2016 was a very special year and it deserves a very special sendoff. Here is my recipe for Dec 31st:
For the ritual soundtrack, I’m going to turn on some nostalgic Prince. Your tastes may vary–you are welcome to instead try some Leonard Cohen, Bowie, Sharon Jones, or any of the many talented musicians who left the planet this year.
Sadly, I don’t have a cauldron, so instead I’m going to find a large pot and put it on the stove. Bring water to a boil in the pot and then toss in the following ingredients:
–the hair of a Trump voter
–eye of Pepe the frog
–my now useless I’m With Her sticker
–my now useless Bill of Rights
–a photo of Justin Bieber…who is still alive
–a few chopped up pieces of the root of division and prejudice
Be sure to stir the pot, and then dance around it, muttering dark incantations and chanting: “Things will only get worse! Things will only get worse!”
Repeat as many times as needed. Keep the pot for next year–I’m sure we’ll be doing the same thing in 2017….
12/11/2016 at 5:29 pm
Make sure to eat your soup with Brexit. As for the luminaries who left the planet this year, I believe they’re enjoying Balinese massages while sniggering at our cray cray behaviour from the mothership. xo
12/13/2016 at 7:28 pm
One of the things that has worried me the most about all the talented, creative spirits that passed away this year…why are they all ditching this planet? What do they know that we don’t?
And oh yeah, Brexit. One more unsavory ingredient for our 2016 stew.
12/13/2016 at 7:40 pm
2016 was a terrible idea. I was wondering what will happen to professionalism, diligence and know-how? There is so much incompetence and people don’t care to be told how they’re contributing to it.
12/14/2016 at 5:43 pm
And we also live in a “post-factual” society now. Yeah, 2016 has been just awful. I would like to say 2017 will be better, but it starts right off the bat with Trump’s inauguration, so no, it won’t be.
01/10/2017 at 1:19 pm
Note: Sorry for the embedded videos…but I desperately needed a laugh. Someday I’ll learn how to post links to the videos instead.
Yeah, 2016 is another in a long string of “Worst Year of All Time”. Sixteen in a row, I think. It’s been a ghastly year on every front imaginable. I can’t even think of one single positive. (But what else is new? 🙂 )
Politics? Well, the best known example is…still too hard to discuss. It’s about the only reason NOT to eagerly wish 2016 “good riddance”, because it won’t be real until late January. (Gasp!)
In addition to the officially declared deaths of:
– facts
– reason
– basic human decency
– any last pretence of constitutionally protected rights
…2016 was a great year for death. And not just the American dead…Prince, the 30,000 gun deaths, the mass shootings, the folks killed by cops, etc. Unbeknownst to most Americans (as almost everything is), the rest of the world had a rough year in the death department.
In addition to those killed as a direct/indirect result of the numerous stupid, unending, Wars on Whatever…and the millions who just simply starved to death in a world that produces more than enough food to feed us all:
1) Britain Most obviously, the EU was murdered in its sleep and Donald Trump just happened to find the corpse and dance over it. But it was also a horrible year to be a famous 69 year old Brit…..David Bowie, actor Alan Rickman (everybody on Earth has seen 5+ things he’s starred in, but still can’t name him), musician Greg Lake (King Crimson and Emerson Lake & Palmer) and a couple other 69 year old Brits of note whose names escape me at the moment. One thing is for sure, Elton John better take it easy this holiday party season cause he’s 69 and has lived a “life shortening lifestyle” for most of his life.
And while older than 69, one of my childhood favourites, Ronnie Corbet passed. A comedic style that, at least in my mind, embodied British humour during that groovy era. Clever/saucy word play that often tested the censors to their limits. Of The Two Ronnies, he was the little one.
Oh, and the Brit who was R2D2 died (Cue the Star Wars Reference Bump in your web traffic.)
2) Canuckistan Justin Bieber is unexpectedly still alive AND inexplicably still popular. Must be the Sedate Me Bump I gave him months before he became famous. (I appeared tangentially in at least 2 of his home made music videos) But, in a cruel twist of fate, the great Leonard Cohen is dead. However, it won’t stop Cohen from getting laid. Dude had so much game that being a corpse won’t slow him down much. I hear he planned a “Weekend At Bernie’s Tour” in the event of his death. To be honest, most of his fans won’t be able to tell the difference.
And another favourite from my childhood (I think my grandma knew his mom, or something), Alan Thicke died….also at 69. Most people only know him from that lame 80’s family sitcom, Growing Pains. But he did a tonne of far funnier shit.
He was a top theme song writer (Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes, Wheel of Fortune), a comedy writer and a talk show host. Some deranged people still remember the utter insanity that was Thicke of The Night (And, yes, that IS Arsenio Hall learning the late night TV ropes.)
But I grew up on The Alan Thicke Show, a cheesy, low budget, Canuckistan daytime talk show from the late 70’s. He inherited the show from Canadian-actor-turned-Hollywood-talent-agent Alan Hamel (aka Mr Suzanne Somers). Hamel’s still alive and married to Suzanne Somers, who is somehow still pretty hot at age 70. Anyway, here’s a taste of JUST ONE episode of Thicke’s talk show.
And that silly 45 single sold over 100,000 copies! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_Sock_Rock (B Side: “Please Forgive My Misconduct Last Night”)
Later in life, Thicke made a comeback with some memorable guest appearances and a fantastic starring role in a hilarious Canadian TV show, Jpod. Jpod was probably his very best work. Stupidly, it was cancelled mid-season, which NEVER EVER happens in Canada, even if the only people watching are the cast’s families. (Canadian networks just can’t afford to cancel shows.) Rumour was that incoming Conservative PM, Stevie Herpes, had a hate-on for it and another CBC show, Intelligence. The CBC tried (& failed) to ingratiate themselves to him by cancelling both. I know why Harper hated Intelligence. It was a Spy show that questioned the very business itself. It also had a plot-line that was a thinly veiled attack on Harper’s policies. But I never understood why the CBC cancelled Jpod. Maybe it was because Thicke’s wife had a grow-op in their basement. Limp-dicked morons!
And in a “Naw, this another of his pranks, right?”….Alan Thicke died the most Canadian death imaginable…while playing a game of hockey with his son and making cheesy jokes right to the end.
Thus ends the most laughs I had in all of 2016
01/16/2017 at 2:34 pm
Yeah, more reasons to absolutely hate 2016. One of the recurring themes of my childhood was my parents getting drunk and listening to Leonard Cohen, so I absorbed him with mother’s milk, so to speak. It was very sad to see him leave the earthly plane this year (although more expected at his age). Then, there indeed was Brexit, and not to be outdone, my native country of Poland has elected a batshit crazy fundamentalist government which is giving the Communists a run for their money as far as censorship and oppression is concerned.
It hasn’t been pretty, and I wish I could say next year will be better, but considering what happens in 4 days…no. The only cold comfort is that the inauguration might be a hilarious trainwreck. I see Trump has actually managed to book some D list singers…and here I thought the Duck Dynasty guys might have to perform a duck call version of the anthem.
01/19/2017 at 1:34 pm
As truly horrific as 2016 was, I am 100% positive that 2017 (& every year in the foreseeable future) will be demonstrably worse for this hellhole of a planet and all the damn dirty apes trapped on it. (Even after the orangutan goes away.)
Ten or twenty years from now, I’m afraid we’ll look back on the 2000-2015 period as the dying gasps of what little the human race had to offer. The condition of things like democracy, human rights and sheer livability issues (Climate Change, economics, privacy, basic human decency, etc) have gone from “bad” to “terminal”. This comes to a non-ignorable head Friday. While I take every chance to call Trump a “mere symptom”, he makes a great example of how far we’ve fallen.
American “culture” (in particularly The Web-pipes) has dumbed us ALL down and vitriol-ed us up. It’s so bad, 50% of the 50% who still give enough of a fuck (about anything other than their immediate gratification) to vote…KNOWINGLY voted for a sleazy, amoral, huckster with a gold toilet. A guy who spends half his day in The Twit Zone hurling orangutan dung on anyone & everyone. Worse yet, we are all glued to the sticky, stinky, spectacle.
Apparently, society now thinks it’s perfectly acceptable for everyone, even the “Leader of The Free World” (Free World? Wat dat?) to constantly use the nastiest, most illiterate, most mentally truncated & primitive methods of “communication” invented since….since mankind stopped swinging from trees and using urine to “communicate” territorial boundaries.
Perhaps more than ever, the human race needs people who can read, write & think in non-fiction book form. Instead, huge swaths of the population can’t string together a single thought on any topic longer than 140 characters…or cobble together something that doesn’t include a purple eggplant…or a picture of their crotch.
So how can such a terminally ignorant, selfish and self-gratifying society ever produce, or even maintain, anything of any value?
Sedate Me is currently increasing the monthly amount socked away for his Survival Bunker
01/19/2017 at 5:56 pm
Well, I will keep writing things longer than 140 characters….
01/28/2017 at 11:24 am
“and not to be outdone, my native country of Poland has elected a batshit crazy fundamentalist government which is giving the Communists a run for their money as far as censorship and oppression is concerned.”
Well, to be honest, it’s been all downhill in Poland since my people finally gave up on your people in the mid-40’s. Both the region’s citizens eager assistance to my people’s efforts to provide -er- “free camping trips for disadvantaged minority groups” and the equally eager retribution upon the largely blameless Volksdeutche und Reichsdeutsche didn’t exactly show the best side of you Eastern Prussians. So, it’s not really surprising that, given the “re-kewling” of fascism, your people have embraced it with a bear hug.
And if there’s 2 words that describe our collective future, it’s (self) censorship and oppression. The tools of modern day spying & oppression now allow even the most pathetic government to leave those “authoritarian” Reds red-faced in embarrassment. Shit, America passed those rank amateurs long ago!
For example, if you own a stupid-phone, spy agencies can now track you in real time (GPS), root around in your files & contacts and turn on your sound & cameras to hear & see what you’re doing. Just one Secret Polizei can now do the job of an entire Stasi! Actually, damn near everyone is doing it now. Last week, I watched this Canadian Broadcasting Company show demonstrating just how easy it is for anyone capable of writing an “app” to LEGALLY harvest every single detail about phone addicted iDiots. And it probably won’t even turn up in a virus/malware scan.
The truth is that everything we say can (and will) be used against us in a Top Secret kangaroo court of lawlessness. Anyone with an IQ higher than GW Bush should be scared shitless!!! All the spying and drone-striking most Lefties considered “acceptable” under Black Jesus is now under the control of an Orange Devil; an adult-sized infant who’s absolutely obsessed with revenge…even for perceived transgressions against him. How could all this possibly go wrong?
(Oh, shit! It’s for real now! Trump is President! Fuck me with a fork!!! Fuck me with a fork!!!)
01/28/2017 at 11:26 am
Note: For some idiotic reason, the above video starts playing in the last 2 minutes of the show and skips over all the good parts. You can, however, “rewind it to the beginning”.
01/28/2017 at 5:10 pm
Meh, your people had plenty of cruelty to offer my people. And it hasn’t been all downhill since then–there was a brief moment when Poland was admitted into the EU and seemed to have a more optimistic future, with more opportunities for its people. And many young Poles still prefer that perspective, and they’re moving away while they still can, pursuing lives and careers elsewhere in Europe. I can’t blame them–I wouldn’t choose to go back to Poland either.
Sorry, in our new patriotic America, you only get a spork.
01/29/2017 at 11:36 am
And you kielbasa gobbling masochists loved it! 🙂 Okay, maybe we went a little too far and made you use your “safe word”. But my people engaged in far more organized & efficient cruelty (Thanks IBM) and did it in FAR more stylish clothes (Thanks Hugo Boss). And these days, better fashion sense is all that matters to the public. You guys did your cruelty in stitched together rags. How unfashionable! Especially at a time when fascism is the most fashionable thing going. It’s “trending” everywhere, so time to “update your wardrobe”!
And anybody “not with the program” better burn their phones and go into hiding. I’m sure Trump has already given the command to trace all the phones present at the Womens March in order to give their owners “special attention”. This is the dystopian nightmare in which we now live and people better wake the fuck up before they wake up in a cage at the newly expanded Gitmo.
P.S. We still have forks in Canuckistan…and we’re thinking about re-opening the Underground Railroad too.
02/01/2017 at 8:10 pm
Your people were certainly efficient–I’ll grant you that much. Since fascism *is* coming back in style, I was almost going to say that you would likely get the chance to use those talents again…but these days, Germans are making videos preaching to Americans about how to be more tolerant…who could’ve guessed?
I was at the March as well….I’ll let you know if I get any special attention.