Skip to main content

2016: A Year in Review

It’s the start of a New Year so it’s time to look ahead once again. For me that means digging up my time machine out of storage and travelling forward into the next year to see exactly how well we fared out in 2016. The results were interesting to say the least, and now I’m back with the biggest headlines of each month. What’s in store for the coming year? You may be surprised. Or you may not. Nevertheless, enjoy these snippets of 2016:

-January: In the world of fashion, the mullet comes back into style. Jimmy Fallon sports one for a Tonight Show bit leading to millions of men and boys adopting it. Michael Bolton rejoices.

-February: Chris Rock is replaced as Academy Awards host at the last minute by a safer Steve Harvey. The Oscar for Best Actor mistakenly goes to Leonardo DiCaprio.

-March: After the Full House reunion on Netflix’s Fuller House, comedy suffers a mild stroke. On a related note, the mullet goes back out of style.

-April: Climate change forces polar bears to take drastic action and in a hostile takeover they drive everyone out of the Territories. The rest of Canada doesn’t notice.

-May: The Anonymous-ISIS War is brought to a temporary halt when a large population of irritated mothers cut off their kids’ internet connections. 

-June: A bill is passed allowing M16 assault rifles to be issued to all Americans, which miraculously brings an end to all mass shootings and gun violence.

-July: Adele goes on a world tour, her single “Hello” receiving wide acclaim for its simple title and soulful love ballad. Lionel Ritchie decides to show her how it’s done.

-August: More than six hundred courageous trans-people come out of the closet, but no one cares because they were never on a bad reality show.

-September: Justin Trudeau cements his place as sexiest world leader when he does a photoshoot for Vogue. During his four week holiday, Stephane Dion is left in charge. Even conservatives beg Trudeau to come back.

-October: Doctors discover a cure for common sense, but realize most of the world’s been operating under it for decades.

-November: Under suspicious circumstances, Donald Trump is elected President of the United States with running mate Sean Hannity. Canada prepares to welcome three hundred million American refugees. 

-December: Just in time for the holiday season, the dead rise from their graves and begin devouring the human race. Zombie Charlemagne is appointed supreme potentate while Zombie Lincoln leads the slaughter of humankind. Nevertheless everyone living and undead come together on the 18th to watch the fiftieth anniversary of How the Grinch Stole Christmas? on ABC. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan  I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan  was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, em...

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz  in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening sce...

So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...

So, I guess Comics Kingdom sucks now. The website run by King Features Syndicate hosting a bunch of their licensed comic strips from classics like Beetle Bailey , Blondie , and Dennis the Menace  to great new strips like Retail , The Pajama Diaries , and Edison Lee  (as well as Sherman’s Lagoon , Zits , On the Fastrack , etc.) underwent a major relaunch early last week that is in just about every way a massive downgrade. The problems are numerous. The layout is distracting and cheap, far more space is allocated for ads so the strips themselves are displayed too small, the banner from which you could formerly browse for other strips is gone (meaning you have to go to the homepage to find other comics you like or discover new ones), the comments section is a joke –not refreshing itself daily so that every comment made on an individual strip remains attached to ALL strips, there’s no more blog or special features on individual comics pages which effectively barricades the ...