NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.
Introduction
There was an
awful lot of news in 2012. In my
opinion, far too much—I’m actually kind of relieved I won’t be getting
“Newsweek” anymore. (I canceled because
they’ve gone to an online-only format, but would have probably canceled anyway because
they started running cigarette ads, which for me is automatic grounds for a
lifetime boycott.)
If, like me,
you did a halfhearted job of staying on top of all the news last year, you’re
in luck: in this annual post I recap the
most important stories, and as a special bonus show how I’d actually already
covered them in an easily-digested and (I hope) humorous way in the pages of
albertnet. As usual, I’ve had to stretch
here and there to make this work, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll giggle
at one or two of my gyrations.
January
Of course
the really exciting story for January was the sinking of the huge cruise ship
Costa Concordia, and the subsequent arrest of the captain, who abandoned ship
early on. It came out that he’d crashed
it in the process of showing off, taking the ship in close to shore as a salute
to some pals there. Not surprisingly,
he’d been drinking. But not only that,
he’d been drinking wine, and with a beautiful woman! Every article I saw emphasized these
things. The Guardian wrote, “The captain who steered his 114,000-tonne vessel into rocks off the
Italian coast last Friday was drinking wine at dinner with a ‘beautiful’ woman
minutes earlier, a witness has claimed.”
The Daily Beast wrote that a “passenger told an Italian newspaper that Schettino had been
drinking with an attractive blonde at 8:35 the night of the accident.”
Wine and
fancy women … what could be more unbecoming for a ship captain to indulge
in? I have a strong feeling that he’d
have gotten off easier if his drinking had been, instead, a couple cold beers
with some guy friends. Plus, he’d
possibly have had more luck modulating his intake. My “Ask Dr. Beer” post in January, which ran two days after the wreck for maximum timeliness, was
designed to suggest all this without, I hoped, alienating the wine-loving
readers of albertnet. I all but openly
scolded the Concordia captain: “Ads for
good booze always say, ‘Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.’ That’s a good start, but why should people
who can’t appreciate quality be let off the hook? They should behave responsibly, too!”
February
The
important and exciting news event in February was “The Artist” winning the
Oscar for Best Picture, and being the first silent film to win since
1927. It’s important to acknowledge that
“silent film” is really a misnomer, because “The Artist” also won the Oscar for best score. To demonstrate my uncanny ability to
predict the Oscar winner, two weeks in advance, I blogged at length about
another “silent film” that should have won Oscars in these two categories. Surely you already know what movie I’m
referring to, and caught the sly reference right away when you saw my pre-Oscar
post last year. What? You’re lost?
I’m referring, of course, to my two February posts about the movie “Pink
Floyd The Wall” (here and here).
Maybe you
haven’t seen that movie in a long time (in which case it’s time to find out
which of your pals has the best home theater and go rent the DVD), and you don’t
immediately recall that it’s a dialog-free movie. Well, it is.
The main character, Pink (Bob Geldof) does have one line, but this line
is the exception that proves the rule. In
fact, he manages to flub it. What the
audience hears—“Take that, fuckers!”—is not what his lips say, which is “Next
time, fuckers!” Maybe this glitch is
what cost this fine movie the Oscars it so richly deserved. (Best Picture that year went to
“Ghandi”—yawn—and Best Adaptation Score went to “Victor/Victoria”—like anybody
remembers a single note of that movie’s music.)
March
I’m sure I
don’t need to remind you of the big news in March, that being the long-awaited
explanation of how waves and other ocean features can actually glow at
night. “National Geographic Daily News”
broke the story here. The article states, “The biological
light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of marine microbes called
phytoplankton—and now scientists think they know how some of these life-forms
create their brilliant blue glow.”
I paid
tribute to this wonderful finding with my “Earth Hour” post. Granted, it was a subtle tribute—Ididn’t
lean too heavily on the light pollution angle, for fear of diluting my more
important message about energy conservation (and the only slightly less
important stuff about a three-pound gummy worm, Earth Hour haters, and
grizzlies mating with polar bears).
April
In April the
business world was taken by surprise when Facebook paid a billion dollars for
Instagram, a tiny company valued at only half that much. As reported in the New York Times, Zuckerberg declared, “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the
Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile
photos with people based on your interests.”
Do you
reckon Zuckerberg was talking about photos of brilliant bioluminescent
seascapes? Yeah, right. More likely this acquisition was simply the
fastest way to drive up sexting traffic.
(Remember Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil?” Perhaps Facebook’s should be, “Be evil.”)
I’m glad my
daughters are too young for Facebook and Instagram. The rapper Nas describes being shocked by his
own daughter’s being caught up in this: “This morning I got a call, nearly split my
wig. This social network said Nas go and
get your kid. She’s on Twitter, I know
she ain’t gon’ post no pic of herself underdressed, no inappropriate shit,
right. Her mother cried when she
answered. Said she don’t know what got
inside this child’s mind, she planted a box of condoms on her dresser then she
Instagrammed it.”
If you’re
thinking I should lighten up about social networks and teens, then I invite you
to check out my April blog post “Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media.” I’m not as well-spoken as Nas, but I
gave my best shot at explaining why teenagers really shouldn’t be on Facebook
and Twitter.
May
Big news—and
welcome news, in my opinion—hit in May when Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning
soft drinks in serving sizes greater than 16 ounces (click here for details). As reported by the
Washington Post, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association responded, “The
city is not going to address the obesity problem by attacking soda, because
soda is not driving the obesity rate.”
This certainly has an NRA-esque whiff of BS about it … he might as well
say, “Sugary drinks don’t make people fat—fat
makes people fat!” McDonald’s
tweeted, “We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them.” Yeah, McDonald’s, that’s been working out really
well.
Perhaps it
seems hypocritical for me to condemn sources of empty calories, because I
devoted an entire blog post in May to describing my desperate quest for sugary substances. I lamented, “The giant handful of gels I’d
hastily grabbed somehow numbered only two.
I had two bottles of energy drink but no mix. By the time I reached the ranger’s station on
Diablo I’d gone through 1 2/3 bottles of the drink and both gels.” I went on to describe my salvation in the form
of free frozen green tea gelato: “It
tasted like lotion, that expensive lotion you get at spas. Frankly I didn’t care for it whatsoever
except it was free, it had 140 calories, and as I said before I had no plan for
feeding myself.” There’s no hypocrisy
here though: like all distance athletes,
I represent a special case. Someday I’m
going to write an entire post about why buying soft drinks should require a
special license.
June
There was an
important Supreme Court ruling in June, but it didn’t get much press; halfway
through the year people must have already been tired of serious news. ABC News came to the rescue with a classic fluff piece about Bon Jovi launching a new line of pasta sauces. That was the headline, anyway. In actuality, it wasn’t the singer who
launched the product, but his father, whose name isn’t really Bon Jovi. Both father and son are actually named
Bongiovi, which is a great name for a pasta sauce but perhaps not the best for
a rock star. So, to recap: a rock singer who is not named Bon Jovi
didn’t launch a pasta sauce, but his non-famous father did.
Naturally
you'll wonder why I didn't include anything about this in my June advice column, “Ask Dr. Pasta.” Well, it’s because nobody wrote in to
ask about it! What? You thought I made up all those
questions? You think “Ask Dr. Pasta,” and
“Ask Dr. Beer” before it, were fake advice columns?
You think there’s no such person as Chip M of Boston, MA or Lawrence H
of Greensboro, NC? Well ... you’re right. But if Bon Jovi isn’t really Bon Jovi, can’t
I cut some corners too?
July
Needless to
say, the biggest story of the year came out in July: the discovery—or possible discovery—of the Higgs
boson. The importance of this scientific
achievement cannot be overstated. In
fact, it cannot be understated, or even stated, unless you’re a rock star of
the scientific world. After reading
several accounts of this discovery by very enthusiastic writers with great
flair for confusing the reader, I’ve decided this Higgs boson thing should be
nicknamed “the Emperor’s new particle.”
(The most helpful reference I found on this is here, though the “American Voices” feature in “The Onion” was also helpful, with a woman on the street declaring, “Yeah, the Higgs
boson is getting a lot of attention, but there are a lot of lower-profile
bosons that are worth checking out if you get the chance.”)
Perhaps most
noteworthy thing I can point out about the Higgs boson was that it was just
about the only thing that is universally
acknowledged to be “a thing” that I didn’t mention in my July “Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass” post, a sprawling epic docucomedventurdrama covering such diverse topics as
camping, cycling, logical fallacies, missing receipts, Mono Lake, Vladimir Nabokov,
paranoia, RVs, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Tioga Pass, the undistributed
middle, and Yosemite National Park. And
yet, to those who actually understand boson particles, this post, upon careful
reading, turns out to be a masterpiece of understatement and subtle insinuation. The story is, in fact, thoroughly flooded with
between-the-lines illumination of the true nature of the Higgs boson. If anybody ever creates the literary
equivalent of the CERN particle accelerator, I will finally enjoy the sterling
reputation I have so long deserved.
August
The most
exciting news in August was the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if
the rover were simply a remote-controlled vehicle. The really cool thing is that it will be able
to think for itself when it gets its next software update, as described here.
Speaking of thinking for yourself, I hope I
don’t need to point out the obvious tie-in between this rover news and my
three-part albertnet series on Artificial Intelligence that ran in August and September (click here, here, and here). Naturally, being more interested in Earth
than Mars, I focused my investigation on real-world—as in, our real-world—applications, such as whether you can speak into your
iPhone and have it transcribe the text.
As I noted in my post, the iPhone does just well enough to be
dangerous: “I need to make some videos
about the iPhone 4S” comes out “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4
ass.” I hope the Curiosity rover does
better.
September
I know that
I could drive lots of traffic to this blog by focusing on a really splashy news
item for this month—namely, the release of the iPhone 5—but I’m not going to
take the bait. I also won’t pretend that
the “Gangnam Style” Youtube video was actually important news. (I’m hoping that using the phrases “iPhone 5”
and “Gangham Style Youtube” twice each will be enough to get me a lot of
pageviews.) Well-informed people
worldwide know that the big news this month was the groundbreaking BYU study finding that exercise can reduce the urgeto eat.
It’s kind of
a shame this article beat me to the press (by just one day!) and thus my own
article, “Nutrition for Endurance Cycling,” didn’t cause as great a sensation.
Echoing the BYU article, in my nutrition post I lament the lack of
appetite I have right after a long bike ride, when eating is important: “For about half an hour after hard exercise,
sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being
absorbed the normal way. In other words,
you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this ‘glycogen window.’ So, right after my ride, during which I drank
a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do? Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt,
a few Girl Scout cookies." Yuck.
October
This month
brought another toss-up for top news story:
Hurricane Sandy, or Felix Baumgartner parachuting from space? Two things have swayed me to choose the
latter. First, Hurricane Sandy was
downgraded from a full hurricane to a “super-storm,” which has the hackneyed sound
of a Wal Mart promotional slogan.
Second, hurricanes are becoming so routine now, they'll eventually cease
to make the news at all, along with senseless school shootings. But parachuting from space? That’s a totally new one.
Did
albertnet cover Baumgartner’s exploit?
Well, not exactly, but it covered a similarly daring and/or foolish
challenge that I myself took on. What’s
that? You don’t remember it? Well, didn’t I do something difficult involving
altitude? Didn’t I too fall to earth,
albeit metaphorically, like a modern day Icarus? Didn’t I too fuel myself with Red Bull? (Okay, in my case it was sugar and caffeine
from Cytomax and NoDoz, respectively, but we’re still talking about the core
components of Red Bull.) The main
difference between my adventure and Baumgartner’s is that his looked really
amazing though it came off without a hitch, while mine would have looked pretty
boring and yet went horribly. Oh,
yeah: and my brain, not Baumgartner’s,
was a thin porridge by the end. Check
out this post if you don’t believe me.
November
Am I a
man? Well, my kids, when asked this
question, usually say something like “Not really—you’re just a big daddy guy.” It’s safe to say, however, that I’m a male,
because I can’t see the forest for the trees, or however that goes. To wit, I failed to notice an important post-election news story concerning a novel solution to the problem of leftover campaign signs. A guy up in the Pacific Northwest recycles
them, turning them into bicycle accessories:
“Peterson occasionally holds workshops in the art, demonstrating how he
reuses the corrugated plastic material that’s used for lots of front yard-type
political signs. He cuts the sheets with
a sharp craft knife or scissors into desired shapes and then stitches pieces
together with nylon cable ties. On some
items, he uses a more sophisticated technique involving scoring the plastic and
folding it.”
This is
almost as good as not having election signs in the first place, a desire I
expounded upon in detail that month.
December
The big news
I was waiting for in December is more notable for almost not being reported at
all. I’m talking of course about the outcome
of the Novartis drug recall I blogged about last month. Several drugs—Excedrin, Gas-X, and my
precious NoDoz among them—were recalled by Novartis a year ago because quality
control problems in the factory were resulting in broken tablets and, worse,
prescription drugs such as Percocet getting mixed up with over-the-counter
remedies.
Novartis finally
did get its act together, but the media barely covered this. I searched this evening on “excedrin recall”
and got just five Google News hits. Four
of them were unrelated to this topic (e.g., “Female Orgasm: Serving an Evolutionary Function?”), but one—exactly
one—covered the return of Excedrin to the shelves. This was the Patch.com site for Hazelwood, MO. Its editor wrote, “When Hazelwood
Patch announced the recall, the article quickly became one of our most viewed
articles.” I think it’s worth noting
that this article didn’t mention Gas-X or NoDoz. I guess Hazelwood citizens are an alert,
non-gassy people who mainly get a lot of headaches. A quick look at its home page offers, I
think, some insight into why. The main
headlines for today: “Elderly Woman
Robbed at Gunpoint and Carjacked, Assailant Captured in North County”; “Man
Breaks In[to] Hazelwood Pet Store”; and, “Ask the Patch Pro: Seeking Gun Safety Experts.” Other articles on the homepage include “Gun
Brought to Mall” and “Mugs in the News:
The Faces That Made This Week’s Crime Headlines.” All this really makes me appreciate my relatively
peaceful community. If our local Patch had
covered the Novartis recall at all, they’d probably have focused on Gas-X, given
the popularity of legumes and vegan fare here.
Conclusion
If you made
it to the end of this lengthy post, I think the rest of your 2013 will be
gravy! And if you’re reading this long,
long after the year 2012, I hope this recap gave you a good sense of what life
was like in that difficult, exciting, tedious year.
