Rapture turned out to be just as big of letdown as the End of Days always turns out to be. Always.  Two thousand years they’ve been telling us Jesus is coming back Real Soon Now and, man, this time he’s pissed. Two thousand goddamned years, folks. You’d think they’d be right at least once just out of random chance. But they’ve been right exactly never. I mean, damn, the Cleveland Indians have a better win/loss record. They’ve predicted the Second Coming what? A hundred, two hundred, five hundred times? Hell, I don’t know, I’ve lost track of how many times Jesus was coming over, but then he stood us up, again – you’d think people would start dating somebody else. But no. This time, man, this time for certain. Read your Revelation, Dude, totally for sure this time. Bible Math don’t lie, Sinner.  Hell, they even had two shots at it this year. What happened? Nothing.  Not one Rapture Balloon. I didn’t even get in any skeet shooting.  The Rapture sucked big hairy donkey balls. Again.

They Repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Coincidently enough, that was the last New Year’s Eve post.  It’s now okay to be totally gay in uniform. And what happened? Anarchy! Chaos! Insanity! Sparkly queer carnage in the streets! Babies fell screaming from the fiery orange sky like taut little water balloons filled with chunky spaghetti sauce! War! Terrorism! The hideous undead rising ravenous from their moldy graves to lick tomato sauce from the sidewalks! What? What’s that you say? Oh. Right. Heh, sorry, I get excited. My mistake, I was thinking of the Iowa Republican Caucus. So, DADT. Gone. Gays serving openly in uniform. Two hot gay queer homosexual lesbians in uniform shamelessly kissing on the pier upon return from extended combat deployment. It was on the national news. Turns out lesbians are just like normal people. And they like to kiss. And now I need a cold shower. And what? Right. Nothing. No sparkly carnage. No exploding babies. No rampaging Hell-demons. Talk about your basic letdown. It was so gay.

They got Osama. Blam! Bullet in the brain pan. US Navy SEALs dropped out of the sky like winged death incarnate and gave him a little double-tap fuck you from America.  Turns out he wasn’t twelve feet tall.  He couldn’t shoot lightening bolts and killer bees from his dagger-like fingers.  He wasn’t living in a cave in Tora Bora making nuclear bombs out of goat skin and coconuts like the Taliban version of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.  He wasn’t cranking out blueberry Slurpees as the night manager at a 7/11 in Palm Springs either.  He was just some unwashed asshole living like a mange-ridden rat trapped in a box.  The accounting was a long time coming, but when the cold-eyed Navy snake-eaters kicked in the door of his bedroom he didn’t go out fighting – instead he cowered behind his wife like the frightened little rat he always was.  In the end, the US Navy dumped his dead ass into the sea along with the rest of the day’s garbage.  Adios, Stinky, say hi to the fishes.

The war in Iraqi is over. At least for America.  The president promised that our troops would be home for Christmas. And they are. Damn that Obama for keeping his word.  As most of you likely know, Iraq is personal to me. My opinion on the end of the conflict is here.  By setting a date for withdrawal, Obama was supposedly setting us up for our own Dien Bien Phu.  American troops were going to get slaughtered on their way out. Jesus Haploid Christ! You can’t set a date!  Why, Evil Insurgents of Evil, twelve feet tall and shooting killer bees from their eyes, will lay ambush to our convoys on the road to Kuwait!  Except, of course, nothing happened.  We handed over the keys, showed them where the circuit breakers were located and reminded them to water the plants.  Then drove to the airport. Yawn. No ambush. No killer bees. No journalists asking Hairy Perry, the Military Genius of Texas, how come his dire end-of-the-world (oh noes!) predictions on the Iraqi withdrawal were exactly as accurate as Harold Camping’s Rapture Launch Date – this despite Perry’s vast, vast military experience as a junior Air Force reserve C-130 cargo plane pilot with no combat experience or knowledge of the situation on the ground.  Oh well, there’ll be another war, I’m sure conservatives will get that one right. Practice makes perfect.

Hell, it was a bad year for dictators everywhere, wasn’t it?  Moammar Gadhafi died in a drainpipe, again just like a sewer rat in a trap.  After forty years of raping the Libyans, he ended up with a stick shoved up his own ass.  Really can’t say that I blame the Libyans for getting some violent payback – half a century of pent up rage, Gadhafi was lucky he took a bullet in the head before he got violated with a telephone pole, instead of the other way around. Not that it bothers me either way.  Again, Gadhafi was personal to me and I won’t miss him.  Of course, it happened on Obama’s watch and he didn’t fuck it up, so it only took about five minutes for the crazies to come out of the woodwork.  That Obama, how could he betray our friend Moammar like that? Oh noes! Now Libya will become Muslim! And an Evil Terrorist State of Evil! Muslim Brotherhood! Ook! Ook! Libyans will shoot Mohammad-Shaped Killer Bees from the their eyes! Oh noes!  Egypt. Nigeria. Syria. The Arab Spring is breaking out all over, and what in the hell is the deal with that? Why, it’s like those filthy Muslims want liberty and freedom too. But, of course, that can’t be right – they couldn’t be just like us! That’s preposterous! Besides, they wouldn’t know what to do with a democracy if they had one.  No, no, better they live under a dictator. Makes you wonder what the civilized countries thought back, oh, about two and half centuries ago when the filthy American colonists had their own little spring – Good Lord! Those damned uncouth peasants! How will they live without a king? What if the Capitalist Brotherhood takes over? Next thing you know, they’ll be over here demanding that we recognize their crappy lice infested country, spreading their filthy democracy. Like they’ll ever amount to anything.  Quick, turn out the lights and let’s pretend  we’re not home!  The one bright spot is that it looks like Vladimir Putin will be Czar for life of Russia, so at least the conservatives still have one dictator they can cozy up to. Maybe they can get him to build a wall across Germany if they ask really nice.  Question: if conservatives think dictators are awesome and they think Obama is a dictator, why then don’t they… oh, you know, fuck it. Never mind.

 

 

Yep, 2011 was pretty lame alright.

No Armageddon. No Zombie Apocalypse. No Hell-demons. No Anti-Christ.  No Rapture, Rupture, or Raptors.  War in Iraq over. Terrorists dead. Dictators toppled.  Economy improving.  Jobs slowly coming back.  Housing market finally on the upswing.   Steve Jobs died, but the iPad II was released. We got Super-8 and The Debt in theaters, A Game of Thrones on HBO, and The Walking Dead and Terra Nova on TV. Justin Bieber did minimal damage. Astronomers discovered about a billizion new planets orbiting other stars and at least one of them is bound to harbor some kind of weird alien Hell-Demons who thirst for the blood of our babies.  We got a good look at Vesta, which is cool because part of the novel I’m writing (intermittently) is set thereabouts.  NASA launched Curiosity towards Mars where it will join Spirit and Opportunity – still functioning years after they should have died – and with any luck we’ll find weird alien Hell-demons in our own backyard, or fossilized evidence that little hell-bacteriums once existed on our red neighbor.  Facebook turned the sparkly fair dust of the internet into billions of dollars in the real world and made Mark Zuckerberg fabulously wealthy.  Americans are still infatuated with the talentless antics of the Kardashian Sisters – and in that regard perhaps the elusive Hell-demons do walk among us after all.

No, 2011, wasn’t terrible per se, but I’m hoping we can do better in 2012. 

 

I’ll have some suggestions on this very subject tomorrow, they may involve Hell-demons.

In the meantime, here’s hoping that 2012 treats you all better than 2011. 

And remember, no flying cars. Ever.