Farewell, 2009
Well, we've made it through another year. Sure, we've grown a little balder and a little stupider as more or our hair follicles and neurons have shared Michael Jackson's fate and ended up dead on the bedroom floor. But overall, 2009 wasn't such a bad year--if you live on another planet.
The year got off to a promising start with the swearing in of America's first mixed-race president, who brought a promise of change and a fully functional vocabulary to Washington. In his first year in office, Barack Obama extended his hand to the pack of rabid badgers known as the Republican Party. After examining the bloody stumps where his fingers used to be, the president continued to try to please everyone, and in the process, pleased virtually no one. The president later won the Nobel Prize, and in his acceptance speech, outlined his reasons for escalating the useless war in Afghanistan. Hmmm. Perhaps Obama's presidential campaign slogan might more accurately have been, "Keep the Change."
As usual, 2009 brought good news and bad news. First the good news: George W. Bush is no longer president, Sarah Palin is no longer governor of Alaska, the U.S. economy is starting to show the first signs of recovery, and we know that David Letterman apparently still has a functioning tallywhacker. The bad news is that Dick Cheney won't shut his evil pie hole, Sarah Palin just won't go away, millions of Americans remain unemployed, and I have a hemmorhoid.
In the entertainment bidness, it was a bad year for celebrities, who dropped dead faster than Beyonce at a Taliban chastity meeting. We lost Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Natasha Richardson, Brittany Murphy, and Patrick Swayze, among many others. Those deaths were of course overshadowed by that of Michael Jackson, whose Peter Pan nightmare life came to an end when he sneezed and his entire face fell off.
It was a great year for the stupid. Fortune smiled broadly and blindly upon people who, in a sane world, would not be trusted to accurately assemble a McDonald's Happy Meal. Sarah Palin published a best-selling memoir that would be better classified as "fantasy;" weepy fear-monger Glenn Beck managed to get millions of morons to listen to his drivel and buy his book (surprising, considering that most of them can't read); and Levi Strauss Johnston parlayed a sexual dalliance with Bristol-Meyers Palin that resulted in a baby named Twit and a brief engagement to Bristol into a spread in Playgirl magazine and appearances on morning talk shows. I actually applaud Levi for using both his big head and little head to work the system. Way to use your johnson, Johnston!
Across the country, average stupid people took time out from praying for God to smite the homosexuals, strapped on their penis substitutes (i.e., handguns) and congregated at Tea Parties and town hall meetings to lament the loss of the "real" America that actually existed only on The Andy Griffith Show, and to issue barely veiled threats of violence against President Obama.
On the positive side, Lou Dobbs went away. For now.
Thankfully, there was no shortage of weirdness this year. Among the lowlights:
- Actor David Carridine choked more than his chicken when practiced a dangerous form of self-gratification that resulted in his death by strangulation. At least we can rest assured that there won't be a Kill Bill Vol. 3.
- Richard and Mayumi Heene, an attention-starved couple who desperately wanted their own reality TV show, "accidentally" launched a balloon which may or may not have had their six-year-old son Falcon aboard. It did not, and the Heenes will now serve brief jail terms for filing a false police report and will be forbidden to have any more children with stupid names.
- Tareq and Michaele Salahi, a wealthy attention-starved couple who desperately want their own reality TV show, breached White House security, crashed a state dinner and posed for photos with Obama administration officials. Former President Bill Clinton said, "If that chick Michaele would've just asked, I would've taken her through the back door--if you know what I mean."
- Tiger Woods had apparently been using his wood a little too often for his hot ex-supermodel wife, who practiced her own golf game on the rear window of Tiger's SUV and possibly Tiger's oversized head.
I'm happy to report that none of my predictions for 2009 actually came true. This merely goes to show that I'm no better at prognostication than Glenn Beck, who actually gets paid for being an obnoxious jerk, whereas I do it for free.
I'll make no predictions for 2010, although I will hope that the Mayan calendar is off a couple of years and that maybe next December 21, we'll see an end to our collective misery.
In the meantime, I'll make just one New Year's resolution, and that is to be a kinder, gentler, more compassionate bald man, and to stop my useless carping about the lamentable state of the world.
Just kidding. Happy New Year!
